I think most people I interact with and coach are starting to get the importance of making peace with where they are before they try to make change—before they take action. The biggest question I get asked is, “How do I make peace with where I am?” It’s tough to make peace with your body (where you are) when you are constantly reminded of where you are and that you don’t want to be there. So I will cover some simple tools I use to help people shift their perspective and make peace. (Note: I think it is important to remind you that where you are has helped you to determine a place you now want to be—that is, the “problem” gave birth to an evolved situation, which is the “solution” to where you are. Without your current “problem” you would not have expanded into a new preference/desire—and preference/desire is what gives us life.)
Making peace with where you are is simply getting yourself to the place that you are content with “what is” so you can focus on “what’s next”. One of the biggest things you can do to help make peace with where you are is to first acknowledge that your thoughts, emotions, and focus led to where you currently are, or at least that they played a part in your situation. I think it is fair to say that most people weren’t taught that their thoughts and emotions affect their bodies—chemically, neurologically, or vibrationally. Most people don’t know they have a choice in what they think. So, if you didn’t know that you had a choice in the way you think and you dwelled on negative things that caused your body to work negatively, you can see it’s probably no accident that you are where you are. Let yourself off the hook for this—you didn’t know any better.
To take that one step further, you can think of how great it is that your body has also given you feedback—you just weren’t taught how to listen to it or what to do with the information even if you knew how to listen. Think of your body and health as a barometer of your thinking, just as it is a barometer for many other physical things. Think of it this way: If the physical stimuli you encounter in life (like gravity, exercise, basic movement, food, drugs, and so on) have an effect on your body, then thinking, which you encounter more than all the other things combined (outside of gravity), has to play a large factor in the way your body is. So if you’ve been judging yourself for the way you look or the way you eat, or if you’ve been stressed out by things happening in your life, it’s not hard to see how you could gain a few pounds or have pain or any health complications, for that matter.
Change the way you see yourself and you change the way your body works. Change the way your body works and you change the way your body looks. The point is, if you feel good, you look good and work better.
One little trick I use to help people make peace with where they are is to have them imagine they had to tell someone they really look up to about their current situation. That person could be living or dead, a parent, a teacher, a friend, a mentor, even God. It just needs to be someone who they would want to share only good news with.
Imagine telling a person you look up to what your current situation is regarding your body but with two rules: You can’t tell them anything negative, and you can’t lie. If you can’t tell them anything negative, you will have to sugarcoat “what is” so it doesn’t sound so bad. But if you try to make it sound much better than the way you have been looking at it (your current perspective of “what is”), it will feel like a lie. Sugarcoating “what is” is telling the next-best story. The next-best story should offer some relief in regard to where you are. It is in this relief that you allow a little bit more change to happen. Everything is working just a bit better than it was at the level of your last story.
You only have to practice this new story for about a minute to begin anchoring it in. And the more you tell it, the more you massage it, the more you gel with it. The more you gel with it, the more this will be your new standpoint. It may take a minute or it may take a week to fully anchor in, but when it does you will know it, as you will feel relief from where you once were. Also know that at some point this new story will lose its luster. At that point, you will want to again tell the next-best story. Continue doing this until you are at least content. This storytelling (report-telling) technique can be used to get you all the way to a place of enthusiasm about what is next. Or even better, you can get yourself to a place of knowledge and joy about where you are and where you are going. In this state change is really easy, as your body will be working at the highest level, neurologically, chemically, and vibrationally.
Note: One thing that comes up often with people when I first tell them that they need to make peace with where they are is that they think they will be conceding to the body they already have. Well, the good thing is this not true. If you have enough negative emotion toward something, you give life to the solution—the evolution of “what is.” When you make peace with where you are, you simply allow yourself to look at where you are going rather than focusing on where you are now. And when you make peace with “what is,” your path of moving toward what you now want, which was born out of the experience of what you didn’t want, will be much clearer to you than when you had negative emotion surrounding your subject.
