Choosing Faith over Fear – A Lesson From One of My First Clients
This year marks the 10 year anniversary of Revenue Breakthrough, and 15 years of me supporting myself on a full-time income from coaching and consistently choosing faith over fear. In celebration of the year – I’ll be writing some articles to share the wisdom that I’ve collected.
So much of this wisdom I’ve learned is from working with my clients.
It was 2006 and I was a year into my coaching practice. At that time, I got a new client. She came to me for health reasons, but we ended up talking in most of our conversations about how lonely she was. She had never been married or even in a serious relationship – but she longed for one. She would say things like, “I missed out. It’s over for me.” She complained that she didn’t like any of her friends and that she didn’t have anyone to hang out with.
I couldn’t help noticing how her fears triggered my own deep (but, as I later discovered, unfounded) fears. The Universe seemed to be laughing at both of us.
We worked together to create more activities for her to engage in and bring her joy. She joined a spirituality group that was reading scriptures from every religion world-wide. We began having conversations about the Old Testament, the New Testament, the Koran and even the Gita. I had been a religion major in college and had read most of these books – so I was thrilled to go back and forth with her about everything she was learning.
And I noticed a great side effect – she was so much happier. Eventually that happiness led to more confidence. Something deeper was also happening – she began choosing faith over fear – a hugely important lesson for me to watch and take on for myself.
At one of our coaching sessions, she told me – “Monica I put myself on a dating site and I have a date tonight!” I was excited for her.
In our next session, I got the details. Turns out that she was the first date he had since his wife had passed away 3 years ago. They had a lot in common, and they had a fun date!
Three months later they were still dating. And six months after that, they went on a cruise together. She came home with a ring on her finger.
I’ll never forget when she said to me, “Monica, I do wish I had met him sooner. But I didn’t. And I’ve learned now that the Universe has its own sense of timing. I also realized that perhaps I wasn’t fully open to it earlier because I was so busy looking at the world as though it was my enemy. But whatever we want truly does come to pass. And I’m so happy with the path that I’ve been on – because if I had met him sooner, he wouldn’t have seen who I am now.”
Over the years, I’ve seen so many versions of this – clients really wanting something – whether it be love, money, or material things. And the Universe delivers those things in its timeline. Which always turns out to be the perfect timeline in retrospect.
It’s made me realize that we ALWAYS get everything we want – it just doesn’t look like we thought it would and it’s not always when we want it. We need to practice having faith in order to be OK with what is.
Don’t get me wrong – I’m not always OK with this. In fact each day I work more and more on surrendering to what is instead of wanting to change it all. But having a deep faith that it’s always moving in a good direction has saved me over and over again.
It’s one of the best lessons I can offer from hearing hundreds of client stories: know that everything is always working in your favor. Have faith. Because faith and fear can’t live in the same place.
Photo: flickr, Jeroen Wolfers
