The Change Journey: A self-awareness guide for women who are thinking "how on earth did I end up here?"

By Nikki Lane

Learn how to live a life you love via the power of self-awareness.

In today's society, we are all striving to be the best we can be... in our careers and at home. We have families to care for, friends to keep up with, jobs to hold down and kids to raise. We are working harder than ever before and the only break we

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Heart Of
• Release date: Dec 14, 2020
• ISBN: 9780645009613

Nikki Lane

Nikki Lane is a self-awareness advocate, Infinite Possibilities trainer, Energy Healer and a qualified Florist certified in Flower Therapy. She is passionate about bringing self-awareness to people so they can choose to live the life of their dreams.

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© 2020 by Nikki Lane

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Neither the author nor the publisher assumes any responsibility or liability whatsoever on behalf of the consumer or reader of this material. Any perceived slight of any individual or organisation is purely unintentional. Every effort has been made to acknowledge the copyright holders for reproduction of material contained in this book.

The resources in this book are provided for informational purposes only and should not be used to replace the specialised training and professional judgment of a health care or mental health care professional.

Neither the author nor the publisher can be held responsible for the use of the information provided within this book. Please always consult a trained professional before making any decision regarding treatment of yourself or others.

First published by The Heart Of in 2020

All enquiries should be made to the author

www.thechangejourney.com.au

ISBN: 978-0-6450096-0-6

ISBN: 978-0-6450096-1-3 (e-book)

Character images were created for this book by Nicole Kankaanpaa,

www.facebook.com/simplenicdesign

Flower images were created for this book, by Katie Ashton,

www.katielauraashton.com

Editor: Margaret A. Harrell, margaretharrell.com

To Scott Lane

for teaching me ‘it’s all about the journey’

To Thomas and Simon

for giving me the privilege of being your mum

To all three of you

for supporting my Change Journey every step of the way

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

My Change Journey

The Change Journey Principles

Stage One: Self-Discovery

Stage Two: Self-Confidence

Stage Three: Self-Belief

Stage Four: Self-Love

Stage Five: Self-Acceptance

Interval—Understanding Change

Stage Six: Self-Respect

Stage Seven: Self-Improvement

Stage Eight: Self-Expansion

Stage Nine: Self-Worth

Stage Ten: Self-Care

Putting It into Practice

Appendix

Getting Help

About the Author

PREFACE

Hi . . . How are you?

Fine, good, thanks and you?

Yes, all good here too.

Sound familiar?

But are we really fine or good? We say those responses because they’re expected of us. Because the person asking doesn’t really want to hear that we’re stressed, busy, worried about paying our bills or didn’t get enough sleep last night.

So, I’d like to ask you in all honesty and sincerity . . . how are YOU?

Take a moment to candidly answer that question for yourself.

Fifteen years ago, I did the same thing. I paused. I took a good hard look at my life and asked:

How am I?

Am I good?

Am I fine?

Is this the life I dreamt of?

Am I surrounding myself with people who are good for me?

Am I enjoying myself?

And the biggest question of all . . . Am I happy?

The answer was no.

In fact, when I realised the answer was no, I looked at my life as a whole and thought to myself, ‘How on earth did I end up here?’

On the surface my life looked great; I had two amazing boys, a husband, a great house, and a part-time job. Yet when I realised, I wasn’t happy, I decided that wasn’t good enough for me and I set off on my own personal Change Journey. One with many highs and lows but definitely no regrets. My Change Journey has allowed me to find self-awareness and joy, and what I love most, is it is a journey that continues to evolve with me.

In today’s world, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people are unhappy more than they are happy. When I go out walking and pass people on the footpath, I hear snippets of their conversations: ‘I am so stressed about . . . ‘; ‘it was horrible’; or ‘I can’t believe she said that’. Rarely do I hear someone saying, ‘I had the best time’ or ‘I was so grateful for . . .’

In our society, where time is money, we are striving to be the best in our career and the best at home. At every turn we are subject to high-drama news stories telling us how bad society is and advertisements telling us how crappy our lives are unless we buy their products. We are switched on 24/7 via technology, so we find it increasingly hard to relax and have downtime. We have credit card debt, high mortgages, bills to pay and mouths to feed.

We have families to care for, friends to keep up with and jobs to hold down. We are working harder, putting in longer hours than ever before, and still never seem to have enough money. If we are parents, we have after school activities to juggle, weekend sports, doctors, dentists, school supplies and birthday parties.

The only break we seem to get is when we sleep, and most of us aren’t even doing that well.

At the same time, we are comparing ourselves and our lives to others: Am I good enough, pretty enough, smart enough, fast enough, earning enough or fit enough? The list is endless. We feel like everyone else in the world has it all together, so we suffer in silence. Does that sound familiar?

As we become more consumed by this daily grind, we are dampening and hiding our true feelings and our true character. We live our lives reacting to external factors and demands that are placed before us. And then one day we wake up and realise that somewhere along the way we lost our joy; the life we are living doesn’t makes us happy.

Yet, here’s the thing . . . it doesn’t have to be this way.

You don’t have to say to yourself, ‘This is okay’; ‘This is my lot in life’; ‘This is all there is’. None of these are true. We deserve to feel joy in our lives—each and every one of us deserves happiness. We all deserve to be living a life that we love. YOU deserve to be living a life you love. YOU deserve to be happy.

And it is as simple as learning the art of self-awareness.

Now, you may be hoping this book has a secret recipe or magic potion that will help you change your life instantly, unfortunately, it isn’t as easy as that. Everyone will be on their own personal Change Journey, with different goals, starting from different stages of life, so there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution . . . apart from self-awareness.

Because when you have self-awareness you have a choice. You can decide who you want to be in this world, how you feel, how you think, who you spend time with, what you want to do, what you like, what you don’t like . . . everything really.

Most importantly, self-awareness is about knowing the one thing in life you have control over: your perception of your world, which helps you control how you respond to the stuff you can’t control. It allows you to better choose your mindset and turn it into something positive, despite whatever external factors are occurring. It gives you the opportunity to grow and become who you really are and who you really want to be.

Yet, you can’t undertake any kind of change unless you’re aware of where you currently are; how you are currently thinking, feeling and behaving. The problem is that we take for granted the way we’re currently thinking, feeling and behaving: it’s second nature to us, we do it automatically, we don’t think about it and definitely don’t analyse whether it is how we want to be.

Let me share with you an example of what I am talking about.

I have been an asthmatic all my life, and I had never been able to breathe through my nose. I did what the experts call ‘mouth breathing’. At night my throat would get dry, so I always went to bed with a glass of water, which I would sip during the night. I never gave a second thought to living this way. It was just how I was, until someone brought my awareness to it.

It was my sister-in-law, who had taken her son to see an allergy specialist and learned how bad it was to be a mouth breather and how it wasn’t a normal way to live. When she told me this information, I immediately took myself off to this specialist and underwent some therapy to clear my nose.

I’ll never forget the moment I walked out of his office and felt air rushing into my nose. I closed my mouth and tried to breathe. It was like a miracle. I couldn’t believe this was how people had been breathing their whole lives and I had missed out on the experience until then.

A perfect example of a Change Journey. I was living with a lack of awareness about my breathing until I was made aware of it. Once I had that awareness, I was able to move forward and work towards a solution of change.

Never underestimate the power of self-awareness.

Though no one can go back and make a

brand-new start, anyone can start from

now and make a brand-new ending.

CARL BARD

That is what this book is going to provide you. A chance to discover who you are, what you want, how you feel, how you behave and how you live your life. A chance to discover your thought patterns and your reactions to life’s moments. Then you’ll discover the areas of your life that are no longer serving you and you can decide when, how and if you are going to change them.

This awareness will give you more options, a chance to have a voice, to choose who you want to be, no matter where you’ve come from. Best of all, these personal choices will come from within, and your life will get easier because you will learn what brings you joy and start making decisions as such.

There’s no right or wrong. There’s no bad or good. This is your journey—especially for you—and everyone’s journey will be different.

My Change Journey led me to leave my marriage. That doesn’t mean that you must make big life changes like that. In fact, I would openly discourage you from making any life decisions without seeking professional advice. My ex-husband and I had months of marriage counselling before I decided to leave.

The beauty of a book (rather than a

program) is that it allows you to change

in private.

ANGELA RASPASS

Remember, change takes time. After fifteen years, I’m still learning. It took me six years of feeling uncomfortable and overweight before I was ready to even look at self-care. So there is definitely no judgment on the time frame you give yourself. You’ll do it when it’s right for you.

That’s the beauty of this book—you can keep it and refer to it as much or as little as you like. Maybe you do one area a month. Maybe it’s one area a year. Maybe it’s one every five years. Whatever pace of change is right for you is the pace of change that you should undertake.

Each stage of The Change Journey is going to introduce you to tools and techniques that you can use to bring more joy into your world. The key thing to remember is, this is your life, you get to choose how you feel about it. You get to choose if you want to move through the rest of your life feeling terrible or great.

Nobody else knows your reason for

being. You do. Your bliss guides you

to it. When you follow your path to joy,

your conversation is of joy, your feelings

are of joy—you’re right on the path of

that which you intended when you came

forth into the physical body.

ABRAHAM HICKS

Joy is not something that should be dependent on circumstances, situations or other people. You shouldn’t be waiting for joy to find you. Instead, let’s journey together and find your own joy. The joy that lights you up, the joy that brings you happiness, the joy that you create within you. That’s what this Change Journey is all about.

So if you are feeling a bit like I was: wondering how on earth you got to where you are in your life; wondering if this is all life has to offer you; rushing to get to the end, hoping and waiting for your life to get better, then I’m so glad you are here with me.

Because this book in itself is a journey. It’s a journey of creating self-awareness in areas of your life that may be causing you stress. It’s a journey about exploring emotions and learning to be and feel in each and every moment of your life, regardless of the situation. It’s a journey in creating awareness of how you can shift more easily into positive thinking when you find yourself feeling negative. It’s a journey of how you can find happiness and joy now, regardless of what is going on in your life.

As you read this book, I’m going to invite you to stop. I’m going to invite you to reassess your life. I’m going to invite you to ask yourself some tough questions that require honest answers. And above all, I’m going to bring you a new awareness that, if you choose to, you can use to change your mind and change your life, just like I did.

I’m not a doctor, a psychologist or a mental health expert. I’m just someone who became aware of how powerful self-awareness was in her life and that allowed me to change, to be more positive, to be happier and to live the life I had always dreamed of living.

Are you ready to embark on your own personal Change Journey?

Then I would like you to give yourself permission to commence your Change Journey. Right now, say out loud to yourself . . .

Yes, I am ready to change. I am ready to give myself permission to change. I understand this is a journey. I understand there will be ups and downs, stops and starts. I promise myself that regardless of what happens, I will continue to value myself and move forward on this Change Journey that I am choosing to undertake.

INTRODUCTION

The Change Journey introduces you to ten stages of self-awareness, based on my own journey. Each stage allows you to further discover who you really are and what you want for your life. Within each stage you’ll be meeting three or four characters (alter egos, companions or invisible friends—whatever you’d like to call them). Each character represents a quality of life you’ll need to live the fullest life possible.

Whilst you may have experienced these qualities before, you may have dampened them down or buried them. The Change Journey is a chance to reawaken these qualities, make them stronger, so they can help you to find the joy you are looking for.

Though several characters are present in each stage, six of them are main characters. I’ve called them The Change Journey Principles. They are the foundation and essence of your Change Journey and are woven into each and every stage. They are your starting point. They are your journey. And they are your end goal. You’ll be meeting these foundational characters in the next chapter.

