So you made a decision and you’re going for the dream. You’re choosing dreams over drama. It’s going to be all smooth sailing from now on, right? Oh wrong. Most likely the yogurt’s about to hit the fan. I’m going to tell you what to do to get ready for.

On this episode we’re going to talk about what to do when the world starts shaking. It starts feeling like you’re going from earthquakes to quicksand. I’m going to give you some tools you might use to keep yourself in forward motion. Let’s get going.

Welcome to the Unlock Your Life podcast, a podcast for highly successful visionary women who want more out of life. If you feel that ache of unfulfillment in your soul, you’re in the right place sis. Join life mastery consultant Lori A. Harris as she teaches you how to stop living for others and finally put yourself first. Let’s dive into today’s show.

Sometimes when we’ve decided to live a more expansive life, to go for something that we’ve never known before, a deep seated desire, it can trigger a lot of emotions. We have within us certain systems and operating ways that try to keep us safe. When we find ourselves going forward, it can be tempting to pull back. There’s a number of things that can happen to us that sends a signal to us “danger, danger, danger”. Our bodies and our internal operating systems can become more and more agitated. They kind of turn up the volume on, “Stop, wait a minute. Don’t proceed.”

I want to help you to determine is this truly an area of danger? Or is it merely a place of unfamiliarity? A place that I’ve not yet gone before, but it’s part of my path to growth and expansion. If you are working towards a new elevated form of living, a new more expansive form of life for yourself, you can expect to get some signals from your body begging you to stop.

I want to help you figure out what you can do to just keep going. Because when you just keep going, that’s when the magic happens and you start to live an even better, more expensive life.

All month we’ve been talking about using and employing and harnessing the power of decision. While it’s great to make a decision and it’s truly the engine that will move your life forward to create an even better life than the one you might be living now, the truth is that sometimes when we go in the direction of our dreams, it can stir up emotions. The same is true for me.

Even in my work as a professional transformational coach, I sometimes find myself in a place of growth and pushing up against that thing I really want. Even though I want it, there’s something that seems to be holding me back. It is in some estimates a form of nature. Just like we have the laws of gravity, there is a law of resistance that operates within us.

Now some of that is designed to help keep us safe. To help our internal monitoring system to keep us in alignment with pure safety. Now that doesn’t mean that when those alarm bells get triggered and start going off that we are in actual danger. It just means that we’re moving past our up ‘til now comfort zone. If we want to get to the next level, we’re going to have to push through it.

Now for people like us who have pretty good lives, that can be even more daunting and challenging. Because there’s a part of us that’s tempted to say, “I’ve got it good. Who am I to want more?” I want to remind all of us that we can be grateful and still hungry. We can be grateful and still want more. It is normal for us as living beings expanding humans living here on planet Earth to want to have an expansive life.

When we encounter those places within ourselves that say, “Oh hold up. Wait a minute. Danger. We need to learn how to read the signs. To determine is in fact this danger or is this just a matter of me moving beyond my up ‘til now comfort zone?”

Nature has done this wonderful job of preparing us and giving us this internal compass for determining where danger might lie. Where we might want to avoid moving forward. So just like in nature, things that have a pungent smell are often poisonous. Things that are red or orange-y in nature are often things that will do danger or harm to us.

So overtime, over evolution, it’s been embedded within us to use caution when moving towards the red zone.  Even as I record my podcast, there are monitors here on my laptop that warn me don’t let my levels get too high. That, in fact, is a red zone.

So there are a number of things in nature and in our day to day lives that we think of as danger. We don’t want the water to get too hot. It’s marked with this zone is red. We don’t want to touch the hot stove. That stove is hot. It’s marked with red knobs.

Just as everything in nature that is red or orange in ton isn’t necessarily poisonous, such as apples and cherries and strawberries and pomegranates. Not everything in nature means red in danger. Everything that we encounter in our life that evokes feelings of red and hot zone doesn’t necessarily mean danger.

Think about passion. Passion is usually marked with signs of red. Think about when we’re infused with ecstasy. Sometimes our bodies will become red and filled with passion. When we’re really, really in love sometimes we are marked with red.

So we want to be able to determine is this red zone a zone that’s moving me towards my passion or is this red zone a zone that’s moving me towards danger? They often can feel the same in our body, but we need to be able to recognize it and call it what it is. I want to help you make that determination right now.

So think about it. There comes a time when you decide to move beyond your comfort zone, and you’re going to go for an experience of life that’s more expansive than what you’ve known up until now.

