What keeps you up at night?

This month I went to Trudy Van Buskirk’s network meeting Women Entrepreneurs Building Businesses  in the Beach to meet up with author Suzan St Maur. It was a workshop on writing blogs. My favorite piece of advice was “what keeps your clients awake at night”. This is what I have pondered for the past few weeks.
For me it isn’t what keeps me up at night, but what wakes me up and keeps me up in the early hours of the morning.

When I think about you, my clients/friends, and myself, I know that financial problems keep us awake. Although, it isn’t so much the lack of funds as it is the bills!! We think about love, although, again not so much the wonderful things going on as much as the problems. I have had issues with PAIN, however, pain becomes a much bigger issue as well. There is physical pain, emotional pain, and mental stress. (It isn’t too often that we lie awake curious of our spiritual journey; although, that is a great conscious meditation.)

Physical pain can definitely keep you awake, but where does it come from? And why is it there? Emotional pain and mental stress are probably the biggest areas we fret about. That pretty much covers all relationships from our family, to our friends, to our colleagues and our romantic relationships.

I believe it is safe to say that what keeps us awake, is not loving matters, but fear! Fear seems to be the culprit if we want to give it one name. I’m sure there are times when we are excited about something, but if it keeps us awake, it is likely due to projecting fear of the unknown or anxiety about something; which again, is really just fear!

Our fears come in many different colors and names, but if you can take it down to one thing, and see the spectrum as love on one side and fear on the other, whatever you name it; it will ultimately be a fear. Anger, anxiety, stress, jealousy, doubt, frustration, depression, guilt, shame, grief, envy can all be seen as a fear, because they come from our experiences in our early childhood that created a core value or belief that fears something. It may be abandonment, feelings of unworthiness, being misunderstood, judged, rejected, powerless, feeling unsafe – the list goes on. Each of us has a unique belief that we have chosen to work on in this life and our experiences in our childhood set the tone for our repeated patterns.

I think what I would like for you to contemplate is what keeps you awake at night (or early morning hours)? I would like to assist you in these areas. I would like to guide you to see that your focus is on your fears, and how once you start worrying about something, you aren’t actually focused on the solution. And the middle of the night, will not allow you to solve anything. A great way that I have learned to find solutions is to write it, or think about it prior to going to bed and either allow my dreams or in the in-between hours (the time right before you fall asleep or right as you are waking up) answers come to you. At one of my lowest times, I decided that I had focused so much of my energy on my fears, that I used a new technique; I downloaded several series of books and decided that I would just read, instead of worrying. This did several things, it allowed me to delve into my imagination far better than movies or Netflix could ever do (they were large novels of approximately 1000 pages, so it would take me a day to finish each one and move onto the next, I didn’t have time to think about my problems); and it shifted my focus from worrying to an exciting journey; a journey that may have been somewhat predictable, but had many interesting twists. What it did was change my energy completely. Instead of being focused on what wasn’t working in my life, I was able to delve into someone else’s life! And because our imagination doesn’t know what is real it began to believe that I was no longer having financial difficulties, because all the books I was reading were of successful eccentric people and it shifted my emotions of lack to excitement.

These two suggestions have really helped me, reading straight for a couple of weeks is quite extreme, but I needed an extreme change in my life and way of thinking and this provided me with the shift. However, for most working on our dreams and using the in-between time will be effective and is how I discover my answers now. I can assist you to uncover your answers as well. This can happen through my intuitive guidance and through coaching to align our three brains, our gut is predominantly in charge of making us feel safe (an issue we often associate with fears). Let me know what keeps you awake at night!