In his book The Alter Ego Effect Todd Herman explains the power in using characters (alter egos) to improve our lives:

The idea of using Alter Egos to create some distance between how you currently see yourself and how you’d like to perform is not only smart, it’s backed by research. A lot of my clients initially talk about how their Alter Egos protected them, only to later realize that their Alter Ego was actually who they always were and who they had always wanted to be.

. . . [Alter Egos] help us suspend any disbelief [in ourselves] and leverage the power of aligning with someone or something else’s strengths, capabilities and superpowers.

. . . This isn’t being fake. Pretending to know about particle physics when you don’t is fake. Using an Alter Ego to entertain a group of physics students when you have been a boring physics professor until now is just bringing the right tools for the job.¹

The reason I wanted to use characters in The Change Journey is because when I was young, I absolutely loved to read Enid Blyton’s The Magic Faraway Tree. A story in which a gigantic tree with small houses carved into its trunk is inhabited by different magical people with names such as Moonface, Saucepan Man, Dame Washalot and Silky. Three children discover the tree and have many magical adventures with the characters.

More than anything, I wished I had ‘invisible friends’ like those. Which is why I decided to create them, so that you can have your very own personal Change Journey characters, and you don’t even have to climb to the top of a tree to find them.

The Change Journey characters are energetic beings—genuine, generous, gracious, helpful, enlightening and healing. They serve as reminders to help bring self-awareness into different situations within your life, and best of all, you can step into their personas whenever you need to. They are the essence of this book and your companions in change. They are the toolkit for your Change Journey and life’s navigation.

Each character is accompanied by a flower. A flower with the symbolism of qualities akin to the character.

The reason for this is simple; I have always loved flowers. As a young girl, I would pick them, display them and sometimes make flower necklaces. I could remember the names of different flowers without even trying. As I got older my passion for flowers continued. I always have a fresh bunch in the house and love having a garden full of flowers. I love stopping and smelling flowers in other people’s gardens. When I finished school, I contemplated being a florist, but the 4:00 a.m. market visits turned me off, so I moved in a different direction. Regardless, flowers have been a big part of my life.

When my boys were in their late teens and I had more time on my hands, I rekindled my dream to do a floristry course. For eighteen months I learned the ins and outs of flowers: how to identify and work with different flower species, understanding their properties and preferred environments. Best of all, how to create stunning arrangements. I loved every minute of it.

A few years ago, a friend lent me a book, The Language of Flowers by Vanessa Diffenbaugh— a novel about a homeless girl who loves flowers, becomes a florist and uses the Victorian language of flowers to communicate messages for her clients. For example, Honeysuckle for devotion, Aster for patience and red Roses for love. This was a concept I totally fell in love with.

So much so, I did some research and discovered the word ‘floriology, or ‘the language of flowers’, which, as Wikipedia explains, is ‘a cryptological communication through the use or arrangement of flowers’. A concept not foreign to modern times, as we commonly send flowers to say, ‘I love you’ or ‘happy birthday’ or ‘my condolences’.

I then took this concept a step further and investigated Flower Therapy. For centuries, flowers, herbs and plants have served as medicinal and healing purposes (you may have heard of flower essences—immensely popular at the moment). After my floristry course, I integrated both the practical and the healing knowledge to create ‘healing bouquets’. Bouquets created with specific flowers that depicted a certain meaning. For instance, when my friend’s father passed away, her bouquet contained orange Lilies for calmness, orange Roses for peace and Calla Lilies for healing grief.

When creating the Change Journey characters, it was a given that all of them also had a flower to enhance their energy. As you meet each character, I will tell you more about their flowers.

The flower symbolism I have used is based on the book Flower Therapy by Doreen Virtue and Robert Reeves. However, I revised and expanded the meanings based on my own experiences and intuition. Even in the history of floriology, a flower meaning changed from country to country, depending on people’s intent.

You may do the same. As you work with a flower, it may take on a more personal meaning to you than the one I provided, and that’s totally fine. Whatever the personal intention is behind the use