“Those who have walked through fire leave sparks of light everywhere they go.”
“If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.”
― What Matters Most is How Well You Walk Through the Fire
Hello, Lovelies!
This Quarter I am using The Sacred She Oracle by Ma Deva Padma for my weekly oracle readings.
Our card to guide us for the week ahead is 8. SELF CONFIDENCE
2024 is a year for fresh starts, for creativity, healing and social connection. It’s a year for ambitious projects and for getting stuff done.
April is a month for giving your dreams power, for heightened intuition and messages from the Universe. It’s a time for finding your own answers and speaking your truth.
8. SELF CONFIDENCE
This week’s energies encourage us to do hard things.
Why?
Because so often the things we want are at the other end of the hard thing.
Love. Success. Opportunity. Positive change. Results that count. Health. Fitness. A career change. The end of something. The beginning of something.
Doing hard things is good for us. It builds emotional resilience. We learn to trust and depend on ourselves. Our understanding of who we are and what we are capable of expands. Doing hard things builds confidence. It builds us into better versions of ourselves.
So, this week, commit to doing that difficult thing, that thing you have been avoiding, the thing that has you procrastinating and finding every excuse not to face that thing you know you need to do if your life is ever going to change. That thing you know you need to do so your dreams can come true.
How do you get started? Small steps, repeated often, lead to results.
This can work either way.
Bad habits, even small ones, cumulatively will take us a long way in the wrong direction.
Small efforts, repeated often, can also take us towards our goals and dreams.
Every book ever published was written paragraph by paragraph, scene by scene.
Every return to fitness started with a slow and inelegant beginning.
Every thriving garden began by tending the soil, planting the seeds, watering, weeding, showing up each day, long before there was anything to harvest.
Every language was learned word by word, phrase by phrase.
Small steps are usually not impressive. The initial results may seem negligible. But all of these small steps, when taken consistently, eventually amount to something grand.
My Top Tip For The Week Ahead
Your big plans may currently seem impossible. You might be sliding back into apathy or overwhelm.
But maybe you just started in an unrealistic way. Maybe your small steps weren’t small enough. Or maybe you never even broke those bigger objectives down into tiny do-able chunks.
Today, start over.
What matters to you? What do you want to achieve?
Commit to one thing. Break that down into the smallest steps possible and simply begin.
Then keep going. Day after day. Just small steps.
A year from now you’ll be glad you did.
Crystals to support you this week – Carnelian, Hematite, Citrine, Sunstone, Tiger Eye, Smoky Quartz
Doing hard things.
It’s a subject we often talk about in my Inner Circle membership group. In fact, one of our previous book club books, Untamed by Emily Glennon, had this as one of the central themes.
I’ve failed a lot in my lifetime. But I’ve eventually learned from those failures. And I certainly didn’t have everything handed to me on a silver platter. When I was growing up, Mum and Dad expected us to fight our own battles, to figure out our problems, and to do our fair share around the house. When our parents divorced, and home became a single-mum family, I was expected to cook dinner several nights a week, to bring in the clean laundry off the line and do the ironing, to look after my siblings, to make school lunches, do housework on Friday afternoons and weekends, and even to contribute my small wages from part-time jobs to the pot when needed.
That wasn’t always easy, and I didn’t always enjoy it. I was often envious of my friends who were paid pocket money and never expected to do chores, whose parents lavished money and time on them, and where they never went without whatever the latest things were – be that clothes, holidays, toys or anything else that a child or teenager could want, including amazing holidays.
My childhood and early adult life taught me lessons that have helped me manage a lifetime of hard things. I know how to count on myself. I know how to dig deep, to grit my teeth, to keep going. I know how to stay up late or get up early and give something my all. I know if everything went to pieces tomorrow I could get a job doing anything, and gradually pull myself back out of the rubble.
That kind of self-knowledge is priceless.
This week I encourage you to commit to something you know will probably be hard – at least to start with – so that you can move closer to a goal, or closer to a more healthy, happy and aligned version of yourself.
We can do hard things. And sometimes, in the doing of them, we realise that the hardest thing was getting started, and that the thing we avoided wasn’t so hard at all.
I’m sending love and cheering you on, Nicole xx
PS – Here’s Rufous and Harry in the back yard, sharing their delight that a flat ball is still a fun ball!
Glennon Doyle 🤐 xx
Self confidence is something so many struggle with and doing hard stuss seems imposable, as you said we need to take small steps