4 Keys For Making A Leap Of Faith

In my life I have made quite a few leaps of faith. Looking back on my life when I was thinking about writing this blog I realised I have made lots and lots of leaps of faith through my life. All of the times when I made one my life took a different direction and a massive leap forwards. I do not regret even one of these decisions even though at times the going was not always easy. I hope in this blog to share what I have learnt so that you need not have as bumpy landing as I did from time to time. 

The first time I can remember taking a leap of faith was when I was 20. I decided to move to Cape Town for a year to study stable management. I left the guy I had been in a relationship with for 2 years packed my bags and set off. Although I had lived there from the age of 6-12 I no longer knew anyone. I lived in a little cottage on the Cape Flats with very little money. I was advised to get a dog as otherwise I might get raped on the way to work. My cat and dog ate better than I did, I had to hand wash all my clothes, and I could only afford to go out once a month. I started work at 6am and finished at 7pm. I came home ate and then studied till 10pm every night. I had no TV and only had an old tape recorder with 1 tape. Yet in spite of all of this I was blissfully happy. I got to do what I loved all day long. My dog came to work with me and was my best friend. And it has been an experience that has helped me through many tough times. It taught me that I could be happy anywhere and that my happiness did not depend on my external circumstances but rather on who I was being and what I was doing. 

Since then I have made quite massive leaps of faith every few years or so. I did it when I met my future husband. He was in Botswana on holiday when we met (I was living there at the time). We spent a 2 weeks together before he had to go back. He then came back 6 weeks later for Valentines Day to surprise me and we spent another week together. In March I packed up everything I owned and moved to the UK to love with him. Although it did finally end in divorce we were together for 9 years and had 2 kids and I now call him my dark angel because if it hadn’t been for the experiences I had with him I would not be doing what I do now. 

I took another leap of faith when I left him (my then husband). I was a stay at home mum looking after our two very young kids and I realised I needed to earn money. I had never run a business before, I had worked in businesses but I had never run my own, but I didn’t let that stop me. Through some synchronistic events I was asked by a wine agency in Cape Town if I would like to import their wines and distribute them around Botswana. I told them that I would be working from home (one of the non negotiable’s I had decided on regarding the type of work I wanted to do) and that I would store the wine in my double garage. What I find hard to believe now is that they accepted. For those of you living in South Africa or even Botswana the wines were well known brands - Alto Rouge, Durbanville Hills, Allesverloren Port, and Hill & Dale to name a few. What I learnt from this is incalculable but I think my proudest moment was when my accountant (a very dry critical man) looked over my books and said this is a proper business Britt. 

I did it again when I left the wine business I had created and became a Consciousness Coach. I remember when I started to train it was as if there was no decision to make. I knew that coaching was what I was meant to be doing with my life and anything else would require me to die a little. 

All of these about turn changes have meant that I have a vast experience of taking leaps of faith. Sometimes they have been smooth and everything has fallen magically into place and other times it has been incredibly bumpy and quite scary. Even when the transitions were easy there was still a very steep learning curve and this in itself was always challenging. As I have said I don't regret any of my leaps of faith because they have shifted my life in ways that would never have happened if I had carried on the path that I had been going along. And I love my life and what I do and where I am. I think these leaps of faith have added a richness to my life and ensured that I stretched myself and grew more than I thought I could. 

If you are contemplating a leap of faith, a major change, or there is something that is bubbling that you are scared of and you don't know whether you should do something about it or not. I am going to share four things that you should keep in mind while you are contemplating it that will hopefully help you transition more smoothly than I have done in some of my leaps of faith.

