Most of us have had the experience of going through a relationship break-up. And maybe you’ve even had the experience of “breaking up” with a client, or a team member, that wasn’t working out.
But have you ever thought about breaking up with the part of you that attracted those things in the first place?
Sometimes we know we need to release something in our life, and we find a way to muscle through the break up, but we never dig deep enough to break up with the root cause of our problem.
Mastin Kipp said, “To be a successful entrepreneur, you have to break up with your parents.”
I heard this quote and immediately both laughed and wanted to cry, because Mastin voiced something I’d been grappling with, and didn’t want to believe.
It was time to break up with my parents.
Now I’m not saying you can’t see your parents or have a relationship with them and have a successful business. But I am saying you need to sever ties with the view of you they have, and the role you chose to play in your family. I’ve yet to meet a client who didn’t need to walk this path.
I thought I had done it, then realized I needed to move further into alignment.
Some of you will need to give yourselves some serious distance from the “you” your family knew, and for most people this is easier to do with some physical distance between you as well. And for some it means literally no contact. If there is no commitment to growth in the family in which you were raised, or you are in a phase of shaky growth, and your courage could easily falter, these are times to limit contact.
I’ve, personally, been in a phase of new growth with my business and my life this spring (relocated cities, upleveled the specificity of my ideal client, and had my biggest month of sales ever, then traveled around the world – wow).
And I’d been planning a trip to spend a week with my family in July. Because you “should” spend a week with your family every summer, right?
Yet my family (yes I love them, yes my parents did the best they could with the information they had, yes, yes, yours too, I know…) has always vacillated between victim and conflict energy (Circumstance Cindy, meet Patty Proven). And I recognized that with where I am heading and what I want to create in my new life in my new city, I COULDN’T AFFORD to spend a week in that energy. (There was an even greater than normal amount of stress in my family this month.)
I decided I couldn’t afford allowing my own potential for going backward to a place of trying hard to prove I’m not the “Ungrateful Shrew” my mother told me I was growing up.
You see, every time I step further into my power in my business, I have a little conversation in my head that goes something like, “Who are you to expect _____? Maybe I’m asking too much. Who do you think you are? Maybe I’ll just watch, wait and tolerate.”
And cancelling my family trip was the exact type of thing that would elicit the “Ungrateful Shrew” conversation in my mind. You “should” sacrifice for your family, after all. You have to prove you’re not ungrateful at minimum.
So my cycle of proving looks like this:
- Desire something.
- Something happens presenting an opportunity to choose between the higher energy (desire) or shrinking to make someone happy.
- Worry about appearing ungrateful.
- Choose to shrink. Or choose to shine, but then do something else sacrificial, helpful, or overly responsible to make up for it.
- Feel resentful and ungrateful. Decide not to do that again.
- Dwell in my true desire and begin to dream. Repeat cycle.
And here’s the dangerous thing. It happens so quickly that I don’t even notice it happening. It just feels like the way it IS.
And next thing I know I’m wondering why it is taking so long to hit that particular goal. You know, the one that I REALLY want deep down, the one that scares me.
So last week I “broke up with my family” by cancelling my trip and choosing instead to take the week for myself to get settled in my new city.
And the most amazing miracle happened. I stopped taking responsibility for making everyone feel better about themselves and about me. And someone in my family finally took responsibility for themselves in a way I’d been praying for for YEARS. Like, changed their life last week.
Now, I’m not saying I caused that, they did. But I do believe my breaking my cycle of proving made it infinitely more possible as I created a space of more freedom in and around my family.
It also brought a cool new opportunity into my world as well, in line with what I’m committed to accomplishing this year. 🙂
So, here is the question, and assignment for this week. What is your hidden cycle of proving? See if you can become present to it between now and next week. If you notice you’re struggling to see it, please join me on the Inner Alignment call Thursday. Click here to register.