160 Your Rules May Not Be Mine!

Hey, this is Anne with your Coaching on the Go. 

Where do your rules come from? 

So when you’re a little girl or a little boy, you are just getting some instruction from the world around you, your parents, people who care for you. 

Some of these rules came from somebody else’s stories. 

So when I was little, I had different people in my family who had gone through different things, who shared their stories. 

And I share my stories with you constantly in service so that something that I have experienced passively could shift you. 

When people tell their stories, sometimes we will have a historical story that’s a cultural story. 

You could have a family story that’s been repeating for generations. 

You could have a story of your parent where they lost their job or they had a struggle and they share something with you that they really want you to understand so you don’t go through their pain, the pain they experienced, but it might not be for you. 

And all these stories are told by loved ones in a loving way. 

But no one is living anybody else’s life. 

When I was little, when I was five, my father fell from the top of the house, landed on some electrical wires that were supposed to be coated with a protective coating.

Instead, he was being electrocuted. 

He shook himself off of those wires, landing on planter boxes, breaking most of his ribs, breaking his back, breaking his wrist and falling and hitting his head really hard. 

And my mom, at that time, there were seven children and the youngest was one year old.

I was just five and a six and a seven-year-old, and then the oldest sibling was 13 years old. 

My mom never went to college, but she was super smart. 

She was faced for many months with the possibility that she would be a widow, and so she instilled in us taking care of ourselves, being able to take care of ourselves, no matter what happens in our life, and not being able to rely on anybody.

And there’s some great things about that lesson. 

And there are also some things where you could not bond completely with your partner or you could, you know, there’s some paradigms that could be in there that could be. 

Well, what I’m trying to say is every story can have a positive spin and it can also be taken to an extreme where you don’t allow the openness or the flexibility to be adaptable.

I see that each of my sisters and I, from that story, are very – how should I say it? – we’re very much making sure that we’re in control of our world. 

It’s taken me training to open parts of my female, parts of my naturally female being back open to receive the support of a male.

Because inside of me, the lesson that I got was that you don’t count on anybody. 

And it hasn’t supported me in some of my relationships until I shifted it, because I would be actually working against my partner at times and not thinking that he would be available, so I’d have to do it myself. 

So anyway, today’s coaching is around cultural, familial stories that you’ve picked up along the way where somebody has wanted to support you in learning something that maybe was just theirs to learn or any story given to you in any way.

It’s just another story. 

Even history is a story written by somebody from their own perspective. 

All of our stories are just stories. 

So which stories suit you to carry forward? 

Which stories do not? 

Which stories are okay to be in the past? 

Which stories have the essence of what you want in your life? 

And here’s another monkey wrench to throw in or possibility to throw in. 

As you change, shouldn’t your rules change as your life starts to expand? 

Why would the rules that supported you as a child be the same rules that are supporting you as an adult, with all of your new understandings and your new abilities? 

So I want to say that the lesson I’m wanting to support you in learning here is that rules can be changed.

Rules can be looked at. 

They can be audited. 

They can be updated like a mission statement for a company. 

The mission, the overarching mission may stay the same, or it may change. 

The essence of your purpose may stay the same over a lifetime, but how it looks and how you navigate through it may change, and your rules get to change to accommodate your own growth and the direction that you wish to go in. 

So today, I want you to look into the stories or the structures that set up some of these big, long-standing rules that you might be having a hard time letting yourself be flexible with. 

Have a beautiful day.