How to Grow Where You Are Planted | UPLEVEL YOUR LIFE Even In Tough Situations

“Grow where you're planted.” - An annoying old saying

I don't know about you, but I'm really sick of hearing this advice.

What does that even mean? When I look at trees outside, some of them do really well, and others struggle. Some just wither away. All of them are trying to grow where they're planted.

Then I thought about it a different way. How do we adapt? How do we survive? There are so many different situations that we’re put in. How do we grow where were planted?

ADAPT

What does it mean to adapt?

I moved from Texas to California. I loved living in Santa Cruz. And now, I’m back in Texas. I honestly can’t believe how hot it is here despite being born and raised here 😲 I need time to become acclimated (if that’s even possible because I never was before).

How long does that take? How long will it take me to adapt to the climate or to the environment that I am in so I can begin to survive?

I know that some people see adaptation and survival as a continuum. But to me, the first step is to adapt to your surroundings, so that you can start making an attempt to figure out the next step of survival.

So what do you need to do in your situation where you've been planted so that you can grow? How do you adapt to that situation?

Going back to trees. If I was gonna plop a redwood tree out here in Texas, it's not going to survive. There's no way it's going to get enough moisture out of the air, to nourish itself. But we have other trees here, we have live oaks and mountain laurels and others I don't know the name of. Those trees have adapted over time to survive. They have literally gone through droughts and weathered really high heat to adapt.

As people, we are self-aware. We can do other things to adapt to a situation rather than just kind of curl up in a ball and say, “Oh, well,” and kind of wither away, like a redwood probably would do here. A redwood doesn’t have the self-awareness or wherewithal to make adaptation changes within its lifecycle. If one were to survive, it still would take many, many, many cycles of many, many children later to have a thriving redwood forest. As people, we can do it faster.

SURVIVAL

Survival is where we're taking it a step further. Now that we're kind of acclimated, we can understand what's going on. We've looked around. We know what our resources are and how we can use them to survive in the situation/environment that we find ourselves in.

And, there's always a way to survive. You may have heard people who say something like, “Oh, no, I've been in a similar situation and there was no way I could have survived.” To them, I say, “Really, then you wouldn't be here telling us about it.”

There's always a way. This is really about where I would say it isn't easy. And it isn't hard either. It's neither easy nor hard. In fact, that is the exact wrong way to look at it.

When you're going for survival, it's all about perspective. We have to find meaning. Why are we here? What is the lesson we can learn through this? What is the silver lining? What is that golden nugget? What is the meaning behind this situation? You could say there is no meaning. I'm here to tell you there's always a reason that you've been asked to grow where you're planted. Sometimes you have to wait longer to find it and you've got to do that as you're starting to survive, but there's always something that will come up. It could be something surface that shows itself quickly. And then later, you’ll see with more depth why you are in that situation. It may only come to light after you've gone through the whole situation. There is a reason.

I want to clue you in on a little bit of something, something. If you find yourself struggling, seriously struggling, you're thinking: I don't know if I’m going to make it, or I don't know how I'm going to dig myself out of this situation, or something to that nature, know that struggle happens at all income levels and in all places. Just as thriving happens at all income levels and in all places. Again, it is all about perspective.

Have you seen that meme floating around social media? I see it all the time. I always think, what if the doom and gloom side looked out the sunny and bright side of the bus? What if they changed their perspective? To me, that's what that little meme is trying to remind us to do. When things are down…when things look awful look somewhere else. Change your perspective so you can see things can get brighter, and that there's hope or a light at the end of the tunnel. That's why I say doesn't matter where you are, there's always struggling and thriving, no matter what. It's all about perspective.

PERSPECTIVE

To gain perspective, you can zoom in or zoom out. This is just like looking at a picture on your computer. You can use the scroll wheel on your mouse to zoom in or out. For most of us, we need to zoom out. We need to see the bigger picture. For a few of us, we need to zoom in and look at the details because we need to be aware of the nuance. Only you can know in your situation if you need to zoom in or zoom out. If you find yourself in a swirl trying to figure out which you need to do, zoom out. Nine times our of ten, we all just need to zoom out to change our perspective and see the situation in a different context. That different contents can change everything. All of a sudden, you can start making meaning out of what is going on as to why you were being planted and asked to thrive in that situation. It's about meaning-making.

As humans, we like to see patterns and put things in boxes. It helps our minds when we categorize things. And it helps us to emotionally feel safe.

