That time I did the bold thing

28th March 2010. That was my wedding day. At least, it was supposed to be my wedding day. I didn’t turn up.

Now, before you picture me running down a street wearing a wedding dress, you should probably know: there was no groom left at the altar. I’d called the engagement and the relationship off a few months before. This isn’t a story of a runaway bride, but instead a story of doing the bold thing.

I almost stuck in there. In the week between hearing what my heart was really telling me and actually telling my fiancé that I was leaving, I imagined losing every friend I had, and the respect of most of my family. I imagined everyone thinking what a terrible person I was.

My reality was something altogether different, even surprising. “I wish I’d done the same thing,” was uttered to me by more than one woman, women who appeared to be in happy and loving marriages.

It wasn’t the case that my fiancé was a bad person. He was perfect as he was. He’s a great guy. He still is. We’re still friends. He just wasn’t the guy for me. My heart was telling me that it wasn’t right, but my head… Well, my head was busy making up stories about what everyone else would think, say or do. And my head almost steered us both down a different aisle, a wedding aisle in fact.

So many people think that following what our heart or our body tells us is fanciful and frivolous. We watch the movie where the heroine does just that. It’s the note at the end of Good Will Hunting: “Tell them I’ve gone to see about a girl”. We sigh a big “ahhhh”. And then we switch the movie off and we lean in to listen to what our head tells us about our own lives instead.

But what if our head is the fanciful one? What if it’s our head where frivolity takes place? It’s our head where those fantastical disaster stories are played out, after all. It’s our head that imagines or interprets things that are uncomfortable, and unreliably predicts pain ahead.

Sometimes our heart, our feelings and our body sensations are a much truer place to look for how decisions that we make about our lives really “wear” on us. Why? Because it’s in those places that the answers come from our own true being, and not through the lens of imagined stories of what others will think, feel and do.

That bold decision to listen to my heart instead of my head and walk away from my engagement was huge. It quite literally steered the direction that the rest of my life would play. It opened me to alternative possibility, different opportunities, new people to meet, new places to live. But above all, it opened me to the power of turning the dial down on those imagined voices, and to turn the dial up in trusting myself and my own power of creating possibility.

If you’re interested in doing the bold thing (and no, that doesn’t have to be abandoning your wedding), then why not create the space to explore your possibility through a coaching programme with me? Let’s create your best life, not the ones that the interpreted and imagined inner voices lead you towards.