Walking the next step is the final step of my ALLOW decision-making process—and it’s where the wheels often come off!
Taking action is often the hardest part of making choices.
It’s all very well to know your inner Truth, but implementing your Truth choice can feel terrifying.
You Acknowledge there’s a choice to be made, you Lay it out, you ask the Love Question, you Open to the answer and get a ‘thumbs-up’ feeling, so you know what the next step is...
And then you freeze.
You get scared, you backtrack, you talk yourself out of it.
Sometimes our Truth threatens life as we know it, because it guides us to give ourselves permission to exist in ways we never have before.
In that scary moment, we’re usually tempted to retreat to our old, familiar ways.
The painful thing about not following through is that once you know you’re not brave enough to let yourself do what you most want to do, life begins to feel like a sham.
You know what you’re doing is not the real deal and you can’t pretend otherwise.
If you choose to compromise and let go of your dream, you’ll always be aware that you did that.
So how do you follow your dreams and turn toward your Truth when it’s scary?
You take small steps.
Only one, small next step at a time.
Often, people balk at really asking themselves the Love Question because they’re scared: “If I loved myself, I’d leave my job/ leave my marriage/ go traveling/ become an artist ... but that’s totally unrealistic! I can’t do that! This is a stupid question.”
The part that sometimes scares us about listening for our Truth is we assume that once we hear it, we have to successfully do the whole thing at once.
But long journeys and amazing achievements are made up of tiny steps and choices.
You only have to take the tiny, little next step that feels good to you.
Like taking a breath and reassuring yourself.
That's a step.
The Buddha is quoted as saying, “As long as you are facing in the right direction, all you have to do is keep taking steps.”
In my groups, it’s easy to see when someone has received their Truth-answer because their body relaxes, their breathing deepens, and a small smile lifts their lips. But then, sometimes so swiftly you wonder if you imagined that smile, they tense up, frown, shake their head, and say, “I don’t know what my Truth is.”
What happened is that they got frightened.
The answer they received seems so out of bounds that they shut it down straight away.
What you need to know is that your beautiful inner guidance is on your side.
You can trust it.
It will never give you more than you can do.
Every huge dilemma is broken into small, manageable steps.
When you ask the Love Question, pay close attention to the very first response you get. And focus on how it makes you feel. Does it make your chest relax?
ALLOW takes you to your chest-relaxing Truth-answer.
If you tense up again right after receiving your answer, you’ve met the next uncomfortable moment, which means you need to start to ALLOW all over again.
This way you ALLOW and ALLOW and ALLOW YOU all the way to your most wonderful life.
If you loved yourself, what would you choose to do now?
The ALLOW process is explained in my book You Have Permission to Exist
Click here for the book
