I recently shot this video of me talking about my journey since having joined this wonderful digital education community and added it to my YouTube channel.

It discusses personal change or evolution, having tools to help deal with life, feelings of self-worth and confidence, and more…

I include it here for you to watch as it sums up a lot of the personal evolution I have experienced so far and I thought you might resonate with some of it.

When I first joined this encouraging entrepreneurial community I feared the change I needed.

I wanted to change but I feared it and had resisted starting anything new because I was just clinging on to what I had and I didn’t want to let go of that for fear of losing all control.

Starting the Journey

Once I made the decision to join the community, my tenacious grip on how things were then had to loosen. What can often transpire is that a seemingly tough challenge ends up being an incredible opportunity. This is what happened to me. Covid gave me the shove I needed to join the community when our business flatlined.

Being a scholarly type I watched all the training webinars and took copious notes and created a colourful filing system. I enthusiastically entered this brand new world of working with a laptop, in an online world, using my new digital skills and started learning.

It took me another year or so before I realised that taking action is where it is at, and so while my files gather dust, I am now learning and growing in confidence from personal experience.

Further to my scholarliness, I love personality typing quizzes, and in my quest for self-knowledge, I have completed quite a few different quizzes. I am an Enneagram 7 (the enthusiastic visionary) so I am interested in a whole LOT of disparate things. I am an Obliger from Gretchen Rubin’s Four Tendencies personality typing, so when I am trying to change and grow, I do well with external accountability. You can read a bit more about these quizzes in this blog post.

So… because I had made the leap to begin my online journey, and because I knew this was the road to change, I joined all the challenges on offer in the community. This is a taster of the challenges on offer:

Fourtopia

I am currently taking part in this month-long challenge for the second time as a way of creating some accountability in the 4 quadrants of my life:

• Health
• Wealth
• Self, and
• Social

I wrote a blog post about the non-financial wealth of starting your own business, which covered the 3 quadrants of Health, Self and Social, and you can read more here.

Best Life Blueprint

A comprehensive goal setting and vision boarding exercise complete with 21 steps, check-ins, homework and exercises. In fact, it is a life check-in which one should do every year or so. Perhaps time for me to redo it.

It is such a holistic life exercise and so importantly turns the spotlight onto yourself for a while. It is an ideal way to rediscover what motivates you and interests you and includes motivation and productivity and a whole cart of mindset support. It is like an entrepreneurial mindset business in a box course and incredibly valuable.

It includes:

• Power Of Positive Thoughts
• Fourtopia For Your Best Life
• Fourtopia Wheel
• Your Passions
• Before You Die
• An Ideal Day
• Vision Boarding
• A Typical Day Now
• Bridging The Gap
• Schedule Out Your Day
• Next 12 Months Bucket List
• Fourtopia Challenge
• Being In A State Of Flow
• Clear Your Mental Desk
• Get Out Of The Grey Zone
• Incomplete Energy Robbers
• If You Habit You Have It
• Three Wins
• Growth Mindset
• Blueprint Insights

The 90-day Video Journey

This is my second round – that’s how good it is and I would say this is THE most transformational exercise of them all, perhaps because it is such a long challenge that demands a lot of commitment and input. 

It is an incredibly worthwhile challenge that one can join at any time and involves your having to shoot 90 videos of yourself (over 90 days or so) talking about anything, and posting them to a private community Facebook group.

It is a huge self-confidence booster because you are forced to bust out of your comfort zone again and again, and put yourself in front of a group of (very supportive and kind) strangers, some of whom are very likely to become friends!

I wrote a blog post about it here.

Beyond my Comfort Zone

This one required some courage. After nudging my nerves aside, I put my hand up to be the live demo lass on various webinars:

• I took part in one with Stuart to help clarify and refine my avatar.
• I took part in one with Danielle to help clarify and refine my website.

Both Stuart and Danielle are absolute gurus in their fields, share their experience and knowledge openly, and are incredibly supportive and helpful. Going live extended my comfort zone right out, and helped me make personal and business progress.

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Healthy Personal Growth

Throughout all these challenges and all this learning and speaking up and taking part in community webinars, and building my website and my brand and getting to know my niche and my avatar and all that comprises this journey – what really happened is that I got to know myself.

This has been the most valuable part of the journey so far.

I have changed and I use the word evolve more than change now. And I continue to evolve.

Rather than fearing change, I now seek opportunities to change and grow and evolve and expand. I am now on the evolution path.

Dealing with Life Better

What I am finding is that I now deal with my life better than I did before. My circumstances haven’t necessarily changed, but my reaction to them has.

Somewhere along my journey, my husband introduced me to Stoic philosophy, which is about 2000  years old. One of the central tenets of Stoicism is that you cannot control external circumstances, but that you can only control your response; you choose your personal reaction.

This goes hand in hand with the idea of taking full responsibility for your life which is one of the central philosophies of the Mentors community.

So when the same situations present themselves now, I accept personal responsibility for my reaction, which means that the outcomes I get are worlds apart.

• I am better able to deal with my triggers because of my self-knowledge and my self-awareness.
• I am less likely to overreact.
• I am more likely to pause before I respond.
• I am more likely to see things from a compassionate viewpoint, rather than a resentful one.
• I tend to feel lighter about things in general.

Daily meditation has become a part of my journey, which is very much supported in this community.

A regular meditation practice lends itself very much to a world view of compassion and empathy, rather than anger and frustration.

I still experience the latter, but it is what I do about it now that has changed. Most days I feel calmer and more at the helm of my life, even though I’m not sure it looks as if things have changed much from the outside. Internally I have changed so much that I feel like a very different person.

I have days of low self-worth and I have days of high self-worth, but I now have a set of tools to help lift me on the lower days, and I have a very supportive community to lean on.

As I go along this journey my brand is increasingly about self-focus and self-knowledge and self-investment – which is a result of what I have learned on my own personal journey.

As a result of my having decided to sign up and join in, I am now living a better quality of life. I am intentional about the way I spend my time.

• I am living with more hope
• And more peace
• I feel more confident because I have learnt how to cope with my life with more ease
• I have met the most vibrant and interested and interesting bunch of people
• My self-confidence is gently on the way up
• And my sense of self is strengthening with every decision I make and action I take.

I share this in the hope that it is relatable and that it inspires you to take that step to invest in yourself.

My hope is that by encouraging others to join the Mentors community, the journey they go on will lead to the transformation that they need in their lives.

So if you have not yet joined the community, but are interested in making some life improvements, I urge to you have a look at these free welcome videos.

Stuart shares a lot of valuable information about the opportunities available in digital business, and the benefits of working online.

You can watch them here, or sign up below to watch them now.

Thanks for reading