274: Holly Worton ~ Getting Back on Track

Today’s Guest

Table of Contents

I’m back again, with another solo episode! Today, I’m talking about getting back on track. I really struggled to come up with a topic for this week’s episode, but when I pulled an oracle card, it all became clear. In this episode, I tell my own story of getting off track, and how I got on track. I help you to understand whether you’re on track or off track, and how to get realigned. You’ll also hear why it’s all good, because even if you’re off track, you’re not really off track!

Listen To This Episode

What You’ll Learn

How to evaluate whether you’re aligned with your current lifestyle
How to get clear on how and why you got off track
How to get back on track

Things I Discussed

7 Ways To Use Oracle Cards In Your Business, by Joanna Hennon

Connect With Holly

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Transcript

The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).

Holly: Hello and welcome to the Into the Woods podcast, episode 274. This is your host Holly Worton and I am back with another solo episode. Today, I am going to talk about getting back on track; but, before I do that, I wanted to address the title of this podcast has recently changed, as of this episode. As you may know from stuff that I posted online and stuff that I mentioned last week, in the podcast things are changing; my focus is no longer on business mindset I am absolutely sure that I am going to be talking about mindset in some aspect or another, because that’s kind of one of my special interests and my favourite things in the world, but this is no longer going to be a business-focussed podcast.

What am I going to be talking about?

Well, you might have heard that in the new intro for this podcast episode but if you weren’t paying attention, I am pretty much going to be talking about deepening your connection with yourself; taking inspired action; really trusting yourself and your intuition. Mindset, of course, and I don’t know what else, because like I said, things are in transition, I don’t know where this is going to be going, except for the fact that I am going to be focussing on my writing from now on. So, that is the intro.

New Patrons

I also wanted to give a massive thank you to new patrons: Alice, Claire, Elizabeth, I can’t remember whether or not I thanked Felicity, so I am thanking you now. Gillian, Joanna, Luisa, thank you so much for joining me in in Patreon. I really, really, really, am grateful for your support and thank you so much. I also decided to thank just first-name people, I am not sure whether that’s appropriate or whether you would have preferred me to thank you first and last name? But then I started thinking: do people really want their first and last name to be out there? So, I am going with first name. If you would have preferred first and last name – let me know and I will change that in the future. So again, thank you.

And I would also love for you to join me on Patreon if you haven’t yet.

If you head to http://Patreon.com/HollyWorton you can join me there. Membership starts at just $1 a month and you will get exclusive access to content that I don’t share anywhere else, including a monthly Q and A, and done-for-you energy work, heart-centred energy work and PSYCH-K® depending on what tier you join at, so I would love to see you there.

So, getting back on track, what are we going to talk about today? I was really at a point when I sat down to do this episode, after I just re-branded the Podcast, where I didn’t know what to talk about… You know, this is a big change, I am going through change, and I didn’t know what to do. So, I did what I have learned from my friend Joanna Hennon, whom you know from this podcast, and that was I drew an oracle card. So I used the Druid plant oracle which is one of my absolute favourite decks, I love the content of the deck and I love the artwork of the deck. So, I drew a card, and the question I asked was: what should I talk about in today’s podcast episode? And what I got was the card for yarrow. So I am going to read to you the meaning for yarrow:

“One name for yarrow is seven years love, since it was believed that a charm made with yarrow could keep couples loving and faithful for seven years. What happened after that we do not know but yarrow’s association with fidelity may provide a clue as to what this card means to you. Faithfulness to a partner, or to certain values, or shared ideas, forms the basis of trust and sometimes we can take this for granted, without fully examining it. A review every seven years is a wise idea, for business partners as well as lovers. Values, goals and boundaries can be assessed and re-contracted with the potential for a renewed sense of purpose and commitment.”

It goes on, but I think that this first paragraph was the bit that really struck home for me and it kind of tied into some of the things that I was thinking about talking about today anyway.

