Hello and welcome to five minutes in nature with me Liz Scott.
I'm actually on Dartmoor soaking up the sun.
It's so warm,
Very warm for an autumnal day near the end of October.
I've heard the buzz of insects go by,
I've seen an orangey-brown butterfly flutter next to me,
The sheep you might be able to hear in the background are close and there's a buzzard that's been flying overhead.
I've been walking along a track called the Puffing Billy track.
It's an old track that goes into the heart of the moor.
It's several hundred years old I would think and it used to be used by horse-drawn vehicles to cart china clay from the heart of the moor back down to this part of the moor and onto the trains and transport to get processed.
The path is still usable now as a leisure path you can walk on it and cycle on it.
It's a very lovely route and I'm with you today wanting to share with you about the power of storytelling and the power we have,
Unintentionally sometimes,
To create stories that aren't true but that we believe and then we act on.
And I had a near-miss recently and I'll tell you the story of my near-miss and it'll hopefully illustrate what I mean.
It was a near-miss because I enjoy getting a vegetable box and a recipe box from a local company that is organic and treats the farmers that it gets the vegetables from really fairly.
I like their ethos and I've been buying vegetables and vegetable boxes from them and recipe boxes for many many years.
In recent years they've started to grow their business and over the past few weeks I've noticed that a few of the recipe boxes I've had delivered have been missing ingredients or had the wrong instructions or had ingredients that weren't on the recipe included.
And so I wrote an email to them.
I wrote an email to them saying just to let you know I'm feeling a bit frustrated with the recipe boxes I'm getting at the moment.
And I wrote the email and part of me was creating a story blaming this company for getting too big and for not looking after its customers and for treating people more like a number rather than a person.
And that story was exacerbated when I didn't hear anything back from them.
So I noticed myself creating this story even it became even bigger in my mind that this was that company was too big they no longer cared for people.
I wasn't sure I wanted to continue doing business with them.
I started to consider sharing with other people that I didn't think the ethos of this company was the same and I started to feel like this is not the kind of company I want to do business with.
So I'd sent an email as you know I hadn't received a response and then I had created this story that this was not a company I wanted to do business with and in fact I wanted to tell other people you know they've changed don't do business with them.
Luckily I had the presence of mind to send another email a follow-up email and this is what I am very aware of and I would ask you to be aware of this too.
When I get agitated and I get into a story of victimhood or martyrdom rather than believe the story I'm telling myself I question it and I just go let me just check this out and that's what I did.
I sent another email expressing my disappointment that I hadn't heard anything and I was responded to straight away and they copied in an email that they had written to me.
I think it might have gone into my junk so I just hadn't received it and in it they were apologetic and they explained what they were going to do and they were going to refund some money and they were looking into this and they thanked me for highlighting it and said please let us know if it happens again.
So this story that I had created about this big company that no longer cared for its customers collapsed in that instance.
I realized that that was completely wrong.
It was completely made up and I was so glad I hadn't acted on the story.
There'd just been a mix-up with the email.
They'd sent an email and I hadn't received it.
It'd probably gone to my junk folder.
But for me this is a really great message and a really great reminder.
I know that whenever I feel like I'm the victim in a story or I'm unloved or unlistened to or challenged or uncared for or overwhelmed I know that those feelings aren't telling me about the thing I think that's creating those feelings.
I know that my feelings are just letting me know I'm losing a space of grounding.
My mind is speeding up.
It's time to ground myself and settle down.
And when I do settle down and bring myself back to that intuitive wisdom I invariably find the right way forward.
And the right way forward is to move forward without a made-up story.
It's to find out what's really happening and then take the next step.
