I talk a lot about the way to work with your Disquiet is to listen to its messages. Easier said than done! What’s the difference between your gut instincts or intuition and the old voices in your head telling you what you should and shouldn’t do?
When you are trying to figure out a course of action, it sometimes gets challenging to sort out all the messages swirling around in your head. How do I know I am not mistaking wisdom for laziness or plain old fear? How can I tell the difference between impulses and good judgment? How do I not mistake a message of making a change because I just don’t like something or is it the smart thing to do?
One way is to ask the different voices!
Yeah, tune into each message, give it a voice and listen to what it says. Let me give you an example.
I was working with a client around his Disquiet. He was contemplating going in a whole new direction with his life. This included a new job offer and he was struggling to determine if it was a good move professionally and personally. There were a lot of good reasons to take it and a lot of reasons not too. Using just logic, it was a stalemate.
We tried another way. He had related to me all these different voices in his head saying different reasons to take the job or stay put. Together we tried to sort them out by giving them names to each voice based on the message and the feelings that came with them. Once we did that we asked each voice more questions to learn “their” viewpoints.
Sounds a little schizophrenic doesn’t it? But if you ever really pay attention to all the different messages you are getting, you can hear different voices. Some of them are you and some of them are other people who are easy to recognize. How many of you hear you mom? Raise you hands. See?
So back to my client. There were a lot of messages, but we came up with several different voices that said things like, “you should take the job-it’s more money and prestige. It’s about time you get recognized for what you do. Never mind the negatives, take it!” Or, “Stay where you are don’t put yourself at risk no matter how good it looks”.
I then asked him where he felt the feelings and energy from these different messages in his body. That is when it got interesting.
A lot of the messages were loud and had lots of energy. He pointed to his head saying they swarmed around there and in his throat area. After we did an exercise to help him focus and hear more, he discovered there was a softer, quieter voice that came from more his belly. It’s message was almost hard to hear over the cacophony of the others. He could only hear it when he was quiet and focusing on his gut.
That voice included some of the concerns from the other voices, but it also spoke of how even if the job didn’t fulfill everything he wanted, he could change in 2 years. In the meantime there were specific things he could do that to improve his learning and doing more from his values. It had some other things to add that really sounded solid to my client.
He then took stock of all the messages and mined them for value. He found this last voice, the quiet one in the belly was his deeper wisdom. He now knew what he wanted to do. He was off and running.
Tune into your Disquiet. When mapping out what direction you need to go, listen to the different and even conflicting voices. Sort them out based on where they are in your body - meaning where do you feel them? That will help you zoom in for the gold. It’s like finding the right radio frequency for that quiet wise voice that gets drowned out in all the noise.
In the summer edition of my newsletter that is about to go out, we will take this into more detail and I will show you what you can do. If you haven’t signed up, you can at the “Get My Free Report” box on the side. You can then receive the quarterly newsletter which comes with the free report on my study of the Disquiet, or you can click here.
Time to tune into your Disquiet!