The Ultimate Guide To Showing Up To Yourself in Life & Business: Don’t wait to feel like it and use fear as a compass
Inspiration
August 5, 2021By First For Women
This Women's Month, 1st for Women has teamed up with speaker, trainer and author, Lori Milner, to bring you The Ultimate Guide To Showing Up To Yourself in Life & Business. Want to build new habits and actually sustain them? Want to manage your inner critic, free of anxiety and fear? Lori has the answers.
Last week we discussed letting go of perfection and focusing on the process, not the outcome. If you haven’t read this blog post, you can do so here . Today, we’ll list some more tools needed to show up to yourself in life and business.
Starting with: Celebrate your win
“Belief without talent can take you further than talent without belief. But when you have both, you’re unstoppable.” – Marisa Peer
A micro win can be doing 10 minutes of yoga, exercise, reading, studying an online course – whatever the task is for you. It is so crucial to acknowledge the victory, no matter how small.
Celebrate yourself! You proved that you are worth it, and you can achieve what you set out to do. When you show up to yourself and make progress on your goal – you win the day!
BJ Fogg is a Stanford Professor and author of Tiny Habits. He advocates that celebrating your victory immediately after the action is the missing ingredient to habit formation. It is the intensity of the emotion linked to that behaviour that locks it in. He calls this feeling ‘Shine’. You had experienced it many times, like when you did that excellent presentation, and everyone clapped, or you aced a challenging exam.
Examples of celebration could be a positive phrase like ‘That’s what I’m talking about’ or visualising fireworks going off or give yourself a high five.
This step cannot be missed even if you feel silly because it is critical to your brain encoding a new habit. Fogg explains that ‘Your ability to ignore self-criticism and embrace feeling good about your successes will ripple out into your life in positive ways that go far beyond the Tiny Habits you create and celebrate’.
Apart from the habit you are cultivating, you are training yourself to be kinder to yourself and acknowledge the person you are becoming along the way. It is the habit of accepting self-praise that will reap the rewards long after the goal is reached.
2. Aim for progress
“Progress, not perfection is what we should be asking of ourselves” – Julia Cameron
When you decide to start on something new, accept that you will not be perfect initially. This insecurity of not mastering something straight away creates a sense of loss of control and anxiety. Somehow you have this expectation that you should be able to be proficient immediately.
If you want to start a blog on your industry, the first few won’t be your best, but you will be way ahead by the time you get to blog number twenty. If you want to launch online workshops or begin a new hobby, accept that the first few times will be shaky.
Aim for progress each time you do it but make sure you take that step. Trust the learning period until you build on your skills.
During Lockdown, Lori’s son taught her an important lesson. “He is seven years old and enjoys playing the XBOX game Minecraft. He decided to create YouTube videos to teach people skills. He worked towards a set of headphones, and the day they arrived, he went straight into the action. He recorded his first three videos and uploaded them to Stitcher for the public to view. I was blown away by his confidence and belief in himself to get going. As adults, we would look at where it’s not great and criticise the production and most likely wait for it to be perfect before having the courage to upload it,” says Lori.
Next week, we’ll discuss more ways in which you can show up to yourself in life & business. Until then remember, above all, be kind to yourself.