So, a seven-years review is always a good idea, and I was thinking about seven years after I read that, and I thought: where was I seven years ago? So seven years ago was 2011, that was the year that I trained as a coach, I trained as an NLP practitioner, was starting up my life-coaching business, and wow things have changed so much since then, there have been so many iterations of my business since then. But that was when I got into the coaching world and started focussing on getting one-to-one clients. And that has been my focus ever since. Now, as I said, my business has changed over the years, it has kind of gone up and down, it has been refining itself little-by-little-by-little and while I have loved the one-to-one client work, I think a part of me always knew that my goal was not to fill up my calendar with one-to-one clients, but I just was not seeing what I wanted to do instead.

Now, I will be continuing to offer one-to-one client sessions from time-to-time. Mostly to people in my Patreon group and also on my email list which I will pick up, at some point; but I have removed them from my website, because I am looking to work with select people who are part of my community, who know how I work and that’s it. I am not looking as I said to fill up my calendar with any old one-to-one clients because my focus is going to be on my writing and helping people through my books and really getting into my writing. And, I was thinking about this and realising, there have been so many signs throughout my life, that I always wanted to be a writer and that was my path for me; and, somehow, I forgot this, and I got off track and I am only now just getting back on track. So, this episode, I am going to be telling you my story because I find it that people find it really useful when I tell my stories like this, whether it is in my email list, or in the podcast, because this stuff resonates for you. So this is not going to just be about me, I am going to talk about how you can evaluate if you have gotten off track in life, how to get back on track, and finally why everything you do in your life is all good and appropriate, even if you feel if you are off track because there really never is any off-track, even though I am going to be using that term a lot in this episode.

Signs that I wanted to be a writer

So, signs that I always wanted to be a writer, so I hope it triggers in you times that you have had throughout your life, of stuff that is maybe part of your life purpose, if you believe in that, or signs of what you are here to be doing. So, I learned how to read from a very young age, and I loved reading, I always loved reading. I devoured books, I was one of those kids that was happiest when I had my head in a book. And when I was about seven years old that was when I wrote my first book, I actually wrote a series of books about this dog and this horse that went off and had adventures together. And, from there, when I was a little bit older, maybe nineish, maybe ten, I started writing plays and I would act them out on Sunday afternoons before dinner, because my Grandmother used to come over for dinner on Sundays, and I would act out these plays, with my stuffed animals, and my horses and toys that I had. And I would listen to the radio and I would record on a cassette tape the soundtrack for the play, based on themes that were happening in the play and I would play this soundtrack as I was acting out the play with my toys. So, that was a bit more elaborate than just writing a book, but it involved writing.

And then, when I was in High School, my friend Lauren and I co-wrote this book that sadly we never finished. It was so much fun, and I so wish I still had this, but I think that it got lost in one of my multiple moves and I am really sad about that. So, we were co-writing this book in this spiral notebook, where one person would write a few pages and then we would pass it to the next person and the next person would just pick up the story and write. And, it was so much fun, we just went back and forth and back and forth with this, not really having a plan, not really knowing where the story was going, but it was fantastic. I really, really, enjoyed it.

Then that was that, I graduated from High School, went to university, started out majoring in ornamental horticulture, which is really fascinating considering how important nature is to me and how I am also getting back on track with the nature, because, I changed my major from ornamental horticulture to English, because I liked to read, and I thought I wanted to be a teacher. Got my degree, went to grad school, getting my degree in Spanish – although I didn’t actually get my degree {laughing} because I quit to start my first business – but the degree I was supposed to get, which I quit shortly before receiving it, with a focus on contemporary Spanish and American literature. So, went from the plant track to the literature track, but still kind of in-track with the writing thing. But I didn’t write creatively at all during this period of my life, in fact, as an English major I was required to take a creative writing class for my degree. And I waited until my very last quarter of university to take it and you could choose between poetry, a short story or a novel or play-writing, there were three options. And, I did a short story and hated it because I didn’t think my writing was good enough and I really, really, struggled with it and at the end of the class I had to read my story out loud and I cringed the whole way through it and it was like torture.

