personal growth Archives - Mickey Roothman Coaching & Consulting

If you’re ready to be, do & have better in life but it feels like you’re experiencing the opposite of what you want right now or don’t understand the contrast we sometimes face, then keep reading.

Its 06:00 on a beautiful Autumn morning. I look outside the window in awe of the majestic sunrise over a clear sky, birds merrily chirping to greet another day. My eyes catch a glimpse of my pooches still fast asleep next to me and my heart and face light up with love and gratitude for these two little fur balls. “How blissful they look” I think. “Just the perfect picture and epitome of unconditional Love and just being.” “Yeah its probably because every day is a good day for them. They don’t experience ups, downs and stresses of life like we do as humans” my ego mind chimes in with the conversation. But very quickly my consciousness interrupts the egoic thoughts asking: “Why can’t every day just be great? Why do we have amazing days and then not so amazing days? I mean life would just be great if we never had to do anything we don’t enjoy or have those harder conversations in life, wouldn’t it? Would it, really?” My mind began to wonder, searching for the answers to these loaded questions I just posed to it. It began to take me back to memories of days that were just all rainbows, glitter, unicorns and feel good warm and fuzzy stuff and experiences. Then it took me back to a few memories of days that I’d rather forget where it felt like my heart was bleeding to death and I thought I’d never survive. “No wonder most people prefer to avoid, run from and bury the more difficult experiences and emotions rather than to face them” my ego tries to interrupt the conversation again. And then it suddenly hit me! We live in a universe full of contrast!

Day and night.
Summer and Winter.
Male and female.
Light and dark.

But why does contrast even exist? I mean wouldn’t it just be easier and a heck of a lot more amazing if everything was always constant, the way we like it and just all moonshine and roses all of the time? Truth is no it wouldn’t be. Aside from the fact that we’d actually get totally bored with life (I mean just imagine sitting through a movie where everything is just perfect the whole way through with no suspense, no plot, no unfolding, no twists and turns), the contrast actually is intended to serve our highest good. That is the core purpose of its existence.

We actually need it.

Without the contrast we could never grow, expand and evolve into the highest version of ourselves and what our soul’s pursuit and purpose on this earth really is. Do I prefer the great days? HECK YES! I’m sure most of us do. But if we didn’t have the “not so great ones” then how would we even know what the good ones feel like? If darkness didn’t exist, there would have been no such thing as or even a need for light. The fact that Thomas Edison even thought of inventing the light bulb was because darkness existed which created a need for it, right? Without contrast we would really all just be robots existing with no purpose, no desires, no experiences, no evolution and frankly no emotions or a need for them. There would be no innovation or technology either. Think about it for a second. The reason you know what happiness feels like is because you’ve experienced sadness. The reason you know how you like your coffee is because you’ve experienced more than one brand, more than one way of drinking it, right? Our need for things to be done simpler, better, faster and different has also driven innovation and technology as we know it today and it is all birthed through a desire and a need for things to be different which we wouldn’t have had if we didn’t experience the opposite of it first. Without the one, the other simply cannot and would not exist. Sure, we would all rather have perfect relationships and never have to have the hard conversations. We would all rather experience happiness than sadness, ease rather than difficulty. But it is really our labeling and judgement of things (our perception of them) that makes them appear good or bad to us. We label and judge things as good or bad, easy or difficult, how it should or shouldn’t be based on societal norms and beliefs that have been handed to us, when in fact it all is exactly as it should be. This is exactly why it also doesn’t serve us when all of us are trying to change who we are or be or look the way society has labelled as acceptable, perfect, successful, happy, good, bad, pretty or whatever else. We need our unique differences to serve the evolution and highest good for us all and of this planet that we call home for now too.

What if I told you that it is your desire to evolve that drew the opposite into your experience in the first place?

Think about it for a second. By experiencing the opposite of what you want you identify and learn what it is you do want. That’s GROWTH. That’s EXPANSION. That’s EVOLUTION! And its never ending too. The type of partner you’re attracted to has vastly changed over the years as you experienced and refined what you do want in a partner by dating people who showed you what you didn’t want, right? Life is always going to present us with contrast. How it serves us lies in how we choose to see it. When we see it as “This shouldn’t be happening. This isn’t how things should be” we have a not so good experience. But when we see it as “Everything is as it should be and it is always happening for me to serve my highest good” we cruise blissfully through what others may perceive as “bad days” or “bad times” with our inner peace and happiness in tact. For me that is really what free will is. If our story was already written before we were born, it really just comes down to how we choose to experience it. We can either experience it from a place of “God promised that all things He makes work together for my good. So this too is for my good” while waiting for the unfolding and the next chapter. Or we can experience it from a place of “God has lost control and this shouldn’t be happening and is never going to get better.” Either way how you end up experiencing that thing will reflect how you choose to see it. We only really have 2 choices in any experience life throws at us. To perceive and experience things through the eyes of Love, or through the eyes of fear. And although contrast is what helps us to learn, grow, heal, evolve and expand, we can always choose to learn through love and not through difficulty or fear.