Now sometimes what will happen is your nervous system, your mental formations will come together and start to tap, tap, tap on your red zone. It’ll say, “Um you don’t really want to do that.” They’ll try to dissuade you. “You never really wanted that in the first place. What you really want to do is just hang out over here.”

All of these voices, these feelings that come up within the body can feel kind of similar. So the voice of dissuasion. The next thing that could happen is it could kind of try to delay you. “Oh the next logical step on your dream? Oh yeah we’re going to do that. We’re just going to do it later. We’re going to do it later. So maybe what I need to do is check everything here in the house and make sure everything is good.”

So things that I have done when I’m battling with delay is starting cleaning incessantly and checking things that are not normally on my to-do list. I’m delaying because there’s a part of me, a little teeny tiny part of me that might be a little a little bit afraid. So I delay. Or perhaps the other thing that could come up is distraction.

Oftentimes for me distraction can be the things that are tempting for me are things that involve connection. So it could be spending time with my family. Taking care of my sister or my niece. That could be a distraction. It could be anytime my daughter calls me and says, “Hey mom, want to do X, Y, or Z?”

I have to train myself to say, “Well, actually I’m doing this right now and I’m not going to be able to that do that right now. I’ll be able to get together with you sometime later. Can we check in in the afternoon or perhaps tomorrow morning?” I have to train myself to not get distracted with the shiny object that is in the personhood of my daughter or my partner, my sweetheart. He can call me and say, “Hey Lori, want to do X, Y, and Z?” Oftentimes because there’s a little tiny part of me that’s tempted to say, “Oh yeah, let’s do that.” I can get off my game.

So I have to be aware of that and recognize dissuasion, delay, distraction for what it is. It’s my paradigm, my internal operating system that’s working hard to keep me safe. That’s telling me, “Oh this over here that you’re going towards, it could bring up some feelings of discomfort. Let’s just hang out over here where we’ve been being hanging out and stay safe.”

If I keep moving in the direction of my dream ignoring my operating system, ignoring that paradigm then the voice could start getting a little bit louder. So it’s tried dissuasion. It’s tried delay. It’s tried distraction. Then it will pull out all the stops. This is what some people call DEFCON 5. DEFCON 5 is not a fun place to be. DEFCON 5 officially sucks. DEFCON 5 feels like you’re dying. “That if you keep going in that direction, you are going to kill us Lori. You need to hold up, pull it back, keep us safe.”

So what happens for me recently was I experienced all the D’s. I was dissuaded. I was distracted. I was delaying. When I did that, there was a consequence. The consequence was I’m dealing with some other people who said, “You know what? I ain’t got time for this Ms. Harris. If you can’t keep up with the schedule that we’ve put together then we’re going to cut ties with you.”

When that happened, I felt oh so much pain. I looked at the situation and my initial reaction was to beat up on myself, to make it mean that I was a bad person. To make it mean all these different things. So for a period of time, we’ve talked in the past about having a little bit of a pity party or allowing myself to actually feel my feelings before I start trying to coach my way around it or coach my way through it or tell myself the truth as opposed to being confined to the facts. Sometimes you’ve gotta let yourself feel what you feel before you get into problem solving mode.

So here I am in DEFCON 5 actually feeling like I am going to die. It was painful and it was tearful and it did not light me up. I felt like I was in a dark place. What I had to eventually come to realize is what am I making this mean? Does it mean that I’m a bad person? I’m a bad businessperson or perhaps a bad coach. That’s one way we could look at it. Is there any other way? Any other possible way we could look at it? What else could we make this mean?

So as we are moving towards the ladder of living a life that lights us up, we are going to experience various signposts along the way just as if I were going to drive from California to New York City. There are certain things depending upon the route that I take that I’m expecting to see along the way. Perhaps I’m going to take the northern route and I’m going to first go through Vegas then go through Utah then go through Denver. Keep going and then maybe I’ll see Chicago.

However I can’t know the road conditions before I leave the house. I can’t know everything. I can plan. I can do my best to be prepared, but there may be some distractions. There may be some detours along the way. What matters is how I navigate those detours, how I navigate those bumps in the road.

Perhaps they shut down the road and I’m going to have to take a detour all the way around. Another area, another way. Going a way that’s not on the map, that’s not on GPS. Am I going to make that mean that I’m a bad driver? I’m a bad navigator? I don’t know anything about cross country driving? Maybe I should have taken the train. Maybe I should have taken a bus. Better I should have taken a plane, or somebody else should have been driving this thing. Why would anybody entrust me with the power of operating a vehicle?