And then, as I said, I quit my grad school studies to start my first business. And, from there, I just completely forgot about writing. And I didn’t start writing again until 2006 when I started blogging for the first time, and I started blogging because I had friends from all over the world because I had moved around quite a bit at that point, and I noticed that whenever I wrote emails to them I would just kind of copy and paste the same kind of chunk of: this is what’s going on in my life and personalise it for each person and then I realised that a blog would be the best way to do that. Instead of having this chunk of information that I would just share with a bunch of people one-by-one emails, I would put it on my blog and send a link to the blog.

From there it evolved into a food blog and then I quit that blog when I started the coaching training and I started blogging more about personal development. I have recently started thinking about importing my old personal blog and food blog posts to my current website because I really value when other people have completely widely unrelated things on either their blog or their podcast and you can see how they have changed and evolved over the years. So, I am thinking about doing that, not convinced but might move that way in the future. Just so you can get an idea of how things have evolved over the ideas and because I often consult some of my own old recipes and it would be nice just to have on my blog post in one place.

So, 2006, started blogging, really liked it, I really, really, enjoyed it and I got into the world of blogging and I started meeting other bloggers online and getting to know people and I really, really, enjoyed it but somehow didn’t think that anything could come of it. And I still had in my mind that I wanted to be self-employed, at this point in my life, 2006 I was still in my first business, it wasn’t until 2009 that I quit my first business. So, at that point, that was when I really, really, got into blogging. So, I had taken my sabbatical in 2009/2010 and knew that I wanted to start a business because I didn’t really think I could do anything else. I was blogging a lot but didn’t see that that could turn into a career type thing. Then eventually I moved to the UK at the end of 2010, started training as a coach and thought that was going to be my business. And as you may have heard through other blog posts, or videos, or podcast episodes, my business as a coach has gone through many, many, many, iterations. It has gone through so many changes.

So, that’s kind of my path, and I forgot that I enjoyed writing and I forgot that I could be a writer for so many years and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that I often had mindset stuff. I had so many problems with self-esteem, low-self-confidence, not trusting myself, not trusting my intuition, and just generally believing that I wasn’t good enough. I think I just thought that my writing wasn’t good enough, my books weren’t good enough. I would read really well-written pieces of literature, or books, or even articles in magazines or online and just think: I am just not that kind of fancy, crafty, kind of writer and I am clearly not good enough and it never occurred to me that I could just write how I write with my voice and that was good enough. And, I wrote my first books in 2016, released my Business Beliefs book, my Business Blocks, Business Visibility, Business Intuition between 2016, and now; and also released my four walking books: so the book on the South Downs Wey, the book on the Ridgway, the Downs Link, the Wey South Path, and still didn’t really feel like a writer. I guess because I wasn’t doing it full-time, I don’t know. I still have some feelings about how my books aren’t good enough, which I think is why I was so tempted to release a second edition of my Business Beliefs book, because I knew it could be better, I knew that I could make it better, and I knew how I could make it better. And there is a part of me that still wants to release second editions of all my books, because they are not good enough and they could be better. However, I get emails all the time from people saying how helpful my books are, so clearly this not good enough thing is a mindset issue that while I have worked on it, a lot, there is still more work to be done.

And, I know I talk a lot about the spiral staircase of mindset work, where you are walking up the spiral staircase, you are taking one step with your mindset work, one step with your practical action work; and, you keep going up to different levels but as you are going around sometimes you see different aspects of stuff that you already worked on, and you think is done. But, as we grow, we go up to these new levels and oftentimes the same kinds of themes, come back to kind of hit us and make us realise that we have hit a new ceiling in that area. And, I think ‘not good enough’ is possibly always going to be a theme for me, that might be a limiting belief, but it has definitely been a theme that I have revisited over and over and over again in my mindset work.

