One of the things we hear so often from our clients (fellow professional healers) is: ‘I don’t want to push myself’.
Can you relate?
You don’t want to do anything at the expense of yourself, your balance and your self-care!
But… then sometimes you get to the end of another day or another week and find you haven’t made any meaningful progress towards your dream of a thriving healing practice.
Ugh.
You might feel like you either have to sacrifice yourself to get stuff done OR take care of yourself and accomplish zero.
If you’ve been caught between these two dynamics, you’ll want to learn to discern between a healthy and unhealthy push.
Healthy Push vs Unhealthy Push; The key to pleasurable productivity
In the creative process, there are times for pushing ourselves, times to rest, times to go inward and connect. As healers, we’re generally much more attuned to our needs than the rest of the general population, and we’ve learned that we have to take great care of ourselves in order to help anyone else.
But when does our self care become an excuse to avoid the healthy pushes that are NECESSARY to make progress and bring your dreams into reality?
A healthy push is a natural part of the creative process.
You know the feeling when you’re out for a run and you’re getting tired and you see the finish line? And you move into a sprint and push yourself through to the finish? And it feels amazing! You’ve hit your edge and gone just slightly beyond it in a way that creates growth in your body and mind.
We need and want those types of pushes in your business. Your clients will need and want those types of pushes in order to experience change and transformation in their lives.
So when is a push unhealthy?
An unhealthy push is when we’re driving, striving and moving beyond what feels right and what feels good because of some underlying fear.
Perhaps we’re trying to prove we’re good enough. We don’t believe it’s possible. We are compensating for feeling like a failure, a fraud.
When these limiting beliefs and fears are the catalyst, we’ve moved in to the territory of “unhealthy push”. It doesn’t feel good and it comes at the expense of ourselves. If we do this consistently enough, we’ll burn out and it may even show up as a health crisis. Plus, it generally doesn’t get us our intended results anyway!
When you take action in your life and in building your practice, begin to notice where the action is coming from: Is it aligned? Is it the authentic next step for you? Is it uncomfortable in the healthy way – where you’re hitting an edge and even though there is resistance or fear it’s GROWTH to stay with it and push through?
OR is your action coming from an underlying fear and limiting belief. Is it coming from the “I should” or “If I don’t do this something bad will happen,” “Someone will be disappointed in me.”
One of the keys to bring your dream of being a healer into reality is being able to discern between a healthy push and a unhealthy push.
In this post, we’ve given you some of the criteria to discern, in our next post, we’ll share practical tips to getting out of unhealthy pushes and into aligned action!
Love,
Julie & Jonathan