Article by Colette Pellissier
Originally Published in the Holistic Living Magazine
The best place to start is right where we are.
It’s easy to be spiritual when everything’s going the way we want. We love ourselves and our lives. We love the people we share our lives with. We feel supported and vibrant within ourselves, and compassionate with others. It’s easy in those times to feel like life is happening for us and that we are on the right track. Our light shines brightly without much conscious effort on our part.
When things go sideways, though, the light within us can move to a place within us that is harder for us to access, obscured by a film of gunk. We can become frustrated and impatient with ourselves and others. Our sensibilities can get hijacked by troubling news, sending us into a negative spiral of critical thinking and judgement. We sleep poorly, and we might abandon our supportive self-care practices (not making time to exercise, eating more on-the-go meals), further depleting our energy stores and disrupting our capacity for self-leadership.
Personality science tells us that if challenging times go on long enough, our sense of resourcefulness gets taxed, and we will recruit our thoughts and actions from our oldest and least-developed capabilities. Under persistent duress, our problem- solving acumen declines, we get foggy, and we can’t find our way out of a paper bag. We certainly can’t be considerate or muster up any self-mastery for our own inner
state, much less our interactions with other sacred, stressed beings who cross our path. I’ll invite you to pause for a moment and notice what your default responses might be when you are energetically taxed, whether that be mentally, emotionally, physically or spiritually. What are your patterns of thought and action when you are under protracted periods of challenge? Repressive defaults cause us to withdraw, cloister and retreat so that we can rebuild our energy stores. Reactive patterns cause us to lash out in order to cast off our discomfort. These patterns can be both an Achilles heel and a tremendous area of opportunity.
IMPORTANT FACTORS REGARDING TRANSFORMATION’S INVITATION
We are surrounded by it. We ARE it. It’s moving fast, and it’s a long game. It’s everywhere, all around us, all over the world, likely even throughout the cosmos. It’s coursing through our individual and collective veins. In our politics, health care, education, financial markets and our environment. Transformation is afoot.
Transformation can be defined as a thorough or dramatic change in form or appearance, a metamorphosis during a life cycle, and the spontaneous change of one element into another.
Think about the caterpillar changing form into a butterfly. Hallmarks of transformation include disruption, friction and change. Let’s be clear – it’s not meant to feel comfortable.
While resistance to transformation is essentially futile, it is a natural and even purposeful element in the process given our human condition. The discomfort of the current situation has to be greater than our fear of the unknown before we’ll let down our guard long enough for transformation to take form.
The very nature of transformation asks us to level-up our default responses. Transformation is always asking us to go to the edge: the edge of our comfort zone, the edge of our patterns, the line between what is familiar and what is new and never done before. Isn’t this a hallmark of innovation? It takes us, by its nature, to the other side of what we already know, in service of discovering something new. We’re then able to see what we simply cannot see in our comfort zone: something different. Something novel and more…possible.
Even in any discomfort we may feel, there are more elevated ways of responding that will better support the direction that transformation wants to point us toward.
ELEVATING OUR FREQUENCY TO HONOR TRANSFORMATION’S INVITATION
Can you see how our default patterns keep us stuck in the same old cycle? Imagine a world that stays stalled where we are right now. That’s motivation enough for me dig deep and discover new, more elevated response patterns in service to moving forward in a brighter world.
Changes at scale start with changes within each of us individually. It’s a brilliant design, don’t you think? Through this lens we each have an essential contribution to make, cultivating habits of thought and action that allow our light to shine – not just when everything is going the way we want, but during times of challenge or duress, because that’s when they are needed most.
How can we elevate our self-leadership, then, when our habits and the force of entropy are seemingly working against us? Our superpower lies in our ability to consciously choose new habits of thought and action, versus being perpetually driven by old, primal habits. It doesn’t have to be pretty or perfect. We just need to begin. And when we realize that we’ve regressed (because we will regress), we simply choose to begin again. We get endless second chances to begin again.
A PRACTICE OF ELEVATION
The more you practice noticing your habits of thought and action, without judgment, the more leverage you’ll have. Practice paying attention to the energy that your thoughts and actions ride on. Just notice. Once you build your compassionate noticing muscles, practice choosing the highest-frequency thought you can hold that still feels authentic for you.
For example…
- Are you against injustice or are you a compassionate advocate for fairness? Let’s attend to fairness! Fairness is a more elevated focus
than injustice, even if your eventual actions are identical. - Are you making someone else wrong, or offering an alternate perspective to expand and enrich the breadth of a conversation that matters to you? Let’s enrich the conversations that matter! The greatest outcomes will happen
when we can include each other’s perspectives and expand our own, without taking differences personally or needing to agree. Different perspectives are a good thing. - Are you encouraging someone else’s courage in trying something they’ve never done before, perhaps doing it imperfectly, or are you judging their action as imperfect and criticizing them? In the elevated approach, we focus on what we want, which is to be helpful. Let’s catch each other doing something right, and rebuild our individual and collective self-belief!
Feel the difference between these? It’s subtle yet powerful.
We get to choose, thought by thought and action by action, whether we are going to contribute to the sum total of funky gunky energy in ourselves and on the planet, or the sum total of loving and compassionate energy. These small, ordinary acts of self- leadership ladder into a palpable force for good that ripples out into the world.
And that seems like good news worth sharing
Colette Pellissier is a Lightworker in corporate America offering Executive & Team Coaching and Organization Development services. She founded Illuminated Leadership as a doorway to develop conscious leaders and guide growth-oriented professionals through the changes caused by evolutionary pull— in their lives & relationships, in their careers and in their businesses.