So, how did I forget that I wanted to be a writer, or that I was good at writing, or I could write? Mindset, limiting beliefs, fears, blocks, all that crap. So, how did I get back on track? And the answer to that is the same, it is doing the mindset work. It is clearing the fears, clearing the blocks, clearing the limiting beliefs with myself and having sessions with other practitioners. I do tons of work and I have been putting together a blog post on my top ten favourite people that I work with to get the help, because I find it really, really useful to work with other people, in addition to working with myself. So, really, really, really, it has been about doing the mindset work. Clearing away that crap that made me think that I wasn’t a writer, that I wasn’t good enough as a writer, that my books weren’t good enough, that my style wasn’t good enough, clearing away that stuff is what got me back to where I am now. And now I really feel like I am back on track. I have decided to make my writing a focus, to make my writing a priority and I am focussing on that.

So, I have made my books more kind of a centre piece on my website, I have removed the one-to-one work, and I am spending more time writing; and one of the ways that I have done that is, you may know that I do Workcation weekends every month and part of that involves getting away from my normal workspace to work specifically on my writing, specifically on a project, a book, or something else in a different space. And what I have been doing is going to a hotel and booking a hotel for a night, or sometimes two, and just working on my project for that period of time. But my husband and I recently rented a flat to use as a separate work space, to kind of do work retreats. And that’s where I am going to be doing my Workcations from now on. So, we just got the flat last Tuesday, I just used it for the first time yesterday, and it is amazing! I got so much work done yesterday, I wrote, I don’t remember six thousand and something I think it was six thousand, four hundred words. And part of that was including and editing the transcripts from my trees that I recorded for this book, but also it was just writing introductions to each chapter.

So, I got so much done and I felt like I was on fire, I felt like I was absolutely back on track. And I am sharing this with you because I think a lot of people often feel like they are off track. And that just feels crappy, it feels like you are not doing what you are supposed to be doing, but maybe you don’t know what you are supposed to be doing, or what you want to do and that can be really confusing, that can be really…just unsettling!

How you can get on track

So, let’s talk about you.

How are you feeling about your life, your business, the stuff that you are doing? Do you feel like you on-track or do you feel like you are off-track? What’s the first thing that pops into your head when I ask that question?

So, if you feel like you are off-track, or you have been getting off-track, or things just don’t feel right, let’s talk about how to evaluate if you are off-track. So, go back in your life, and tell your story, whether you just kind of run through it in your head, or you write about it in your journal, or you tell it to a friend, or a partner. Tell your story. Go back and think about the stuff that you loved doing when you were a kid. And I know people say that all the time and I have done that exercise, but it just wasn’t obvious for me. So do it, do it, even if you think you have done it before and just pay attention to the stuff. I never really focussed on how important my writing was and how important my books were because I just thought it was some weird thing that I did as an only child who didn’t have many kids in the neighbourhood to play with, so I spent a lot of time alone, so I wrote some books.

But I loved writing the books, it was fun, it was creative, I really enjoyed it. I loved doing the plays for my family, with my weird cassette tape soundtrack recorder from the radio. So, go back to your childhood, to when you were a teenager, but especially look at the stuff from your childhood, before all the mindcrap kind of settled in and made you think that you weren’t good enough to do the stuff that you loved doing. And look at the stuff that maybe you think isn’t do-able as a career or a business, look at the stuff that you love doing. I mean another thing that I loved doing as a kid was spending time outdoors, we had a really big garden in the back, we had a big garden in the front, there was this one tree that I always used to climb, and I used to spend so much time in that tree just playing by myself. And in the backyard as well, I was always outdoor, and surprise, surprise, that’s a really big and important part of my life now.

So, think about all that stuff, both practical stuff, fun stuff, especially the fun stuff. What did you enjoy? I loved reading, I loved writing, I loved hanging out in that tree. So, what did you enjoy as a kid, what was fun, what brought you joy? What could you do endlessly for hours on end and lose track of time? What have you loved and what have you loved doing at different points in your life as a teenager, as an adult, now? Make a list of all the stuff that you really enjoy doing. And think about how you could do more of that and again this isn’t necessarily about changing your business, or changing your career, it could be. But it could be just about getting back on track with doing the things that you love doing.

Now, Joanna Hennon and I did an episode, a couple of weeks back, about fun for the sake of fun, if you haven’t listened to that episode it is really relevant to this so go back and listen to it. And think about how you can bring more fun into your life by doing the stuff that you enjoy. And fun doesn’t need to be playing a game, it could be taking a bath, or reading a book, or writing in your journal or whatever it is that you enjoy that feels deeply nourishing. And do more of that stuff and see how your life changes by doing more of the things that you love. And, whenever I say this stuff, I am aware that I have more spare time than the average person because I don’t have kids, so my cats don’t take up a lot of my time, they just need food and water and some love, so I have loads of free time compare to people that have a family and kids. But, even if you do have a family and kids, take five minutes, fifteen minutes, ten minutes…find some small chunk of time every single day, where you can do one thing that you really love. Maybe you write a gratitude list, five minutes, you write down all the stuff that you are grateful for… I don’t know, something. At least five minutes of something that makes you feel good. And I brought up the gratitude list because whenever I am feeling down, whenever I am feeling stressed, that is something that really picks me up very quickly and easily and I find it really, really, good for turning around a bad day and helping me to get back on track with my mood, or with my kind of energy levels.

So, I highly recommend that you do whatever you can, again, even if it is five minutes. No excuses you can add five minutes to your day where you do something for yourself, absolutely. Maybe it is a cup of tea alone with a book for five minutes. Maybe you just give yourself until you drink the cup of tea and then you put the book away, or you listen to some music, or whatever. Do something for yourself and really, really, enjoy it guilt free because this is something that I have also struggled with which is feeling guilty about stuff, so I make sure that I have time for my walks, for my Workcations, for my writing, but sometimes I feel guilty about that and that’s really shitty, it does not serve me to give myself permission to do the things that I want to do and also feel guilty about it and this is something that I have been working on with my mindset work and I know that it is something that needs a little more work. I feel guilty about doing this stuff, so at least I have gotten to the point where I do it and the next step for me is releasing the guilt around it. So, if you can, try to do this good stuff that makes you feel good without guilt, that is a journey, it maybe something you struggle with, it may not be, but if it is, all I can say is do the work on it.

So the last thing that I wanted to talk about today is everything that I have done in my life has led me to the point where I am today.

My first business which was incredibly stressful but very, I mean I learned so much there, it was very life-changing. All the iterations of my business since then. I feel like I got off-track because I got off-track with the writing, or I wasn’t writing the books or the things that I wanted to write. But all that stuff I learned from it, I have grown so much, it is all good, it is all safe and appropriate, it is all part of the journey. So, even though I feel like I got off-track I was just meandering, the track is not always a straight path, sometimes it curves, sometimes you take a wrong turn, get lost, come back. And it really wasn’t a wrong turn because maybe you saw something or learned something or grew in some way. So, everything that you do and everything that you have done in your life, value that, value it, because it is part of your journey and it is part of who you are, and it is part of what makes you who you are today. So although this episode is about getting back on track really there is no such thing as off-track, it is all good. I hope this has inspired you to get back on track with the things that you want to do and the things that are really nourishing to you and the things that bring you joy in life.

That is all for today, thank you so much for joining me. I would love for you to drop me a line and let me know what you thought of this week’s episode. Let me know what you think of the new title for the podcast! You can email me at [email protected] or find me online and get in touch. I would also love for you to join me on Patreon, if you head over to https://www.hollyworton.com/patreon you can join me there. Membership starts at just one dollar a month and you will get exclusive access to stuff I am not sharing anywhere else.

Finally, thank you so much for listening, of you enjoyed this episode please subscribe and tune in next week. Remember to visit: https://www.hollyworton.com/274 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you, thank you, thank you for listening, I love having you along on the journey with me.