The PressPlay Lifestyle is a series phases with tools that can be used to design your best self – even when you feel like your worst self and now we will talk about the Distribute stage. You can find a summary of here. The first step of the lifestyle is Discover, you can learn more about discovery here. The second step is Design, you can learn more about design here. The third step is Develop, you can learn more about develop here. The fourth step is Dry Run, you can learn more about it here.
Distribute Your Best Self
You have done so much work already to get yourself to this point. Brave, yes you were so brave and took the time to discover who you were being and who you wanted to be. Then you designed what your best self might look like. That is how you took some time to develop a plan and you even tested out a few things.
Integration into Life
By now you have a decent footing on at least one character improvement that you have been testing out that you want to really integrate into your life. In order to implement this change so that it is more than just a wish for change but a behavior change that sticks it is time to do some personal training and deployment of your new self. What do I mean?
Well, we all hear the various news articles and blog posts and the lastest personal development expert tell us that it takes 28 days to create a new habit. It might even take longer than that, but at least if you spend 28 days doing the new you, your brain will see it as more familiar and stop fighting you on the transformation.
Ideas for Preparation
Some ideas to prepare for the big reveal are to ask some questions of yourself before you really just out and do this thing. Consider asking yourself these questions in a journal so that you can spend the next 28 days checking to see if you are on track.
- What do you want or what would like to show up as? (This is your new state of being)
- What will having that do for you?
- How will you know when you have it?
- What will you see hear, or feel?
- Where, when, and with whom do you want it?
- What’s it been like up until now?
- Who else in your life might be affected (positively or negatively) if you got this outcome?
- What (if anything) might you have to let go of in order to have this outcome?
Consider writing these down as a template to reflect on each day. Then spend your day looking for ways to demonstrate and distribute the new you to the rest of the world.
The Allow Skill
This is a big deal. Showing up in a new way might not be received well by everyone. There may be those that liked who you were before but do not like the new that you want to become. It might be frustrating to do all this work to show up as someone else and improve yourself just to feel judged and looked down upon.
Here is where the new skill of allow comes in. You must allow yourself to notice with curiosity and without judgement how they are responding. They did not ask for you to change, you decided to make the change. Allow them to have their own experience with the change. Remember, people care about one thing, themselves. It is a biological imperative for them to think of themselves and their safety first. They will immediately consider the change a threat, and only because it is change not because it is bad.
Allow Their Change
Allow those that are in your life to go through their own change process of learning that you are changing and that you are going to stay this way. They might be used to you changing and then reverting back. Perhaps they might have their own trust issues. Certainly they might not have any reason to reject your new you othre than it is scary for them to see others doing something better. Meanwhile, allow them to process the new you as you distribute the new you.
Most importantly, allow yourself to process the new you. You have never shown up this way before. Perhaps you might have thoughts and feelings that you didn’t expect. You may find there are things you didn’t foresee happening due to the new way you are showing up and you will have to allow that to happen. Learning to allow, to live in curiosity, and to avoid looking at your change and the change of others with judgement will be the best gift you give to yourself during change work.
Start Doing the Work to Distribute
There is a lot of work to be done here! Consider journaling the experience so you can see both your progress as well as things to consider working on as you move forward. Remember you are looking at just one thing right now. So you might learn a technique that never works for you or one that always works. The only way to do that is to chronicle the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Looking forward to hearing about your great work.
After that, if you are you looking for more details on the #pressplay lifestyle? Here are a few more posts to consider: