What Did You Do With Jill?Jill Whalen's healthy lifestyle transformation                                               

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I’ve seen a lot of articles and comments about personal transformation that focus on how much time and effort it takes. They promise that with the right tools, techniques and lots of perseverance, transformation can eventually be yours.

Maybe.

But I see it differently.

Transformation happens via insight–not hard work.

While some personal transformations may look like they came from years of hard-fought self exploration, when it comes right down to it, the transformation itself came from insights that were sparked along the way.

I am not a life-long seeker. I never spent time working on myself. In fact, I sort of went the opposite route. I was so caught up in my personal ego that I had no interest or desire to become a better person. My own little world suited me just fine. Honestly, I had no idea there was anything for me to work on, let alone transform.

Therefore, other than my initial decision to lose some weight, I never set out to purposefully try and change anything about myself.

Still, it happened anyway!

My personal transformation came to me spontaneously through the power of insights.

Yet I notice that when I discuss how much I’ve changed, others assume there was a lot of hard work involved. Which seems to be the popular position of today’s psychologists, the media and our culture, in general.  

But here’s the thing…

Personal transformation does not have to be hard.

Working on ourselves for years (or decades) is not a requirement.

I’m living proof.

Consider the following points and see how they fit (or conflict) with your current understanding of transformation:

• We do NOT have to practice anything to experience a complete turnaround in our lives.
• Our “childhood wounds” do NOT need to be nurtured for decades in order to heal.
• Any past trauma or blockages that might in some way be stored in our cells or our bodies or in some sort of grooves in our brains, do NOT need to brought to light through discussion or other means in order to become unblocked.

All it takes is an insight.

Insights are quite literally, “a sight from within.”

Here’s how I describe insights in my book, Victim of Thought: Seeing Through the Illusion of Anxiety:

If you’re not familiar with insights, they are simply “Aha” or “Eureka” moments.  

An insight is when you suddenly see something at a deep level that you never saw before.

Like with an optical illusion or those 3D “Magic Eye” pictures. You look and look and look, then in a flash, you simply see it.

It’s the same with insights. You may have heard something a million times before, but now it makes sense in a new way–at a deeper level. It suddenly becomes more than just an intellectual understanding.

It becomes a Knowing.

The best part of an insight is what happens afterwards.

You see…

Deep insights magically create spontaneous change.

I’ve written extensively about my mega life-flashing-before-my-eyes insight, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say that after that split-second download from The Universe, I was transformed in ways I would only discover later.

No doings, practices, tools or techniques are necessary.

This is not to say that we can’t also be transformed through our excavations into our past. The problem is that purposefully pulling up old, often repressed memories can be really painful. While it’s true that insights can and often do come to us after years of dismantling and disarming our past hurts and traumas, the very same transformative insights can also occur without all the hard work.

And even better, without all the associated pain.

The key is that no matter how it happens, be it from years of working on ourselves or via a spontaneous insight, it is the insight itself and not the hard work that creates the change.

Either way, our old childhood wounds are brought to light. But when they surface all by themselves through the Knowledge that comes from a flash of insight, rather than through digging into our past–it’s painless.

Have you experienced personal transformation in your life? I’d love to hear how it happened for you.

–Jill

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Jill Whalen

CONTACT JILL WHALEN to learn how she may help you be the best you can be.

Jill is the author of Victim of Thought: Seeing Through the Illusion of Anxiety

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For the past 20 years, Jill has consulted with companies big and small, and spoken at conferences all over the world. She is currently a transformational speaker and mentor to businesses, individuals, coaches, leaders, groups and organizations. She helps them uncover their natural well-being and happiness so that they can operate from a clearer state of mind and take their lives and businesses to a higher level.

Jill's blog, What Did You Do With Jill? is a personal account of what she's learned throughout her transformational journey. Jill has many "viral" articles on LinkedIn and is a contributing writer for P.S. I Love You.

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