It’s a story I can’t stop going back to.

I call it my 10 years in the self-help aisle.

I was aware of this thing called coaching, and I was pretty sure it had something to do with what I was meant to do with my life.

And I would get moments of divine inspiration about how I could put my gifts to work in a business.

And I would tell the people around me, and they would wrinkle their nose or give me one ‘solid’ reason or question that suggested I was wrong and I would quit.

And this pattern went on for a good 10 years.

So lets talk Truth. Were the people in my life hell bent on keeping me stuck? No. And yes.

See I now know that who I was being during those years was someone who was secretly saying with my energy, “someone please stop me from this madness because I’m really afraid I might fail.” This is true, even though what I was actually saying was, “Don’t you think this is exciting? Come on, agree with me!”

Love and Support

I titled this, “He Loves Me, He Supports Me Not,” and ‘he’ can just as easily be interchanged with ‘she’ as we’ve all got friends, family members or significant others in our lives that just don’t get this whole entrepreneurship thing.

heart-love2It’s time to get really real on the dynamic of love and support around you. This is arguably THE hardest thing that an independent business owner faces. It’s making the decision about who is going to be in your life, and what you require in order to keep them in your life.

Do they have to support you and your dreams, or is it OK if they just love you ‘in spite of’ your dreams? This is a personal decision that each person needs to make, but let’s explore each side here.

What is Love?

The first thing to ask yourself is what it really means to love someone. A common definition of love is as follows:

Love (n): a profoundly tender, passionate affection for another person.

My favorite definition of love is simply, “accepting another exactly as they are and exactly as they are not.”

Here’s the thing about my definition of love. You don’t have to be in someone’s life to love them by this definition. They may have behaviors and thought patterns that simply don’t work for you, even though you can accept that they are true for them. But you don’t have to be around them.

When someone in your life tells you they love you (even if they don’t seem to support you), the thing to ask yourself is, “Do they really accept me exactly as I am, or are they secretly hoping I’ll change?”

Oh, and by the way, ask yourself the same thing about THEM!

What is support?

I recently created a list of 10 Lies We Tell Ourselves in Business, one of which is “I need the people in my life to understand and support me in order to succeed.”

So I looked at the definition of support.

Support (v): to bear or hold up; to sustain or withstand to undergo or
endure, especially with patience or submission; tolerate.

Now, do we really want the people in our life to support us by this definition!? Ha! We want the person we love to endure and tolerate us? Really?

What do you really want?

It’s worth stopping to ask yourself, when it comes to the relationships in your life, what do you really want? If you can stop focusing on needing other people to support you, you can give them the freedom to give you what you really want. And, you can give yourself the freedom to choose what you really want as well.

Most likely, if you’re a “my people” type of person, you’re not looking for someone to support, or tolerate, you. You want to surround yourself with people who love you. In the definition that says they accept you exactly as you are and exactly as you’re not. Even when you grow. Even when you have ideas that seem like hair-brained schemes from their point of view.

How do the people in your environment respond to you when your intuition, or personal Truth, gives you signals about what to do, and they just don’t get it? Do they accept it as what you need to do, or do they question you and suggest you might be wrong?

But, what if you’re right?

If the people in your life don’t believe you when you are stepping out in alignment with your Truth, what is really going on? What are they really saying when they ask you, “What if you’re wrong?”

We like to justify their responses by saying, “Well, they just love me and want what’s best for me and they are helping me to think it through.” I know I’ve said that. But what if the Truth is that they are really meaning, “It makes me uncomfortable when you change, and I’m afraid of what would happen if you are right, so I’d rather have you doubt yourself and stay the same than believe yourself and actually grow.”

People who question and doubt your decisions, they aren’t concerned about you. And in that moment they certainly aren’t loving you. They simply don’t want to be inconvenienced by the outcome that happens on the other side of your decision when you are right. They are saying “What if you’re wrong?” but they really mean, “I sure hope you aren’t right!”

Who gets on your bus?

I teach in my programs that when you invite a client to work with you, you are letting them “on your bus,” and that you want to be really clear about who you invite on your bus. The same is true with the people in your life. There is no right formula for determining what is really going on. Are you are busy pointing fingers at the people in your life so you don’t have to grow? Or are in a place that you’re ready to move away from the people in your life so you can attract a loving environment?

It’s different for everybody based on your own personal subconscious programming and degree of growth and awareness. The one thing I can say for certain is that you are teaching people how to treat you, and the surest way to retrain your environment is to begin honoring your Truth without fail every time, being completely willing to accept the outcome of your actions and decisions. Stop looking for and waiting for support and start living in love, and watch what happens!

 

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