DO THIS NEXT TIME YOU THINK YOU’RE HAVING A “NOT SO GOOD” EXPERIENCE:

When a “problem” situation pops up. Don’t panic and don’t go into those old familiar thought patterns of “Why is this happening? How am I gong to solve this? What am I going to do?”. Instead take a moment to stop, breath deeply a couple of times, silence those thoughts and say this out loud to yourself: All is well. Everything is working out for my highest good. Out of this experience only good will come. I am safe. Take note of firstly how much better and calmer you feel and then be expectant and on the look out for the universe to present the solution or to you or dissolve the “problem” for you, as it was always designed and intended to do. We don’t ever really need to fix “problems”. We only need to fix our thinking and perspective about it. That in itself is already growth, evolution & expansion that serves your highest good and the highest good of all others involved.

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So its one of “those” days where everything that could possibly go wrong; does, and your emotions are off the charts, in fact your emotional well being seems severely under attack and at risk. You wake up only to see that its 06:30 AM and that’s the time you’re already supposed to be leaving for work. Your alarm clock didn’t go off for some inexplicable reason and no matter what you do, you’re going to be late! You hustle to shove yourself into the outfit you luckily laid out for work already last night, but as you grab your coffee to get one sip in on the way out, you spill it all over your brand new, crisp white Chanel shirt. So you rush to change only to find that your back-up preference is in the washing basket and your washing day is only tomorrow.. You eventually make it to the car with no further delays only to realize that you forgot to fill up your tank last night and the petrol light seems like its deliberately trying to be snarky flashing the words “EMPTY” in big red letters at you! You finally make it to the office and it appears that all hell had broken loose in the mere 10 minutes that you were late. To top it all off, the boss is in a bad mood and glaring at you (you think its probably because you’re late) and he piles yet another crisis that is on deadline onto you. At this point the “drama queen” inside your head revs it up a gear, kick into overdrive and she’s like: “He’s probably testing me to see if I will manage. He’s just setting me up to fail. He never liked me anyway. I bet he is just looking for a reason to fire me and my being late just added another bullet to his arsenal. Oh my gosh how will I find work again. The job market is so over-saturated as it is. I’m going to starve and end up living as a bum on the street. Why didn’t I just take my phone in last time it did that? Oh yes it was because I had to work late to finish that project. That my boss doesn’t remember. He doesn’t even see the value I bring to the team and all of the extra things I do. Why the heck do I do them anyway? They don’t appreciate me. No one does. Its because I’m not good enough. Just like my ex. Nothing is ever good enough. Maybe I should just resign before he fires me” – EASY THERE GIRL! STOP & BREATHE! We’ve all had a day, at times a week and some are even convinced a life like this, right? Okay that may have been a little bit over dramatized but you get the gist. And it serves the point I’m getting to. When you read that, how did it make you feel? A little anxious perhaps? Did your heart start racing or your stomach turn into a knot? Changes are that it absolutely did. That wasn’t even happening for real and it wasn’t even happening to YOU, yet your body reacted to it physically anyway and here’s why.

The mind doesn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. So whatever you’re thinking it thinks is really happening. I wrote that in the first person and you read it that way too, so your mind did 2 things there. It perceived is as something you are really thinking and thus experiencing and it reacted accordingly by letting you feel it as emotions and physical manifestations in your body.
Despite most people believing that their emotions cause their thoughts, its actually the other way around. Our thoughts cause our emotions. You read it (thus thought it) and pesto, you felt it right? Not convinced? Think of a person or situation that makes you anxious. Focus on your body for a second and feel how and where you can feel that anxiety in your body. Whatever you thought about isn’t even happening at the moment yet you were able to conjure up those emotions physically in the present and physically react to it anyway just because you thought about it.

From a young age, most of us are taught that emotions are a bad thing, not acceptable, shameful and even a sign of weakness. But the truth is its really our power! Our emotions are our GPS and KPI’s to what we can expect to experience showing up in our reality soon.

