Nancy: Every choice we make, every action we take does one of two things, it serves our vision or it sabotages our vision. In other words, it serves our change – the ability to have a different outcome or it sabotages that.
So what this does is immediately put you in the seat of responsibility and empowerment. It allows you to connect with the parts of you that are fully conscious about the choices you’re making and the actions you’re taking every single moment.
Nancy: Welcome to Your Permission Prescription. I’m Nancy Levin, founder of Levin Life Coach Academy, bestselling author, master life coach, and your host. I train life coaches, aspiring coaches, and anyone who wants to add coaching skills to their current career to elevate their life and their business. I’ve coached thousands of people to live life on their own terms, and now I coach, train, and certify other coaches to do the same.
If you are ready to give yourself permission to finally make yourself a priority and mobilize your vision, you’re in the right place. Let’s dive in.
Welcome back to another episode of Your Permission Prescription. And just take a moment here to close your eyes, not if you’re driving. Just take a moment to close your eyes and what comes up for you when I ask about your relationship to change? You might feel afraid, you might feel excited, you might feel scared, you might feel curious. Whatever comes up for you, just take a moment to check in because as they say, change is a constant in our lives. So open your eyes if you haven’t already.
I want to spend a little time today talking about making change in our lives. And you may have heard me talk before about what I call my transformation equation, Change equals vision plus choice plus action. I’ll say that again. Change equals vision plus choice plus action.
So here’s the deal, if we want to make a change in our lives, which first means we have an awareness that we want something to be different, and we have a willingness to do what it takes to have a different outcome than the one we’ve known. Then what’s essential is, having clarity of vision. Now, vision gets talked about quite a lot, and I’m not saying that you need to envision your entire future. I like to work with the micro. So if you can even envision one small micro-element of how you would like your life to be different, of what you would like instead, what you would like to grow toward. One element of your life, that’s all you need to begin making change. You do not need the whole entire package of a vision.
I’m someone who gets quite overwhelmed when asked for my vision because the “blue skyness” of it is too much. So I like to identify my vision in specific areas of my life, and then from there I get the holistic vision. So it really is about brick by brick crafting your vision from small micro bite-sized elements first.
So we first need a vision in order to make change. Where is it that we want to be? Where do we wanna move? How do we wanna evolve? What do we desire? What do we want? Then from there, that vision becomes the gauge by which we make our choices and take our actions.
Every choice we make, every action we take does one of two things, it serves our vision or it sabotages our vision. In other words, it serves our change – the ability to have a different outcome or it sabotages that.
So what this does is immediately put you in the seat of responsibility and empowerment. It allows you to connect with the parts of you that are fully conscious about the choices you’re making and the actions you’re taking every single moment.
Nancy: If you don’t know your core strength as a coach, then how can you expect potential clients to see themselves working with you? I’ve created a free guide to help you find your own unique strength, your niche. Because the most successful coaches are those who’ve built their businesses and attained certifications around the specific niches they can best serve.
Even for me, establishing a niche was one of the keys to my own success as a master life coach. As the founder of Levin Life Coach Academy, I feel deeply called to help others achieve the success I’ve experienced. This is why I created the Claim Your Coaching Niche Guide designed for existing and aspiring life coaches. This guide will help you establish a lucrative and purposeful place within the competitive life coaching industry. Today you can download the complete guide for free. Simply visit nancylevin.com/resources to download. You can also find the link in my show notes.
Nancy: You know, every choice matters. There’s no differentiation between a big choice and a small choice. I often say that if we can all agree, so if you can agree with me that where we are right now in our lives is the culmination of every choice we’ve made up until now, up until this moment, then it just goes to prove that if we don’t do anything different, our future is going to arrive looking very much like our present or our past. And while our present may be good, the truth is it can become greater.
So our present moment choices, our present moment actions, are the crystal ball we’re seeking. If we wanna know our future, all we have to do is pay clear, close attention to the choices we’re making and the actions we’re taking in every single moment. Most importantly, that we are making these choices from conscious awareness instead of unconsciously. So what this looks like is building in a pause so that we can assess if the choice we’re making or the action we’re taking, we can assess if these are serving us or sabotaging us. I’ll use a really simple example to sort of hit this home.
Let’s say that the vision I’m holding is wanting to buy a house. And so when I look at my choices and my actions, if they’re in service supporting my vision, my choices and actions look like saving money and look like everything that that might entail. Perhaps it’s cooking at home some more. Perhaps it’s no longer buying any new clothes. Perhaps it is putting a certain amount away in my savings every month. Those are the kinds of things that are going to support the vision I’m holding.
Now, if I’m someone who gets sidetracked by numbing out with an avoidant strategy of late night online shopping, for example, every time I buy a pair of shoes, I’m acting against my vision. I’m making a choice that sabotages me. It’s not about buying the shoes or not, it’s about consciousness. It’s about consciously buying the shoes, knowing that it’s moving you away from what you want, or making the choice not to buy the shoes because then you are in alignment with what you want.
So there’s an opportunity at every moment to take a pause to ask yourself, what do I not wanna feel or deal with right now? What’s in the way? What’s having me go numb? What’s having me go to my avoidance strategy? And our avoidance strategies can be all sorts of things can be drinking, drugs, can be shopping, exercise, work, social media, anything that we go to that we turn to, to numb out, to not have to feel ordeal.
So even with food, for example, we might find ourselves standing in front of the fridge and not being hungry. And instead of just going into that avoidant place of, I just wanna numb out and eat something, if we can take a pause and ask ourselves, what is it I don’t wanna feel? What is it I don’t wanna deal with right now? And actually address that either by taking a few moments in silence or journaling. Our feelings can come back into our body so that we’re no longer numb. And from there, we can connect with the part of us that wants to serve our vision instead of sabotage it.
So again, it’s not that eating is bad, of course, it’s not that any of these things are bad, and it’s really not about bad or good. It’s simply about doing what is in the highest alignment with my vision with the change I wanna make and with what I most desire in my life, so that I can be in the seat of responsibility and empowerment and therefore can’t blame anyone else. And I’m not showing up as a victim in my own life.
So when we’re looking at your own relationship to change, see if you can embrace the curiosity. See if you can embrace the ability to connect the change you wanna make with the vision you’re holding of where you wanna be, and the choices and actions that will get you there instead of the choices and actions that take you away.
One of the main things I see in all my years coaching over a decade now, so many people are afraid to make a change in their life because they’re fearing judgment. They’re afraid of what will everyone else think? And I wanna help you out with a new way to look at this because the truth of the matter is if you are fearing external judgment, the truth is, you are already judging yourself in this very way. Once you clean up your internal judgment, once you get right with yourself, you get in alignment with yourself and what’s true, you’ll no longer have any velcro for anyone else’s judgment to stick to you.
I really invite you to test drive this. Notice when you are afraid of being judged, you’re already judging yourself. How are you already judging yourself? What do you need to do to get in the right relationship with yourself around these circumstances that you’re judging yourself for? And once you are clean and clear and in acceptance of yourself, there will be no fear of judgment coming from the outside.
I hope that this supports you in renewing your relationship to change. And inviting in change from the perspective of being empowered and taking responsibility for the life you most desire.
Thanks so much for joining me, and I look forward to being with you again next time.
Thanks so much for joining me today on Your Permission Prescription. For even more, I invite you to head on over to nancylevin.com and sign up for my newsletter, The Practice, and follow me on social media.
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