The other great thing about gaining perspective is it pulls us out of victim mode. Because usually when you're in victim mode, you have thoughts like this playing in your head: “I'm struggling, and this is awful, and I hate this, and I don't know how I'm going to get out of this thing.” Thoughts like that mean you are firmly in victim mode. When we gain perspective, when we zoom out or zoom in, we get to change our perspective and pull ourselves out of victim mode.

Normally, when someone gets out of victim mode, they get so excited, they want to go straight to action. And I really want to caution you against going from victim mode and into action. Why? I’ve worked with people since 2006, and once they move out of victim mode straight into action, they end up bouncing back sooner more so than later into victim mode. Why? Because they skipped a step. So when you gain the perspective you need because you're seeing the situation in a different context, you need to take more time in that uncomfortable space. You need to do some observation and be in gratitude. And, dare I say in celebration because you're able to pull yourself out of victim mode to get that perspective to gain a new context to which to look at that situation.

I think sometimes we're in such a hurry to get out of victim mode that we're literally running away from it, aimlessly. In that running, we skip this very important step. I know the step is uncomfortable, and many times hard. You are being called to just be. Just be the observer. Just to be in gratitude. This isn't the time to get into action. It's not time to be the leader, yet. Just be. Continue to observe. Continue to understand, and anchor in the experience of the situation. When we're anchoring in the experience, guess what, we don't have to learn that lesson over and over and over again.

To anchor in experience, we need to be in gratitude for having the experience and weathering the storm. Once those observations have been made and we understand what's going on as well as have gratitude for having the experience, then we can actually make good plans. We have all the knowledge needed to create a strategy for moving forward. Again, note this cannot happen before we can gain the perspective. It cannot happen before we have the observations. It cannot happen before we are in gratitude. Once those are handled, you can action.

LEAD

Now that you have all the knowledge to make the plan and you have a strategy, you can lead. If this situation had to do with something in your life, now you can be the leader in your life again. If was something to do with work or your business, you can now lead there again. Perhaps it had something to do with a movement, you can now lead the movement again.

SKIPPING THE JUST BE STEP

I want to reiterate, if you skip the just be step, you end up back in victimhood. It becomes a cycle over and over and over again because you're not learning the lesson. It ends up looking like hitting the bottom of the barrel. And I don't know about you, I have hit the bottom of the barrel too many times. Sometimes I get so stubborn about learning a lesson that not only do I hit the bottom of the barrel, I decide now I'm gonna go underneath the barrel to the reallly sharp rocks and drag myself around. All because I don't want to face something that lesson is trying to teach me. Maybe it's something I really don't want to look at, at a very deep soul level that needs to come up to be exposed and released.

We get to choose how we learn our lessons. We get to choose our experiences. We get to choose if we want to give ourselves a hard time or not. There are all sorts of ways to learn lessons, some are more gentle, and some more painful. We get to choose which way we want to go.

There are always those decision points because every moment, we get to make a choice, which leads to other things happening. With all these little decision points they culminate into our lessons being one way or another. They can be gentler, harder, or kind of middle-of-the-road-ish.

But as we keep having to learn the same lesson over and over again, it gets harsher and harsher and harsher. It’s like the universe is wondering if you are going to get it this time. It sees you haven’t learned the lesson so it lets you try again. If you still aren’t getting it, it serves up the lesson in a different harsher way for you to learn. So you get to decide to make different decisions to make it a little easier. You get to decide to taken and learn the lesson the sooner rather than later. With each iteration, you are essentially asking for it to be harsher so that you’ll pay attention.

With that said, not every lesson can be super easy. And not every lesson has to be really hard. But we're still at choice. And even the middle of something that seems quite horrific, harsh, quite ugly, quite devastating. To be frank, you are still at choice. You still get to make the decisions that can lead to an easier exit, rather than a harsher exit out of that particular situation.

Every moment, every breath, you can make a different decision. You can choose a different timeline. I know you might not be a timeline nerd like I am. In the Marvel Universe show Loki, they did a good job of illustrating different timelines. They talk a lot about people making different choices and going on different timelines. Essentially there are different versions of you doing different things on different dimensions based on these timeline splits.

TIMELINE JUMPING

There's a timeline when you made decision A and then there's a timeline where you made a decision B. Each one of those timelines branch off and become all these different timelines.

