I love personal development work. I’ve been doing it for more than 30 years and I can’t get enough. But sometimes it’s a defense for me. I would prefer to go back and look at some awful experience in my past than I would to do something for my therapy business that’s challenging and new. I like my comfort zones.
But as the saying goes, if you keep doing what you’ve always done, then you’re always going to get what you’ve always got. You can’t get a new outcome by doing the same old things!!
And that’s all well and good, but as we know, none of us can see our own blind spots.

Acting As If I was Safe

This was brought home to me very clearly recently when I heard a speaker talking about acting “As if…” Listening, I casually started speculating about how I might behave differently if I really trusted that I was safe in the world. Safety is a theme that follows me around. It’s not something I ever really thought about until I trained as a therapist and discovered how anxious I can be.

As I began to think about what would be different for me if I felt twice as safe, I became aware of how unsafe I feel most of the time, but blissfully unaware until I started thinking about it.
It’s a hard one to crack isn’t it? There is so much evidence around that we are unsafe. And then there’s the news and the speculation that happens in conversation… My assumption is of a lack of safety. And yet, here I am on this planet, nearly 60 years old, and still with all my limbs intact. The evidence would suggest that I have been safe enough to survive this long!!

Healing the past may not be enough…

Safety is a huge concern when we step out in the world, to do something different or something bigger. And starting a therapy practice is different and bigger than anything you’ll have done before. Healing the past may not give us everything we need to create the practice we want. We may be totally at peace with our past, and still not feel safe in the world.

How do we create enough safety within ourselves and around us to support this big step forward? If we were going on a journey from Dublin to Belfast, we would gather what we needed to get there; directions, accommodation, nourishment, company and so on. How well prepared are you for the journey towards your new practice?

If you missed my recent videos about how our practice grows, what supports  we need and what gets in the way, you can see them here:
It’s a growing up thing!
How does growth happen?
What supports do we need?

The Business of Therapy: The Inner Journey

Creating safety is one of the things we looked at at in my new course, The Business of Therapy: The Inner Journey, which was held in Navan on 19th October. We looked at the three main areas we need to grow within ourselves in order to make this big step up. And we started the process of creating the internal and external support we need to make the journey.
In the last of my videos on this subject, “How wrong was I?” I talk about the journey I have taken to build my own practice. I hope you enjoy it. You can see it here: