Don’t Be Afraid To Start Over: How To Overcome Fear and Launch a New Beginning.
Don’t be afraid to start over, my dear one.
Yes, your life is falling apart all around you and you feel alone right now, but I know you can survive this and emerge stronger and braver than ever before.
I tell you this because it has happened to me, too.
As you go on your healing journey, you will incur some losses along the way.
Partners, friends, and family who aren’t ready to grow with you, who you have to leave behind.
It’s heartbreaking, but if you are strong enough to get through this period of upheaval, starting over doesn’t have to be something you fear.
It becomes an exciting adventure!
If you have experienced a change in your life and just don’t know what to do anymore, this post will give you the strategies you need to start your life over in a position of strength and embrace the change.
Let’s begin.
Let yourself grieve the loss before you start over.
Allow yourself time to grieve.
It’s important to give yourself time to mourn the loss of what you had or the idea of what your life was going to be like.
This doesn’t mean wallowing in sadness forever, but allowing yourself an initial period of grief will help you eventually reach acceptance and begin moving forward.
The stages of grief are:
- Shock and Denial
- Anger and Resentment
- Bargaining
- Depression and Despair
- Acceptance
Once you have moved into the acceptance stage, you can take action and move on.
Reflect and Learn Your Lessons
Make sure you do a post-mortem on the previous situation before you put it in the archives.
You certainly don’t want to be back here starting over again in a few months!
At a minimum, be sure to know:
- What went wrong?
- What was your part in this (do this even if your person was toxic)
- How can you avoid this in the future?
- What personal skills do you need to develop (e.g., be more assertive?)
Is what you lost that great?
Your current circumstance is familiar, and you are facing a period of uncertainty ahead. Of course, you want to hang on to the familiar with a death grip because change is scary!
But what if all we lost were people not worth our time in the first place?
From here, you won’t be able to see it because you look up to these people and probably share a long history. Like me, you also see great potential in those you care about and rarely see their flaws.
With time, you will start to see that these people may have been a match for the person you were when you met them, but they aren’t the type of people who will support your growth to the next level.
They’ve gone as far as they can go with you and your time together is up.
You aren’t a match anymore, and it’s nothing personal to either party. So please don’t take it too deeply to heart.
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Look back at when this happened last time. Are you happy it did?
I’m guessing this isn’t the first time this has happened to you.
Look back on the previous times and ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you happy it happened now?
- Would you be friends or partners with these people today? Why / why not?
- Do you think your future self will feel the same about this situation?
Do you think the universe knows what she is doing?
Ok, so please substitute whomever you believe to be in charge here. Do you believe they have a plan for you?
We don’t voluntarily decide to start over, which is why we are afraid of it. It wasn’t our choice.
Because it happened ‘to’ us, we didn’t choose it. It makes us feel attacked and this is scary!.
So, we have two choices before us. One is to struggle and fight to regain control, or we can release it to a higher power and have faith they know what they are doing.
If we fight, we remain stuck in the sadness, anger, and despair and if we choose acceptance, we release and can move forward.
Letting go is the logical choice, but it isn’t easy. It takes a lot of inner work to leave people you are deeply attached to and go out on your own.
Pass your worries over to your higher power, let them take care of things and have faith everything will be ok.
Starting again means you can do it right next time. So don’t be scared!
Starting over means you get to set your life up the way you want to. You can choose again. This time with the wisdom of your new experiences.
It’s a wonderful opportunity!
So many people live their lives on autopilot, just plodding through the motions, but not you.
You can spring-clean your life and bring in new people who are like a breath of fresh air, and who are more aligned with you and your values.
Are you really starting from scratch?
quote
Don’t be afraid to start over again.
This time, you aren’t starting from scratch you are starting from experience
anonymous
While right now it feels like you are back at square one, but during this process, you have become wiser. You will not make the same choices next time, and you will grow stronger from this experience.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to delete the things I’m good at from my mind and focus on the things I am not.
It’s not like you are 18 and starting life with zero knowledge of the world. You have previous experiences to draw from, and you aren’t starting completely from scratch.
Don’t catastrophize the situation too much. Yes, it feels awful right now, but there is hope. You are smart. You can figure this out and get your life back on track quickly.
8 Steps to Start Over Successfully
Do a personal audit.
The first step is to rebuild your confidence by seeing that you aren’t really starting over from scratch. You have skills, knowledge, resources, and contacts that can help you get going again quickly.
Get a piece of paper and write down your life vision and values. This is your north star and guides your direction in life. Make sure you know who you are and what you stand for.
This is especially important to re-establish now that you have moved away from people who may have had a powerful influence over you.
