J.O.M.O – Joy of Missing Out

I have ‘borrowed’ the wonderful cartoonist Michael Leunig’s concept of JOMO for the beginning of 2019 newsletter!

Many people and magazines write about the stress of holiday season and give you all sorts of tips and skills – only for us to do the same things again the next year despite new year ‘resolutions’!

What are the resolutions about anyway?

Essentially a new year resolution is about creating new habits – deleting old ones and wiring in new ones. The success of which depends on what choices you make in every single present moment.

What if the really simple (not necessarily easy) message was…in this moment, do you choose FOMO (the fear of missing out) or JOMO (joy of missing out)?

Do you choose the pain of comparison and judgement or the awareness that comes with choosing yourself and what is intuitively right for you – not anyone else.

Without wanting to be a broken record…the only way we change anything in ourselves is to become more self aware. To observe the stories we tell ourselves. To notice patterns in our behaviour that are triggered by particular beliefs (which are stories we tell ourselves) that are most commonly unconscious and lies!

It’s very tricky to do that well until we take time out for JOMO. And let go of FOMO.

In the JOMO moments, we tune into our hearts and spirits where our innate wisdom lives. Rushing, stressing, doing too much, ‘having’ to get everything done, pleasing others all take us away from our hearts wisdom into the chaos of our minds which are usually full of those stories/lies!

If you wanted to dive deeper into this, perhaps you could make a commitment…you could choose to make a commitment – to yourself. To finding out what really matters to you and why; what you love to do; what makes you feel alive; to what programs (stories) are operating in your background computer in your mind running the show without you even knowing!

I have written in the last few months about my experience at an astonishing event called The Gathering. Where after 30 years of working on myself – and making progress – but never earth shattering ones! – I learned some core truths about myself and how I had distorted these with stories that my 0-7 year old told herself. I had no idea these stories were controlling several habits in my life that I had tried to change for years.

The process is powerful and revealing. And with Dr David Martin’s permission, I am sharing with you the first question in the process that if you choose to explore, you too may shed some light on those ‘invisible’ beliefs/stories/ lies ruling your life.

Here it is: What 6 events or experiences had the most significant impact or imprint on you?

Try to find 3 positive and 3 not so positive and write about them in detail. Give yourself a page for each of the 6 answers.

Go through the process 6 times over a period of days (or weeks) to really drill down into what it was about that experience that had the imprint or impact on the rest of your life.

Your goal is to recognise a time when you actually told your self something that was embedded as the truth. For example my big ah ha moment – which took some help to get to was the time I was molested by a stranger. I was about 2. And the impact/ imprint that experience primarily had was that I told myself ‘I am responsible for me’. No one else was around and without the capacity to rationalise the situation and see it for what it was, that was the conclusion my 2 year old mind came to.

What impact did that have? Well…running on that program, my only memory of childhood was being ‘responsible’. As I grew older with this program orchestrating things, I expanded that into ‘I was responsible for everyone else’. Which I refunded into ‘it was my job to fix everyone else’!

In some ways this is an excellent mindset for a speaker! LOL.

But for life and relationships it sucked! And I tried all I knew how to do to change it once I recognised this pattern in my 50’s! Nothing worked until I had this ah ha moment as a result of the answers to this question and time to soul search. It’s critical to be really honest with yourself and have NO – zero – zip judgment. It was. It happened. You did what you could in that moment. And now…with self awareness we can change the imprint or impact. If you choose to.

There is much more to the process but this first question is a gift from Dr Martin.

And a first step into discovering JOMO and a sense of peace.

So there you have it – not 3 strategies to bust stress but an invitation for 2019 to become an inner travel agent for yourself! It might seem hard an uncomfortable at times but it’s sooooo worth it!

And if you don’t choose to do it, then at least choose JOMO. Choose to give yourself permission and time to JOMO!

If you don’t – look at what you tell yourself to stop you.

JOMO is a great way to find peace and that is what I wish for you for 2019 – many more peaceful moments in the chaos.

Zooties,

Amanda