I could beat myself up in that way. But when you use your mental faculties in that way, you delay meeting your goal. You delay meeting this new expanded version of yourself. Because now you’ve gotta climb out of that quicksand, this self-deprecating place and heal yourself from that before you can move on.

We have six senses. Just like we have our ability to smell, touch, feel, all of those things, we also have mental facilities. We have the power of our will. We have the power of our memory. We have the power of perception. We have the power of intuition. We have the power of imagination. When we harness all of those things to give us the power to realize our dream then we are employing the power of universe and working with and getting in the flow.

So when you are moving forward and you hit a road bump, a speed bump, or perhaps an actual crater and it seems like you’ve fallen in, pause, wait, check in with yourself. Let yourself feel what you’re feeling, and then say, “What am I making this mean? Is it possible it could mean anything else? Is there any other way to look at it?”

Another thing is if you know the distractions or the way your paradigm usually shows up for yourself, you can prepare for that in advance. So you can turn off your phone so that the people who usually distract you can’t reach you during business hours. Perhaps you turn off your phone and you just let it go to voicemail or you put your phone in another room and you don’t accept calls during business hours so that you train yourself and you train the people that you love the most who would most likely effectively be able to distract you. You train them to know oh, I can’t reach Lori during those hours because those are the hours that she’s working.

These are the things that we can do to build up the support system for ourselves. So we get ready. We know that these things are going to come up. We don’t expect life to be shockingly different because we’ve been living in this body for a long time. We’ve accomplished some things, and we’ve seen ourselves get thrown off track by the distractions, delays, dissuasions that have happened to us in the past. That we’ve had to overcome in the past. So we can get ready for them in advance.

Then when we’re building a new system, we’re building a new habit, another thing is we can get married. We can marry this new habit to something that we’re already doing. So perhaps you want to…Let’s say you’re building a new habit and you want to hydrate yourself. So you want to make sure that you’re getting lots of hydration throughout the day. So you could tie it with an activity that you already do.

One of the things that when I wake up in the morning, I kind of check in with myself. First thing I do, make my bed. Second thing I do, brush my teeth. When I was training myself to take my vitamins, I paired them with brushing my teeth. So those two habits went together.

I go downstairs, I want to hydrate myself. So I trained myself to associate turning off the alarm system for the house with heating up the tea kettle so I can have hot water and lemon. It’s a simple thing, but now my body associates turning off the alarm with having hot water and lemon. So when you’re building a new habit, you can marry it to something you’re already doing.

So I want you to remember you have these six mental faculties. This is your will. It’s so much better and more powerful than willpower. Willpower is trying to hold the beachball under the water for as long as you can. That’s gonna run out because it’s going to rely on your physical power. The power of your will is building that muscle to tell your body and your mind, “We’re going this way. This is what we’re doing.” Training your mind to take a command from you and allow yourself to enjoy the power of your will.

We have the power of our perspective. We know that just because we’ve seen one way, that doesn’t mean that it’s the only way to look at things. We have the power of our imagination. We’re gonna use our imagination to imagine things that we would love, not to freak ourselves right out and abuse ourselves with thoughts of worry and doubt. Worry is negative prayers for things that you don’t want. Leave that stuff behind. So we want to use those three members of our six mental faculties to light us up, to move us in the direction that we would love.

So when you’re moving in the direction of your dreams, you have made a decision and you know you’ve made a decision because you’ve had a thought and you’re marrying it with an action. That’s not going to be enough. Because if it’s truly something that you’ve never done before and it’s moving you outside of your comfort zone, do not be surprised if all of the opportunities and operating systems and your pair times band together to try to stop you with sending you signals of danger, danger, danger. Know that it’s not true.

Learn to analyze. Check win with your body, scan your body, and say am I truly scared? Or is this just excitement for me moving towards something that really lights me up. Do not deny yourself the experience of having a fully electrified life. Go toward the things that light you up and watch what happens.

This has been the Unlock Your Life podcast episode number 30. It’s been my great pleasure to serve you. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, I hope that you will share it with your friends. You can find this episode at loriaharris.com/30 and share it. Find it on the world wide web. If you really like it, I’d love it if you would share it. Tell your friends about it.

You can follow, rate, and review the show at Apple Podcasts. This is the thing that gives us the ability to share this information with even more people and to build the world that we absolutely love living. I’m looking to expand my ripple and help even more people. I know you want the same. This has been the Unlock Your Life podcast. Remember, it’s your life. Make it a great one.

Thanks for listening to this episode of the Unlock Your Life podcast. If you want more information on how you can transform your life and do it quickly, visit loriaharris.com. See it on the next episode of the Unlock Your Life podcast.