Let me explain. So you already know that our thoughts cause our emotions. But what are emotions? Just like thoughts, emotions are vibrational energy. And Science and in Quantum circles it has already been proven that energy attracts the same energy to itself. So whatever vibrational energy you are sending out through your emotions is really what you’re attracting more of to yourself then. Right about now you may also be having a little “AHA’ moment going on inside of you as to why it is that when one bad thing happens it can feel like it caused a snowball effect causing an avalanche of sh*t bombs rolling your way. But, this doesn’t have to happen. See if you re-calibrated your energy after the first shitty thing happened, you wouldn’t have attracted more drama into your experience. Re-calibrate your what now? Well basically if you chose a better thinking thought in that moment like: “Well, stuff happens. I couldn’t control the alarm clock not going off. I’m never late and I’m a hard worker so I’m sure my boss will understand. Everything happens for a reason and I am thankful for whatever this experience was here to teach me or protect me from” , none of that other stuff would have happened. You would have pivoted from a low negative vibrational energy (thoughts and feelings) to a high vibrational energy in an instant and that would have been the end of it. The rest of your day would have gone a lot smoother and you would have had a lot more joy and inner peace too. So what we attract then really starts with our thoughts. But here’s the big whopper! We think around 80 000 thoughts a day and only 5% of those thoughts are thoughts we are consciously aware of. The other 95% are subconscious thought patterns based on our upbringing, past experiences and beliefs that are running on auto-pilot. Hang ten now, don’t get discouraged just yet! The title of this blog said that this was about showing you how to do it and I always deliver on my promises. Okay, so if we we’re not even aware of our thoughts like 95% of the time and they’re running on auto pilot, how do we then know when we are thinking a low vibrational thought that will attract more low vibrational experiences to us? QUE DRUM ROLE PLEASE ….. Through our EMOTIONS! Like I said in the beginning, our emotions are really our GPS for what we are busy attracting to ourselves and creating in our lives. And lets face it. It’s a heck of a lot easier to be aware of how you feel than it is to try and manage 80 000 thoughts a day of which 95% are subconsciously on autopilot. We usually know when we don’t feel well emotionally because our body reacts to it physically in manifestations like stomach knots, headaches, neck spasms, ground down teeth, chest pains and so much more. The important one to mention here is that it may manifest as debilitating and even serious physical illnesses. Emotions are energy but they also cause chemicals to form in our body. This is really the body’s way of trying to protect us, our built in protection and self preservation mechanism. But these chemicals were meant to protect us for short term threats we experience in our environment and they were never meant to be present for extended periods of time. So when we are not aware of low vibrational thoughts causing low vibrational feelings and manifesting as toxins in our body that aren’t dealt with over an extended period of time, our body will eventually warn us that something needs to get “processed” and worked on that is causing it to malfunction in the form of illness. if we can learn to become aware of our emotions and to process them, we can nip it in the bud straight away and not wait for more bad experiences to show up or for physical illness to set in to tell us that we are headed for disaster.

MY 2 FAVORITE PRACTICAL TIPS TO LIVE AWARE OF YOUR EMOTIONS:

Set hourly reminders on your phone that just says “How do I feel?” – Stuff happens throughout our day and this way we are prompted to become aware of how we feel every hour, and then either process it or at the very least pivot by choosing a better thinking thought and better feeling emotion in that moment, stopping the low vibrational thoughts and energies from gaining more momentum.
At the end of the day before you go to sleep or when you’re soaking in a bath, reflect on your day’s experiences. Become aware of how they made you feel, what you thought about it and how you acted and reacted to it. This way you choose to pivot and stop those low vibrational thoughts, feelings, experiences and frankly the story you told yourself about it in its tracks at least once a day and you don’t carry it into the next day with you which stops its from gaining momentum.

PS: If you’re like me and you struggle to identify what emotion you are feeling at times, have no fear. Use the following Wheel Of Emotions Chart to help you to hit the nail on the head.

Now you may be thinking, “what about all the other times I didn’t do this because I didn’t know about it yet? “Fact is there may be some old trapped emotions in your body that you need to release. Its time for you to do an Emotional Detox! Clean the slate and pivot! You’ll experience tremendous emotional freedom and as a bonus your energy levels and health will increase as well. Overall you’ll just be feeling GREAT and attracting more of the experiences you DO want into your life as a result. Like everything in life it takes some commitment and action on your part, but I promise you it is easy to do and so damn worth it!

HERE’S MY 7 PIVOTAL STEPS TO EMOTIONAL FREEDOM:

You can do this exercise as an emotional detox now to process specific events and experiences, but its also a great daily practice to incorporate when you become aware of how you’re feelings through your hourly phone reminders, or once a day when you’re reflecting on the day that has passed. These 7 steps will help you to process and release emotions straight away with a lot more ease as you bring them to conscious awareness.

NEED A LITTLE EXTRA SUPPORT?

Check out the blog on The Roadmap To Finding Wholeness & Inner Peace Check out the blog on 5 Steps To Lasting Happiness That No One’s Told You About Dive a little deeper into a meaningful life with my Ultimate Life Transformation Program Listen to this Podcast Episode of Breakthrough on 5 Steps To Getting Your Breakthrough Connect with me on Facebook Connect with me on Instagram Connect with me on Linkedin

personal growth

Why We Need Contrast To Be, Do & Have Better In Life