Other things to consider when doing a personal life audit are:
- Your likes and dislikes
- Personality traits
- Your identity and core beliefs
- Money-making skills you have
- Your strengths and weaknesses
- Dreams and life goals
- Your support networks
Set your intention and program your compass.
Now that you have done your audit to find out where you are now, let’s look at where you want to go next!
How do you want your life to be different? What does your ideal life look like?
Write a page on this and then reflect.
- What are my goals in my life? Note your 1-3yr, 3-5yr, and 10+yr goals
- What steps do I need to take to achieve these
- Write out the steps and schedule them on your calendar
My goal-setting planner can help you with this process in more detail.
Change unhealthy behaviors holding you back.
Your life today reflects the choices and habits of the past.
So, if you want to change your outcome, you will need to change your behavior.
What bad habits stand between where you are now and achieving your goals? Be honest here; is it procrastination, low self-esteem, or people-pleasing? Phone addiction?
Which behaviors, if they disappeared overnight, would improve your life significantly?
Don’t be afraid to start over because when you change your habits you will change your outcome.
You won’t get the same results if you take charge and make intentional changes.
See, there’s nothing to fear. this will help you come back stronger than ever.
Start by choosing the one habit that will have the biggest impact and move on to the others next.
Reinvent yourself aligned with your intention.
The reason most new habits don’t stick is that the person hasn’t changed their identity. They still think they are the person with the bad habit.
Let me explain.
If you want to stop eating cake after dinner, you can try not buying the cake, drinking water instead, eating a sugar-free cake, etc. This will probably work in the short term, but eventually, you will end up caving and eating cake again because your identity hasn’t changed.
The best way to stop eating cake after dinner is to take on the identity of a healthy person.
Healthy people don’t eat cake because they don’t like how it makes their bodies feel. They understand food is fuel, and so they only want to put good food into their body.
When making a major change to your situation, you will need to be the person who has the results you want.
You need to act like them, make decisions as they would, and everything like you are this type of person already.
Use your goals and set your intention toward who you want to be and start acting like them today.
Let go of the fear of judgment.
When you start over again, it is important to leave the judgment of others behind you. If you are still chained to other people’s opinions of you, how are you ever going to make lasting change?
It will be incredibly difficult to do anything helpful to your growth when you let other people captain your ship.
Some people will get threatened when you start acting differently, and they can see you making positive changes. It makes weak people feel bad about themselves.
While they won’t personally make any changes, they often sabotage you, so you give up.
You will never make these people happy, so your only choice is not to care what they think. That’s all you have control over.
As a niceaholic, this is very difficult to do. Remember that everyone has a choice, and they are choosing to stay stuck.
It is ok to leave them behind, but it is not ok for you to give up and join them.
Change your thinking about starting over
You can choose to see the nightmare, the thunderstorm, or you can choose to see the glimmer of blue sky.
I always remember what Tony Robbins says in these situations. He tells a story about a race car driver teaching him to deal with a wall on the track when the car is spinning out of control.
He says if the driver looks at the wall, they will hit it. However, if they look at the space next to the wall, they will avoid it.
Don’t look at your wall, babe.
Look to where you want to go, see the opportunities that are possible for you, now you are free and starting over again.
Be brave and go for it.
The hardest step of all. Take a big breath, give yourself an internal hug, and then act.
Action-taking will help so much with the whirling around in your head, thinking too much, and getting overwhelmed.
Once you get some momentum behind you, you will find your rhythm again.
It will feel weird at first, but remember that this is all new, so that it will be this way at the start.
Keep remembering the new life you are heading toward and stop telling yourself you are starting over again.
You can do this. Just take one small step at a time and don’t look back.
Prepare for setbacks.
Of course, things won’t always go to plan! You will mess up, but it’s what you do next that matters.
Be gentle with yourself and don’t throw it all in the bin 🙂
Forgive yourself and start again tomorrow.
Be consistent and keep your eye on your compass. Simply adjust if you start to go off course.
The key is to keep working on your goals and remembering the life you want to live.
Don’t self-sabotage and go back to how things used to be; you’re better than that.
The change will be worth it, I promise.
Don’t be afraid to start over. Conclusion.
Yes, it sucks that you have to start over again, but when you look back, you will see it was the best thing that could have happened to you.
You no longer have to deal with trying to piece together something that’s kind of working and kind of not. People happy to see you one minute don’t want to talk to you the next.
All of that will be gone from your life.
It’s hard to let people go, but sometimes people are just with you for a season of your life, then they move on.
You can start over again, don’t be scared. Go and get the life you deserve!
Your life will change forever. You can have people who love you, a life you love and the freedom to be yourself.
That is certainly worth starting over for!
How are you going to start over? Let me know in the comments below.
Remember luv, always be kind to yourself.
Love
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