Hello and welcome to Five Minutes in Nature with me Liz Scott.
Where every day in February I take you out and about and together we listen to nature's wisdom.
And it's a real wet old day today,
Still wet here,
Mist is down.
I look in front of me and I should be able to see a hillside but all I can see is the grey of the mist and there's a real dampness in the air and although it's not actually raining at the moment the trees above me are so wet that big plops of water are dripping on my head.
And today what I'm exploring and curious about is the phrase which I find so helpful and in fact my husband often says this to me as well which is when something happens in my life where I feel agitation,
When I'm about to respond to someone,
Maybe they've written an email or I've had a conversation with them and I'm feeling a bit agitated and I question my actions and I say this is what I'm planning to do,
What do you think?
He'll often say to me,
Does this take you closer to love or further away from love?
It's great isn't it?
A lovely little reminder,
Refrain to myself actually which is will this action that I'm about to engage in take me closer to love or further away from love?
And I use this daily in every single little situation when I remember it so anytime I feel a flurry of annoyance or frustration and I'm about to respond from that place of frustration or annoyance I ask myself will this action I'm about to engage in take me closer to love or further away from love?
And a really good recent example was when a friend and me we were planning to facilitate an event together and I wrote to her saying right for us to do this there are a mixture of jobs that we need to divvy up between us,
There's the marketing and the admin and the emails and the responding to people,
The collecting of money,
The paying the venue,
The planning the event,
How do you want to divvy it all up?
And she responded back and basically said I just don't have capacity to do this at the moment,
I just can't do any of that.
Now my initial response when I heard her message or read her message was one of real frustration and anger.
I went into this story of how dare she I'm the one that always does everything and is she expecting me to take all of this on and she's just going to swan along and do the facilitation and it's always down to me and I'm the one that has to take on board all the bits I don't like and you can imagine all the stories I had running in my head and the thinking I had running in my head.
And what I know for sure without a doubt is there is no point no point at all responding from that place of agitation.
All that happens a hundred percent of the time is if I respond from that place then I respond in a way that is often hurtful or unhelpful.
So instead I waited until my feelings had settled and I thought of different ways I might respond.
And with each action and with each response I just filtered it through that phrase of will this take me closer to love or further away from love.
And I realized as I settled that actually her email was really fair.
She had just expressed something that was honest to her which she was feeling overwhelmed and at capacity and didn't feel she could actually now engage in the event.
And so I responded to her by just thanking her for her honesty,
Thanking her for being so honest and upfront and clear in her communication and just saying look do you know what I think maybe now is not a good time to do this event because I don't have capacity to do all of it either.
Now the outcome of that was that we actually found a way forward.
We both found a way forward to run a really fabulous event but it was coming from that place and coming from that question does this action take me closer to love or further away from love.
That was the key thing I asked and that was the place I came from.
So my request to you is that you maybe reflect on that for yourself.
Just ask yourself the question when you're in a situation that you're not sure what to do will this action take me closer to love or further away from love.
