“Get the inside right. The outside will fall into place.”
—Eckhart Tolle

A client wrote me and from her email, it was clear that she was in a desperate place. She wants a new career – the current one is making her very unhappy. It’s unfulfilling and boring, and she feels desperate to do something else with her life. There’s a sense of urgency there. She wants it as soon as possible – yesterday would be good!

I understand that so well.

A personal example

I remember so clearly a difficult day just soon after I started my healing practice. Having resigned from my work as a computer programmer, I was earning virtually no income with my practice yet. I was so frustrated because I had all these new healing tools and skills… and no-one to use it on.

All my talents really love supporting others – so to have no clients, no-one to support, was very difficult. I felt worthless, like I had no value – and that the only way I could demonstrate my value as a person, would be to have clients and use my talents.

On that particular day, I was feeling enormously frustrated and desperate. That feeling of desperation made me do something really strange. Desperation wants immediate results – have you noticed? There’s no patience there….

So I decided to get in my car, and go to a huge shopping centre closeby – and that I would not come back until I’ve acquired a new client.

I had no plan of ‘how’ I was going to meet or get this new client. Perhaps If I was meant to do this healing work, and help people, magically a client would reveal themselves to me somewhere in the shopping centre. I’d strike up a conversation with someone who would tell me that they had a health challenge – it could be the waiter who served me coffee, or the person behind the till, or a person walking along the shops…. In my desperate mind, anything could happen and I’d walk away with a possible appointment. Someone I could help, to relieve this desperate feeling I was carrying.

What do you think happened? Did it work out that way?

As you can most likely guess – no.

Nothing of the sort happened.

I didn’t have a plan. I was too shy to talk about my work, desperation was written all over my energy system, and I had too many other emotional blocks in the way. I went home feeling a bit defeated, slightly less desperate and now with an even lower energy than before.

Here’s the thing:

Desperation for quick results is usually not a great energetic place to create a good outcome from.

I believe worthwhile success is the result of a process. And this process might take far longer than we ideally WANT it to take.

Our mind, our ego, the human part of us (whatever you want to call it) – can only see so far. It doesn’t see the bigger picture. It wants things because we believe those things will take us out of our current emotional state and make us happy.

Those ‘wants’ don’t necessarily come from the higher parts of us. They sometimes come from a very human place like

• “I don’t feel valuable right now” or
• “I don’t have value unless I help someone else” or
• “I don’t feel valued where I am now”.

Jumping to the next job, finding the next position in your company, or desperately finding another job that will make you feel valued, is not going to solve this issue.

It will make it go away for a while, yes.

It’s like when you’re in a relationship and something doesn’t work out there, and you go straight on to the next one. If you hop from relationship to relationship to find the ‘perfect partner’, you’re missing the gold inside yourself.

The ‘gold’ is the inner work. The work talked about by the quote from Eckhart Tolle above.

We all have many, many limiting beliefs or thoughts. I recently heard Joe Dispenza explain that “our personality creates our personal reality.” (You can find many of his talks and interviews on GaiaTV.com).

If we don’t do the inner work, we keep reliving the same life, the same problems and challenges… because our personality/beliefs/thoughts are still the same. We behave according to the beliefs and thoughts we have and think.

What is the ‘Inner work’ I’m talking about?

It’s the work of investigating our thoughts, our thought process, our beliefs. Our emotional work. Becoming aware of what we think and feel, HOW we think.

Gently bringing awareness to how we create our personal reality by the way we keep recreating thoughts and feelings in the same, very predictable way. Over and over – with very little awareness of our patterns.

Our personality and beliefs are fully formed and ‘set’ by the age of 35 (read more about this in “Evolve your Brain” and “Breaking the Habit of Being Yourself” by Dr Joe Dispenza).

Unless we consciously choose to focus on our thoughts, feelings and behaviour – we will keep perpetuating the same thing, the same result, the same pattern… because those brain patterns have been formed, and the brain loves using as little as possible energy on ‘automatic pilot’.

So our ‘inner work’ is a combination of finding the thoughts, feelings and behaviours that currently limit us, and then making a conscious effort to change that.

This is not easy work. Change takes time, and feels uncomfortable. Our ‘set’ brain patterns will fight tooth and nail to keep doing the same thing. The brain does not want to spend a lot of energy to do things differently.

There is a lot more to say here and I want to finish here for now.

Here’s the summary:

 If your ‘outer reality’ is not the way you want it right now, you have to do the inner work.
 The inner work takes time to produce different results.
 Yet it’s a beautiful, empowering path to do the inner work – because anything can shift in our outer world when our inner world shifts. So many different possibilities open up.
 If we try to shift our reality by jumping from thing to thing (and find our happiness that way), we’re going to be jumping for a long time.
 The inner world is where it needs to shift first for long-term, permanent results.

HOW do we do the inner work?

In my experience, it’s very hard to see the woods for the trees in our inner world when we do this alone. We simply cannot be the mirror for ourselves. Because our thoughts, feelings and behaviour are so ‘normal’ to us, we find it hard to think, feel or behave differently.

Working with another person who can challenge our thoughts, our beliefs, our assumptions, our normal way of doing things is one of the best ways to hold up a mirror. A coach, a mentor, a person who is not invested into ‘keeping you the same’ because of their own ‘stuff’.

Friends and family often feel threatened when we change…. (bless them) because if we change, they might need to change…. And that’s not necessarily what they chose. So friends and family are not the best people to help us do the inner work.

Find someone you trust and feel comfortable with, to accompany you on this journey of the ‘inner work’. It is SO worth it.

When our inner world shifts, so many different options can open up.