It’s been a season of talking about connecting with our inner mentors over here. We covered How to Recognize Your Inner Mentor’s Voice, 2 Ways to Check in with Your Inner Mentor, and the powerful way the Inner Mentor shows us what I think of as our “oak tree self”.
Today, I want to share about what to do when you’re having trouble connecting with your inner mentor. Here are four strategies to try.
Practice #1: Take a second look.
More than 90% of the time someone tells me they aren’t hearing anything– or anything helpful– from their inner mentor, we discover quickly that actually, they are getting something quite valuable from her. They just need to recognize it.
We bring our hopes, shoulds, and often, EXPECTATIONS to our check-ins with our inner mentors. Maybe we are thinking it’s going to take place in a beautiful scene, but it’s just a gray blank around her. Maybe we were expecting to see her, but there’s no visual at all. Maybe we expected her to answer our question with a crystal clear verbal answer, and she just threw her head back in a chuckle.
I can’t stress enough: the vast, vast majority of the time, what does show up is perfect. Valuable. Enough. But our mind (and inner critic) may jump to thinking it’s not.
So if you find yourself concerned about what you didn’t hear, see, or learn that you expected or hoped to, try on the idea that what did show up was important and meaningful. What do you see about it now, looking through that lens?
- If there were no words, what was the feeling or visual, and what might that be imparting?
- If there was a lack of answer to your question, what was being offered instead – challenging or uncomfortable as its message might be?
- If there was just a single image, what feeling/energy did it have and what would it look like to bring that feeling/energy more fully into your life?
Practice #2: Help your body relax.
Sometimes, we get the blessing of our inner mentor showing up readily when we check in with her in the midst of a busy day or a frantic moment. That’s wonderful when it happens. But sometimes, we need to shift our body state so that it can become a more receptive vessel for sensing the inner mentor part of us. We can think of it this way: the waters have to become still, so we can sense what’s coming from the deeps. Or at least, more still. (I don’t know that mine ever get completely still!)
When you are having trouble accessing your inner mentor, try taking a little more time to unwind tension and relax first. That might be as simple as taking three long, deep breaths and then checking in with her again. It might look like listening to a five minute meditation or guided relaxation – or a twenty minute one. It might mean taking a bath, or dancing out your stress to a rousing song, or listening to a piece of music that helps you slow down, or going for a walk, before you check in with her.
Practice #3: Empty out first.
I love how so often, we don’t have to process or resolve all the noisy chatter, fears, or self-doubts first in order to connect with our inner mentor. We can find incredible shifts in perspective simply by jumping in to connect with her. That being said, if you feel like a fear, self-doubt, resentment, or hurt is so loud, persistent and attention-demanding in your mind/heart/awareness that it’s too noisy to hear inner mentor’s voice through a regular check-in, you may want to try “emptying out” your feelings and mental chatter first.
Grab your pen and paper, or even a voice memo app, and share your stream of consciousness thoughts and feelings about the situation you are facing. The fears, the worries, the resentments, the uncertainty, the sadness and frustration about the hard parts of reality.
You can do this emptying out for a certain amount of time (3, 5, 10 or 20 minutes – whatever you need). Or you might decide to go by length – journaling your stream of consciousness for three pages, then switching to your inner mentor check in. Or, you can do this in a less bounded way, simply feeling inwardly for when you sense that the venting and processing of your feelings and thoughts is sufficient, and you are ready to check in with a different part of you. Then you’ll switch to your inner mentor check-in.
If you want to make your “emptying out” extra powerful you can do two additional things:
- Seek to articulate the real kernel of what needs to be emptied out by asking yourself some good coaching questions, like “What’s the kernel of this issue for me?” or “What’s the biggest fear?” or “Where is there the most pain and hurt here?”
- As you do this processing, meet yourself with a stance of “compassionate witness,” a caring, supportive response to your own challenges and tough experiences along the way.
Practice #4: Change up your approach.
Last but not least, change up your approach! In our last post I talked about two major ways to check in with your inner mentor – if one isn’t working, try the other!
You can also explore switching modalities. If you’ve been closing your eyes and looking for her, maybe instead take out your pen, write her a question and see if you can write back from her perspective.
Or ask her to come forward as you paint, sketch, or make a collage – seeing what imagery she leads you to create.
I hope this has helped you know what to try when it’s feeling more challenging to sense your inner mentor and to connect with her.
Love,
Tara
Top Photo Credit: SJMJanedgak, Getty Images
