Emma Cann: Choose To Believe
~ 12 minute read time ~
Dear LP Readers,
As I love you all so much, here’s a special New Year’s gift for you.
This week’s article is guest written by the wonderful Emma Cann.
A former teacher she’s now helping school leaders, teachers and other clients to find the clarity, confidence and calm to do what they love.
We had a wonderful conversation during lockdown last year, realising our backstories were very similar leading to this collaboration for which I’m truly grateful.
Here’s Emma, in her own words:
“Feeling disempowered, depressed and burnt-out, Emma chose to leave her teaching career at the end of 2018.
Since then, she has changed her life through coaching, which has allowed her to explore her mind, understand her priorities and take aligned action to create change.
She is clear on her mission to empower others to lead balanced, happy and impactful lives - on their terms without burning out in the process!
She also enjoys spending time outside in nature, drinking tea and - pandemic permitting - travelling the world.”
Without further ado, her article Choose To Believe…
A few years ago, I was stuck. I didn't FEEL stuck, I WAS stuck. I believed that my circumstances were keeping me somewhere that I didn’t want to be. I didn't believe that I had the ability to change anything.
Looking back, I now know that's not true.
I now know that I have the power to choose and I have the power to create change for myself. I now know that choice is always available and change is created by me.
I now see that I wasn’t stuck – I just felt stuck.
At the time of my ‘stuckness’ I was a primary school teacher in a leadership position, and my workload was just getting bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier and more and more crushing every day. I wasn’t happy but I didn’t know how to change things.
In fact, I don’t think I knew I COULD change things. I felt like I had to work at least 50 hours a week to get what I needed to do done, and even then I couldn’t shift the guilt that I felt about not doing everything on the ever growing to do list!
“Can I imagine doing THIS until I retire - for another 40 years? Can I imagine doing this for even half of that time? Can I imagine still feeling like this in five years? Can I even imagine doing this for another year?”
I was overwhelmed, overloaded and exhausted. I knew there had to be another way, I just couldn’t see it. At that point simply being told by others, ‘just don't do as much work’ was not helpful. Likewise, being told ‘things will get better’ didn’t convince me either. I just felt like this was going to be it now forever.
And that's when I made the decision to do something about it.
I looked ahead at my life and I thought, ‘Can I imagine doing THIS until I retire - for another 40 years? Can I imagine doing this for even half of that time? Can I imagine still feeling like this in five years? Can I even imagine doing this for another year?’ And the answer to all of those questions was a resounding ‘NO’.
I knew I had to do something about it.
Great. Decision made!
Not quite…
All the voices in my mind then piped up.
‘Is this really the right time? Maybe you should wait? What will YOU do if you leave? All you know is teaching – do you really think you can be good at anything else? What are you thinking?!’
That was when I realised there's never a good time in life. There will always be a reason not to do something. ALWAYS. And if you look for that reason, you'll be sure enough to find it.
So I started looking for the reasons TO make a change, rather than the reasons NOT TO.
‘I want to be happy. I want to know that I tried. I want to see what else I can do in my lifetime.’
Through that process of looking for reasons to change, I uncovered some self-belief. I believed I could change my life. I knew that I could do it. I didn't know what ‘it’ was. And I certainly didn’t know how I could do ‘it’, but I believed that I could.
And that ounce of self-belief is all you need to make a change. You don't need to know WHAT, you don't need to know HOW, but you need to believe that you CAN.
So once I believed that I could make a change, I handed in my notice to say I was leaving my teaching career of nearly 10 years behind and I stepped out into the unknown.
“You can choose to be scared or excited. Choose excited. ”
It could have been terrifying. But I chose to see it as empowering, liberating and freeing.
You can choose to be scared or excited. Choose excited.
My experiences have shaped the principles behind the work I now do with others.
I work with people who want to make a change in their lives. They don't necessarily know what that change is and they probably don’t know how they're going to do it either. But they believe that they can.
If they say that they don't believe that anything can be different for them, I can't help. Because if they don’t believe they can change, they won’t.
But if they believe that they can make a change, I'm there to help them. Through coaching, I help them grow their self-belief, gain clarity on the WHAT and take action to create the HOW. Change is possible and it all starts with the choice to believe.
So, if you are stuck and you want to make a change, I might be able to help you. If you have the belief that you can do it, and you choose to be excited, wonderful things can happen!
I hope you enjoyed this week’s guest article from Emma. If you loved it, she’s running her ever-popular The Power of Choice workshop on Saturday 23rd January 2021.
It’s 90-minutes where she helps people explore the empowering nature of choice. Helping you make decisions in life that leave you feeling confident and in control, rather than flustered and doubting yourself.
If this sounds like something you’d love to embrace in 2021, you can register interest here http://www.emmacanncoaching.com/workshop.html
Please leave a comment for Emma or LP below.
Finally, thanks again to Emma for agreeing to contribute this authentic, truthful and kind article 🙏
Love
LP x