1. Alignment - Know that you are in alignment with the decision you are making. The way I do this is I imagine myself standing at a crossroads and can see myself looking down the different paths that my decisions would take me. I think of where my life would go if I carried on the current path that I was on and I get a feel for it. It is not so much a logical thing it's more of a sensory thing and it doesn't always involve looking down and seeing the logical explanation of life as it might be. I might see a forest, a mountain range or it might be sunny, dark, cold or warm. I get a feeling for how that path would make me feel. I did this once with a relationship that I was deciding whether to carry on with or not. (I have actually shared this before) I looked at where where my life would go if I stayed in the relationship and when I looked down that path I saw my life as being quite stayed and quite boring. I would most likely have ended up living in the town he grew up in maybe doing what I love but more as a hobby rather than as a career. There were not enough people there to have been able to keep me very busy. I would have been living a life that he wanted to live not a life that I chose to live. When I looked down the other path of where my life could go if he wasn't part of it, it was less clear. I saw a beautiful forest with sunshine shining through the trees. It felt expansive and open, it felt exciting, liberating and it felt like I was expanding. One of the key things to look out for when doing this is does this choice make you feel expanded? It might also make you feel a little scared and that's not necessarily a bad thing because the way our subconscious mind works when we step into the unknown it does make us feel scared. You don't want to feel terrified but a little bit of fear a little bit of feeling scared is not a bad thing.  Something else that is very helpful when making decisions is knowing what you want and knowing what you don’t want. I am not going to go into detail about how to do that here as I wrote about it last week and you can follow the link above to find out more about that. 
2. Resources - Assess whether you have the resources to make this major shift in life. At times I have had the resources and the changes I have made in my life have gone very smoothly and at other times I haven't had the resources and the process has been more bumpy. When I talk about resources what I mean is; energy, time, finances, emotional capacity, contacts, knowledge, connections, and infrastructure. When I started the wine business it was very stressful and I learned a hell of a lot in a short space of time but I had a home, I had my family around me, and I had many close friends. I had the resources to get it started. It would have been smoother and less stressful if I had had better financial resources because there were times when I was waiting for money to come in from customers so that I could pay for the stock and that got very stressful from time to time. When I shifted to do my coaching practice I had the social infrastructure in place. I had lived in the city I was living in for many years and had a lots of connections within the community. I also had the training that I had done so I knew what I was doing. My children had started school so I had time and space to be able to work on what I was going to be doing. And I had money from my wine business that I was able to invest in my new Coaching business. So although there were times when I wasn’t completely sure how to build the business I had most of the resources I needed and the business grew from strength to strength. When I moved to the UK I did something that I was unaware of at the time but which caused me the biggest difficulty in the transition. I handed over my financial wellbeing to both my ex-husband and to my father. They were amazing and they did try to support us and help us with this change but through a number of different circumstances what we had all expected changed in ways we weren’t able to predict.What I learnt was to ensure you do not give your power away to anyone else. I have again already written about this so please follow the link if you want to learn more about it. I think it is very important when you're looking at resources to know that you are in control of those resources. 
3. Mindset - When you make a leap of faith your subconscious mind will be sent into turmoil as it will have no data about how to keep you safe. The whole purpose of your subconscious mind is to ensure your survival. It does this by using all the information that it has gathered throughout your life and it uses this to predict what will happen in the future and then gives you signals in the form of thoughts and feelings to get you to act to ensure you will be safe. When you take a leap of faith you are stepping into the unknown so your subconscious mind has no data as to how you will survive in this unknown space. Because it has no data on how to keep you safe it will try to stop you from taking this leap. And it does this by bringing up all of your subconscious fears, uncertainties and self-doubts in the form of thoughts. If you are aware that this will happen then you will be much more able to see these thoughts for what they are. And to be able to handle them and to stay in the right mindset to ensure your success. If you don't know how to handle them then you are likely to get buffeted and bumped around by your own thoughts and feelings. Which will make you step back rather than step forward into what you're trying to create. You might fear that you can't do it and not take that leap of faith, you might get to a stage and not think it's possible and by thinking it's not possible you might then give up your leap of faith and choose something safer. All of these things are incredibly important because when you know what your subconscious programmings, beliefs, and fears are then when they come up you can see them for what they are and go “ah! I am just doubting myself. I have done that hundreds of times before. It is not actually real it is just a subconscious fear I have and I am going to ignore it and carry on.” When I moved to the UK as I said I handed over my financial security to both my father and my ex-husband and when things didn't go according to plan they got very fearful. So not only did I doubt myself but I had the people that held the power over my life also doubting me and that compounded my fear that I wouldn’t be able to create what I wanted to create. In this particular instance I stepped back very drastically from them both and that's not to say that they were wrong but it is what I needed to do to be able to create the space I needed to be able to carry on with my life as I wanted it. It was the one thing that started to turn the trajectory of where my life was heading at that time. It released the pressure that they were putting on me and allowed me to start and move forward as I wanted to. 
4. Working with Source. I have already mentioned how the subconscious works and that you subconscious will make you feel very uncomfortable when you step into the unknown. You will most likely feel fearful and doubt yourself but this doesn't mean that you won't survive. Energetically when you feel fearful, uncertain or when you don't trust the process you close yourselves off. You step back and you want to protect yourself, but when you do that you disconnect from Source. To ensure this does not happen and that you remain in alignment and flow you will need to make sure that you keep that trust and ensure that you have a good relationship with Source. When you feel uncertain or when you doubt yourself take time out to meditate, to reconnect and to see the truth of life. Being in alignment allows everything to flow and it is when synchronicity’s and coincidences happen to support you in what you are creating. You will also need to make space for inspiration so that source can guide you through the right steps to creating what you want to create. I have found the most profound inspiration through running, walking, driving and meditating although these are not to only ways. You will need to find your own way to step out of your head and create space. Having curiosity is also a fabulous way to invite the universe to play with you as you never know how your synchronicity’s are likely to come to you. I have found a lot of guidance from sharing where I want to go with others. You don't know where the next lead is going to take you to help you create what you want. Source is always there it has your back it wants you to succeed it is only for you to be able to be open to keep stepping forward in curiosity to be able to create anything that you truly want. ​

Wishing you every success with any changes you are thinking of making. So much love from me to you BrittTanya

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