Sometimes I hear people say we are on the worst timeline. Usually, they wish they could jump to a different, better timeline. To do that, quite honestly, it's simple, but not easy. It is a matter of making different choices. Why? Because you’re always at choice. When you make different choices, by changing your perspective, you can release the things that have happened in the past and recognize and change the presuppositions running your life. Presuppositions are those things that we’re taught at a young age and act on without even thinking about it because we just assumed that they're true. When we get older, we may find out those things we're not true, but we still behave as if they are. Essentially, presuppositions are our subconscious running our lives. Add that to any kind of trauma we've had, and it’s those crazypants choices we make over and over again despite knowing logically they don’t make sense. And it is those choices that are forming our future and informing our future choices. That’s why we tend to keep making the same kinds of choices, over and over and over again.

Back to wanting to be on a different timeline. I play a lot of video games, and it happens to be a pretty good analogy for all of this. When you want to uplevel your character in the game you need to change strategy if what you’re doing isn’t getting you the results you want. For us to change strategy since so many of our actions are deeply entrenched, we've got to clear away all that gunk. That means dealing with the trauma, releasing blocks, and reprogramming ourselves with presuppositions that are helpful for this phase of life.

Any time I hear advice like that, I would roll my eyes because I was so tired of hearing that as I was in the muck, underneath the barrel, scraping myself over the sharp rocks, because I STILL needed to release the trauma, clear my blocks, you know, reprogram myself. As much as I was so tired of hearing it, I also knew it was true. I didn't have the time and couldn’t find the resources to do what needed to be done. Let's just be honest, there were and still are some resources out there. They didn't make sense to me, or I tried them and they didn't work. Sometimes, they would work temporarily. I would clear something and i' would be right on back again. It's almost as if I would unplug whatever it was from myself and would find its way back and plug itself back in.

Essentially, I was grinding for XP (experience points) and gathering resources in order to level up my life only to realize I couldn’t crack the code to uplevel. It was as if I was playing a video game and had all the things to level up my character except for the recipe to combine everything together, and I didn’t know how to get that recipe. In games as well as in life, that means you keep searching for the recipe/code. Eventually, you find the receipe/code and are able to level up.

What I realized is that I do this a lot. When I’m playing games, for one reason or another, I will start the game again. I may have reset the game, but as the player, I still have all the knowledge that previous playthroughs have taught me. I have knowledge that the character I am playing doesn’t have. So when I reset the game, I still know all the things that happened in the game. I still know where to go and get the recipe to level up in the game. I know where I need to go get different resources or the people I need to talk to in the game so that I can buy that recipe later. I can make better choices because I have reset. In life, I have the knowledge to make better choices. That’s how I'm jumping to a higher timeline. I am up-leveling. It is such an amazing experience to give yourself and its pretty good in game, too.

There is a way to reset your life with all the knowledge you have while getting rid of all the gunk that you don't need so you can make better choices. I talk a lot about that in Soulful Reset. We go through a process of resetting you, the player, not the character, but the player. You’ll be able to make better choices. Trauma, blocks, and presuppositions are no longer holding you back. Circle back to the beginning of this, you are out of victimhood. You changed your perspective, put the situation in a different context and have done your observation while being in gratitude. During Soulful Reset you’ll bring in the dreams and desires YOU want to fill the vacuum so nothing you don’t want can plug back in. You’ll create new tapes to play in the back of your mind and rewrite some of the experiences that you’ve had. You can get all the details at SoulfulReset.com

I hope that you would come and hang out with at our next Soulful Reset virtual retreat because you’ll learn a proven process to make timeline jumping easier. You already have the XP and resources. If you still can't get to the next level it’s likely you don't have the crafting recipe. Soulful Reset is a crafting recipe. Give yourself the gift of knowledge and check it out.

I hope you do and you're able to show up for the Soulful Reset experience so it is easier for you to grow where you're planted. I know growing where you’re planted is frustrating. So frustrating. I've been there too many times. There were lessons I had to 10+ tries at before learning them.

You can grow where you're planted. The first step is to get yourself out of victimhood. You do that by gaining perspective…zooming in or out. The second step is just being...being an observer and being in gratitude. The third step is getting into action by making a beautiful strategic plan so you can lead yourself and others.

Remember at all times, you are at choice. You're always at choice. You can make your lessons harder or you can make them easier. You're at choice. You get to choose how you learn the things that you need to learn.

As you go through life grinding for experience points (XP) and gathering the resources you need to level up, know there is always a way to get the recipe/code needed. You can feel around for it, wait for it to come in the mail, or you come to Soulful Reset and get the recipe so you can get to the next level...the next phase or that chapter of your life. Use your abundance of knowledge to be retooled from the inside out. Get further faster and easier.