The 6 Proven Ways to Restart Again after Setbacks
When life gets hard, these daily practices will get you unstuck and back on track.
“Into each life some rain must fall” from The Rainy Day by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
We’ve all been there.
Path #1: We’re cruising along, checking to-do’s off our lists, and slaying each item on the way to completing our goals. You’re on your game. You’ve worked hard. Everything is falling into place. You pause and take stock of how far you’ve come. Since you’re confident and grateful, not cocky and gloating, you restart the next leg of your journey with positive expectations that it will be as effortless as the previous. Nothing can stop you now. You could live forever in this state of flow.
Path #2: Or perhaps you’re on the dreaded flip side of flow, drought. Each step is tough and fraught with distractions and disasters that are none of your makings. You’re doing everything right, so why isn’t anything working?! You made solid plans andhave the appropriate skills and talents to achieve your goals, but you’re persistence and effort have gotten you nowhere. Where did you go wrong? What needs to be fixed? How can you fix this disaster?
When life is good, we expect it to stay good; when it’s bad, we expect it to stay bad.
You are NOT omnipotent.
The first thing you have to do in either path is to accept that you’re not in control of every factor. You may have controlled the factors that were in your power, but many results are subject to unseen things and powers beyond your control.
Life is a classroom.
I believe that we come into this life to learn certain things. We’re not fated or destined to do a particular set of actions like a computer with code. We have been given free will to act of our own accord. Even the life plan that we filed before we arrived here can be dismissed, although not easily. Although we’d like to believe that we didn’t place nasty stuff in our way, most learning experiences are the hard ones.
We are divine and spiritual by nature.
We were built for hard because we are spirits (aka energy) in fragile bodies having a human experience. At any moment, we are out of balance in one of the three areas, our bodies, our minds, and our spirit. It’s a hard balance to keep. In the western way of thinking, many people (including some reading this) don’t believe much in the spiritual side of life. I’m not trying to convince those that want to hang on to their way of thinking to change their minds, but my writing and expertise are to help those trying to grow their spiritual depth and learn to flex their spiritual muscles without throwing away logic.
If you’re ready to move ahead, I have a 6-step action plan to help you get started again.
- Honor your feelings.
Acknowledge your emotional response and why you might be feeling that way. You might be angry, sad, or possibly relieved. Don’t discount whatever feelings come up. You may want to write it down in a journal along with any doubts and fears that sneak in with them. These uncomfortable feelings are important directional clues as you plan to restart.
2. Open to intuition or divine insight.
You should feel a certain calmness as your emotions shift to make way for some insight hiding behind them, like the sun or moon from behind the clouds. If you feel that opening up of a still quiet space, ask yourself, your higher self (the one that came into this life with a list of experiences in mind) and/or your divine team of helpers (God/Goddess/Creator/Love, guardian angels, loved ones on the other side, etc.) what you need to know.
Do you see a sign, hear a phrase, get a knowing, or otherwise feel a shift in direction or your action plan? Make note. That input is tailored advice for you. You’re never alone, even when it feels like it. Your spiritual team has your back. You might not have met them yet, but their corrective “setbacks” may be blessings in disguise.
3. Get Up.
No matter how badly you want to lie in bed, eat and drink your feelings, skip your workout, say no to a fun night with friends, and more, you’re only hurting yourself if you take defeatist nonaction to the extreme. Give yourself a limited time to wallow over your “bad luck.” Then get up and take a step in the right direction.
Inertia is in play so use this simplified version of Newton & Galileo’s First Law of Motion that says, A body at rest tends to stay at rest; a body in motion tends to stay in motion to help your mindset. The longer you stay stopped, the longer you stay stuck because the force needed to break the inertia becomes greater without movement.
4. Get Dressed
Many people have lived in sweats and no makeup throughout the pandemic. That’s all well and good. You do you. I can’t blame you if you had to wear heels or suits at the office. You deserve to be comfortable while you work from home and tend the dogs, cats, kids, etc.
I, however, did the opposite. I dressed up. Let me share why I felt it was such an important step for me to take action when I least felt like it. In mid-April of 2020, I was pursuing a new career when I had a major health setback. Surgical repairs finished coming undone with one set of reattached muscles from my rare, “morbid surgery” (a medical term) to remove a broken tumor and the pieces two years earlier. Unfortunately, even the surgeon dismissed my concerns. It took me nine months and many doctors to find the most awesome, shoulder surgeon and get the correct diagnosis and the surgical repairs I needed. However, that was only the beginning of my recovery. I was facing another year to get as close to “normal” as I could.
To put myself in a better state of mind, I needed to separate this new, healthier self from the severely injured one that I was before surgery. I’m not going to lie. It was hard. I just couldn’t see past the literal scars and restrictions to a healthier me. So I came up with this list.
See, I’m a visual person, and clairvoyant. I depend on seeing to shore up my knowing. I needed to see me getting better. So I got up, bathed, got dressed, and put on makeup every day that I could. Even when I was strapped to an ice cooling machine24/7 those first few weeks and slept most of the day, I got up when I could. I needed to see myself in action and doing “normal” things so that my mind would believe that I would heal completely.
5. Show Up
Dressing for the part was only part of the solution. I needed to act as I wanted to be, within my restrictions, restrictions so severe that it was too easy to believe that I might not get beyond them. Before surgery, I had spent 6 months on muscle relaxers, unable to drive. Afterward, I spent 3 months in a sling and unable to lift anything over 12 oz. That’s a long time to believe that things could change for the better.
So I showed up and went back to work, sort of. Even though I couldn’t carry a laptop, take notes with my dominant hand, or drive, I took my continuing education courses online. Thank you, pandemic changes and my family for hauling my laptop everywhere!
I felt like my old self even when I couldn’t move much more than before. Only then did I see myself as the multitalented professional I was. I took my continuing educational requirements and more to keep my real estate broker license current. I started giving life-changing, clairvoyant medium readings again. I listened and encouraged as the supportive and loving wife, mom, and daughter I was. I read books on writing and publishing as I returned to my roots as a writer. I was determined to be all those things, even when I was injured and even if I didn’t fully recover. No one was forcing me. I showed up for myself.
6. Never Give Up
Why would I force myself to show up? I’d certainly earned the right to do nothing.
I needed it to give foundations to my beliefs. See, this wasn’t my first Lifetime Movie moment. My life was filled with them. As one of my best friends says, “You’ve got such a dramatic life for such an undramatic person.” I have all kinds of reasons over the years to have given up on my dreams. But I’m not done. I reassessed, pivoted, and pushed on.
I’m sure many of you do the same, too. You have something in you that keeps you going, against all odds. Please cling to that in the midst of the storms.
Let your friends call you stubborn. I prefer “resilient.” No matter what life throws at us, we can get back up. Just use these six steps to reorient yourself and pursue those things that make life worth living.
PS I’d love to hear your experience with these steps in the comments.