"Dear 2020, this wasn't on my vision board"

I saw a Facebook post the other day which said, “Dear 2020, this wasn’t on my vision board’

I chuckled to myself when I thought of all the vision boards I’ve made over the years, how I would take careful photos of the optimistic images I’d created so that I could carry them around on my phone to remind myself of what I wanted to achieve in my home and in my life. I even ran workshops and mini-training sessions with clients to support them to make their own ideal dream board so they could too benefit from this positive technique. After all, we get more of what we focus on… don’t we?

Well, yes, many times we do but sometimes events overtake us and we are sent challenges that we have to work our way around. This present situation is nobody’s idea of a good time and it demonstrates to us all that sometimes things just happen that we can’t plan for. That doesn’t alter the fact that what we focus our attention on tends to grow. If we look for the positive elements in a situation we tend to find it.

This present situation is nobody’s idea of a good time and it demonstrates to us all that sometimes things just happen that we can’t plan for.

It is also the case that we can easily overwhelm ourselves with fear and dread if we watch every single update or news bulletin and goodness knows that there are plenty of them at the moment.

The last thing I would ever want to do is dismiss genuine anxieties and concerns and I know that so many of us are missing our loved ones and sad that we can’t see family and friends. There are also people who will lose loved ones and that is a terrible reality for so many.

Throughout our lives we construct our routines around familiar people and things and surround ourselves with people and activities that we love and can rely on. For some of us that can be time with family and friends, for others it’s getting out and about and meeting people for coffee or drinks and some people thrive on regular visits to the hairdressers and presenting themselves in a way that they are comfortable with.

We become so used to defining ourselves by our work, by our relationships and by what we do that anything that deprives us of these things is threatening and scary.

Most of us will never have been thrown on our own resources in this way. Routines that we relied on to give our life structure and people who are precious to us seem lost, albeit temporarily, as we retreat to our caves and hope that we can all get back to what we know and value when this is over.

Sometimes, we think that what we always did is the only way to live and we try to impose control by filling up our time with as many ‘normals” as we can. We think about what we can find in the shops to feed ourselves and our families, standing patiently and not so patiently in long queues to buy toilet rolls and pasta as if those things sustained our lives. All in a thinly disguised attempt to take control of something we can’t control.

The truth is, we were never in control…at all. It has taken this virus to show us the reality of that. But what we can influence is how we think about what happens to us. The good news is that we all have the potential to come out of this differently from how we went in.

We all need to consider how best to support ourselves as we come through this situation and what and who we will be on the other side. Maybe now is the ideal time to focus on a new vision for our future. What if we decided to use this time to plan how we want our lives to look after this period is finally over?

Everything passes and this will pass too. Now is a golden opportunity to look again at things we do because we’ve always done them this way and begin to make plans for the months and years ahead.

Services at Orrganise are available online at this time so if you would like a chat about what is going on for you or if you would like to book a session please don’t hesitate to get in touch

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The Life Coaching column is contributed by Francine Orr. Francine is an NLP coach, hypnotherapist and reiki practitioner. She supports people to find real and practical solutions to the things that hold us back in life. Francine usually works within Linlithgow Chiropractic, but at the moment all services are online. Please contact her at Francine@orrganise.co.uk

Published in Konect May 2020

Author: Francine Orr