YOU ARE YOUR OWN D.O.T. GETTING RID OF YOUR STOPS SIGNS AND GETTING STARTED AGAIN.

YOU ARE YOUR OWN D.O.T.

GETTING RID OF YOUR STOPS SIGNS AND GETTING STARTED AGAIN.

Over the years at IHC, we have worked with many clients or heard from many clients, and personally, we’ve experienced in our own lives as well. The concept of or part of us that Stops. Stops doing things as we get older or maybe it was never allowed to start.  We stop when we hit “road stops signs” that stop us in our tract, usually at those crossroads as we go down the path of our life.  If we turn around, we’ll start to see all those times we’ve stopped. The times we haven’t taken the leap.  The times we stopped being part of community.  The times we stopped being part of a business or a career or a profession or a friendship.  Maybe you stopped going out with friends?  Maybe you stopped fulfilling your passion.  Maybe you stopped swimming or painting?   Something you used to love to do?

We’ve find as we get older, we create more stops in our roads than we do starts. This can lead us down a path of what we might think would be of least resistance.  The problem is that when we get to the end of the road, we don’t have much left because we put up all the stop signs along the way.  What we see here at IHC a lot is that the more stops (or more ‘NO’s) people have put up in their life, the more they’ve lose their passion, their integrity, their congruency, their authenticity with themselves & subsequently, the more they move into something less healthy.  Whether that something was an addiction to alcohol, drugs or food.  Food is an easy addiction; not easy to conquer and not easy to have, but easy because it flies under the radar.  Easy because it’s just about a stocked pantry or a couple fast food runs that nobody knows about or notices.  It’s easy because it doesn’t ruin your life on the outside.  But it destroys our integrity and self-esteem and most importantly our self-trust!  When we don’t have a self-trust for ourselves, we put up a huge stop sign.  When we don’t feel like we can do it on our own without something, food, alcohol, drugs, we slip. Or when we don’t feel the inner strength that we know we had inside of us or we don’t recognize it & we fall by the wayside.  We slip or fall into some facet of an addictive pattern.  When we put up those top signs in our lives, we definitely have to put a start sign somewhere and that somewhere can move into food or other addictions.

How many stop signs have you put up in your life?  What have you stopped doing that you used to love?  When Dr. Sandra was young, she used to love to swim!  She was on swim team for years through high school. She could swim like a fish.  Not me, my passion was drawing, sketching, and creating from clay. For different reasons along our paths, we stopped things like this & replaced them with other comforts. like food or alcohol.  But we’ve turned and recognized how many stopped signs we had put up in the crossroads of our lives. Most times we didn’t even recognize we were doing it.  We just thought we might be putting it on the shelf for a little while.  “We’ll start again someday”, right?  But as the old saying goes, “Someday if not a day of the week”. As you get older you recognize that those some days don’t come that easy. And unless we turn around and intentionally look at those top signs and start to pull them up or kick them down, we’ll keep them.  In fact we’ll put up more.  Because putting up those stop signs and telling ourselves that we can’t or we shouldn’t or we wouldn’t, that becomes a pattern, or a habit.  Each time we do it, it lowers our bar; it lowers our strength; it lowers our resilience and most importantly it lowers our trust in ourselves.  When you recognize those stop signs take a look at why you put them there.  If you don’t need them there anymore, kick them down.

Move into Start.  What have you forgotten about yourself?  What did you love?  What made you feel alive?  What made you feel strong and centered and proud? You can get that back again.  You don’t have to stay here. Unlike life, our inner Stop & Start signs do not have to be monitored by the Department of Transportation.  We are our own D.O.T. and in that we can absolutely bulldoze the stop signs found.  You can start at any age.  You can start a friendship.  You can start a community.  You can start speaking.  You can start a new career. You can become an artist.  You can start swimming.  You can start anything you want but you won’t know where to begin if you don’t turn around and take a look at your highway of life & figure out your Stop Signs.  Where they were and what do you want to do with them now.  Don’t keep those up you don’t need to.  We think, in the moment, they are keeping us safe.  We figure, in the moment, we’re making time for other things.  No more time comes; in fact, time gets shorter and more precious as we age.  Look back at the highway of your life look at those stop signs and kick down the ones you want to go away and put up those start signs.  Put up the signs you know will lead you back home to yourself.  the journey back home is amazing. you’ve just got to start!