Trusting Your Own Pace: 5 Strategies to Stop Comparing and Start Manifesting

Embrace who you are now and start designing the life you seek

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Trusting your pace is empowering, but it’s also one of the most difficult things to do.

What does it mean to trust your pace? It means accepting who you are now. It means trusting that your pace is exactly what it is because of your life circumstances, your physical circumstances, your emotional and spiritual circumstances.The only way that you can adjust your pace — speed up or slow down — is by accepting and acknowledging that this is where you are.

I can look at someone like Oprah Winfrey and decide, oh my gosh, she’s got so much — a magazine and shows and she travels, and she’s got all these companies — and that’s what I want. But then I look at my own life and I say, oh my gosh, I’m so far behind, I can never do that! In my mind, I can decide that I have all these barriers that are stopping me from a life like Oprah’s.

Well, guess what? I’m not Oprah Winfrey. I am me and I have my own visions and my own ideas, but if I constantly compare myself to someone else, I’m always going to come up short because my life is my life.

My circumstances and choices are my own to claim.

The more I compare myself to others, the more I will look at my own life with scarcity, doubt, and resentment — not a place of creation and expansion.

There may be things you want to change about your life and that’s okay. We all have these areas of improvement and growth. But resentment, self-doubt, pity and anger make creating change difficult. Instead, acknowledge where you are in your life, whether you’re a mom of young children or starting or growing your business. There are always going to be circumstances that make your situation unique to you and the more you can get out of comparison mode, the better.

Here are five ways that you can allow yourself to trust your pace:

Release the need for external approval and comparison

The sooner you can do that, the sooner you can decide that you are not a kid in school looking for a star on your paper. You don’t need someone to pat you on my back or tell you that you’re doing a great job.  Go ahead and give yourself permission to be proud of yourself for the things that you are doing.

What do you want? What does success mean to you?

If you automatically adopt someone else’s version of success (like Oprah’s or anyone else), you’re going to be measuring up to something that doesn’t even belong to you. You’re going to be living life based on someone else’s vision and someone else’s desires.

If you haven’t taken time lately to not just create a vision board, but to really create a vision of what you want your life to look like today, tomorrow, a year from now, 20 years from now, then you’re going to be spinning, spinning, spinning frantically and not really getting where you want to be.

That’s why I want you to take some time — whether it’s 5 minutes or 20 minutes — to go somewhere that you feel comfortable and relaxed, perhaps somewhere in nature. Take a blank journal and just sit and write at the top of the page what is your vision of a most fulfilled life. Even if nothing comes right away, give yourself time to let the chatter die away.

Let the noise of the monkey mind die away and just sit there and be.

Whether it’s staring at the beach or the water or nature or sitting on a park bench, allow inspiration to bubble up because it always does. If it doesn’t bubble up, you haven’t sat there long enough. If you don’t think your life is worth a few hours to access your own wisdom, then you’re never really going to get to a place where you’re living on your own terms.

You can give yourself all the excuses you want. I get it. I’ve been there. I’ve said them, I totally have, but you are worth your own time, so go ahead and give yourself the time needed to really get clear on what your vision is, because from there, you can create a timeline, a plan, and a strategy that reflects your life and your needs. After that, even if you feel stuck or have some loss of momentum, you’ll know that you can do what it takes, because you’re striving for something that’s yours.There’s nothing more satisfying than creating and serving what you really, really want from your own heart — not from someone else’s vision, or what someone else told you about what your life should be.

Stop doing the Facebook scroll

What I hear from women all around me is that distraction is one of the top reasons they don’t take inspired action on their vision. Scrolling through other people’s feeds, seeing what they’re doing and what they’re working on taps back into that comparison mode, which can mean death for creativity.

Maybe, mindfully give yourself 15 to 20 minutes to scroll through Facebook or Instagram, but only once you have given yourself permission to spend time on your dreams.

If you’re comparing yourself to some woman that you’re seeing on Instagram who is in her twenties, doesn’t have kids, and is traveling around the world and you’re feeling bad that you’re not doing that well, then you’re comparing yourself to someone who has a very different life. If you really want to do more travel, ask yourself how you can work that into your life now.

Spend time to see who you are right now

If you’re not pausing to get to know yourself in these different phases of your life, you might be operating based on old assumptions. To avoid this, ask yourself:

Who am I now and what do I need now?

I am now the mother of a 12-year-old who’s homeschooling and the partner of a man who has been with me for 18 years — but we are not the same people we were when we first started dating. We have different responsibilities. We have different desires. We have different visions of what our life is going to be in the next 5 or 10 years, and so the actions that we take now, the investment of time, energy, and money that we make now, are very different than what we did 18 years ago. You, too, might need an update to reassess your core values and your goals to make the absolute optimal, best version of your life now.

Trust divine timing

Are you able to trust that if something is meant for you in this lifetime and you’re working your way towards it, that it will happen?If you are in your garden and you’re planting some seeds, you’re not going to expect them to be fully grown the next week, right? In fact, most harvesting doesn’t happen until months and months later.

If you are planting the seeds of your dreams right now, can you allow the seasons and cycles of gestation to happen?

Say you are building a house. You’re not going to start with the roof; you’re going to start with the foundation. Just like anything else in your life, trusting the divine timing means trusting that you are doing the small daily things, planting the seeds and allowing your natural unfolding to happen. It does require inspired action from you as well as risk taking and the capacity to fail. Be patient and give that seed a chance to do its thing.

Press Pause and Pivot

If you’re on a path and you’re feeling super frustrated or stuck or overwhelmed or exhausted and you’ve done everything you can, it is perfectly okay to just press pause — even if it’s for an hour or a day or a week. It’s okay to press pause on that creative project and to really step back and ask yourself some probing questions like:

• What’s working?
• What’s not working?
• What’s bringing me energy?
• What’s not bringing me energy?

Learn to make adjustments as you go because sometimes that little pivot away from or towards something that’s not working or working better is exactly what you need. Sometimes it doesn’t require a whole blank slate, or you don’t need to completely kill the project.Sometimes it’s just deciding that some part of this is something I’m not enjoying anymore and maybe I can delegate it or maybe not do it anymore.Or maybe I can just press pause for a month and give myself a little spaciousness to really breathe into the project.

There are all sorts of things you can do instead of feeling like you can’t do this anymore because you’re so tired. Maybe it’s about taking some rest. Maybe it’s about going back to a deeper sense of self-care because you’re asking more of yourself: more energy, more attention, more time, more money.

All these investments are taking away from some part of you, so you need to replenish that just like you would fill up the gas in your car if you’re on a long journey.If you’re just going to the store, you’re not going to pack up a whole backpack of resources that you would if you’re going cross country. You’re going to make stops along the way. You’re going to get gas along the way. If you’re on a journey of creating something beautiful and big, don’t forget you’re going to need more nourishment, more rest, more play, more of the feminine metrics that I teach.

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You may also enjoy reading 5 Ways to Achieve the 8 Dimensions of Wellness, by Tom Buckland