Originally posted June 2014
Looking back to where I first started and how far I have come can sometimes be overwhelming. I often forget that Kinesiology was just an idea in the back of my mind two and half years ago and not a reality. During my most recent stages of self-development, I was asked in passing to recall those small but significant turning points that have led me here.
I surprised myself with how many signposts I have turned and how long I have been experiencing them. Now that I pause to look back, I can’t believe it has taken me so long to get where I am. In saying that, I still wouldn’t have changed the journey as it is where I gained knowledge, experience and momentum.
Below is one of my favourite photos, a travel adventure from the very beginning of our relationship. A trip where we hiked across the mountains on the Slovakian border, crossing over and walking down into Poland. This photo is a good reminder of one of the significant turning points in my life. I was finally finished with experiencing all the failing relationships in my life. I had to reassess and redefine what I truly wanted in a connection and put myself in place to allow new energy to follow. When I was finally ready and willing to own how I had contributed in the past, change happened fast. Within only a few weeks of us sharing each other’s company and getting to know each other, there were some big decisions to be made. I had to decide quickly to either stay and finish the last few months of my working visa in London or follow him home.
Concerning questions came from all my friends and family for all different accounts. This photo symbolises how dynamic our relationship started, the literal and metaphysical mountain we crossed. At the moment just before the picture, I stepped off the guided track at the very top, utterly clueless about the sheer drop and nothingness that hid behind the cloud below me. At this moment, I saw complete calmness from my partner and his simple, explicit instruction to climb back over the rock face to the safety or the path. Easier said than done at this point as I held a 20kg hiking pack on my back. My memory of his actions to remove his backpack and reach out for me was flawless. Moments later, we reached safety and stopped to regather and compose our thoughts; he confessed to an extreme fear of heights. We spoke about the fear of me slipping or falling was far greater than his fear of heights, and as a result, the actions to overcome this fear were effortless.
I wish I could say that at this point, I mastered the secret of perspective and its role in overcoming any fear. The game we play internally is to persevere with the undesirable and remain in a pain pattern only because the fear of the unknown is perceived as worse. But when faced with the illusion of a more significant pain/ fear, we can become oblivious to the memory of the feelings that previously helped us back.
This particular lesson learned was pointed out to me during my classes at the Mind Body Co ten years later, but it was top of the mountain where we certainly changed the direction of each of our life paths.
My second most significant turning point was a typical afternoon hanging out with friends. At the end of my visit, I was introduced to an audio series about the law of attraction. An old school CD called, ‘Your wish is your command’. The friend at the time had just received it and was passing it on to see what I thought. After a desperate conversation with him about finding a good quality daycare in the inner city for my son, this was gifted to me. Well, I lapped it up then, and I still refer to it now, especially when I get caught up in the drama of life. I will continually come back to my 3 main take-home points.
- You don’t know what you don’t know
- How teachable are you (not gullible, but what is your teachability index)
- To know and not to do, is not to know
Needless to say, as soon as I changed my own story, new chapters in my book began to appear.
The seed of change began years before the most significant turning points on my path to wellness and mind-body coaching. I was fortunate to have been exposed to simple NLP techniques and goal setting at an impressible, uninhabited age. At the beginning of my final year in a small, isolated country NSW school, my PDHPE teacher organised a guest speaker to address the year group on study habits, goals and memory tools. I didn’t know it then, but he explicitly instructed me an anchor for a state of confidence, focus and motivation, which I used throughout my final year and exams. We were guided through active goal setting, value manipulation and timeline therapy for the HSC and future academic success. It has always blown away the amount of accuracy in my visualisation that day sitting in the school library with my eyes firmly closed, the total sensory experience I had the day I received my marks.
I didn’t know it then, but the techniques he used I would later learn and incorporate into the way I teach, interact and motivate my students within their learning journies. Still in the process of reflection, it was this seeded experience that my life path keeps returning to. Sometimes I lose focus of the direction or path ahead; I feel like I have taken a wrong turn only to find that the views are much more spectacular from the places I end up in than from the locations I plan to be.
