When I was growing up, I was (according to all reports) a fireball.
I was looking through a box of old photos the other day and ran across my book of “Baby’s Milestones,” which had been sporadically filled out by my Mother. I especially got a kick out of her comment: “Nature at age 1+ | Outgoing. Notes: Picks on older sister.”
As I took a moment to travel down Memory Lane, I thought about one of my characteristics that my parents didn’t approve of. Since I was a curious and somewhat outgoing child, I had a tendency to want to experience a lot of different things; guitar lessons, dance lessons, baton twirling, bike riding, roller skating, track-and-field, swimming and diving, football (I was quite the Tomboy) – and the list goes on.
Their complaint? That I was a “quitter.” That I never “stuck with anything.”
It’s funny to think about, because I don’t think I realized how much that consistent judgment about my character affected me as I grew. Oddly enough, if you ask anyone now, they’ll most likely tell you that I’m fairly tenacious about getting stuff done.
And yet I know that underneath it all, there have been times when that subliminal feeling of being a “quitter” who can’t “stick with something” has made a substantial impact on my decisions and over-all self esteem.
So how are YOU in the “follow through” department? Have you ever been told you’re a quitter, someone who can’t focus on something and do it, someone who just can’t make a decision?
Let’s look at our Life Path numbers again to get a glimpse of how our Numerology might give us some insight into how we operate with “stick-to-it-ness!”
HOW TO STICK TO IT – BY THE NUMBERS
1 Life Path:
Here’s the deal with you, focus, and follow-through. As you go through life mastering your 1 Life Path amazingness and all its challenges, you’ll first need to learn how to stand on your own two feet. Learning and embracing a sense of independence is crucial for you. And so you’ll have challenge after challenge in this arena of individuating yourself from your family and figuring out how to lessen dependence on others – which can manifest both mentally and physically. Ultimately, you are the Master or Mistress of original ideas, innovation, and leadership. So when you’re in your game, you get a “Five Star Rating” for focus and follow-through. When you’re not in alignment with your 1 Life Path purpose, you can be pushed around, feel as though you’re a victim of circumstances, and that you never get a break.
2 Life Path:
Here’s the deal with you, focus, and follow-through. As you go through life mastering your 2 Life Path amazingness and all its challenges, you are here to learn the power of partnership, patience, and persistence – we’ll call them The Four P’s! You’re all about the details, so follow-through and focus is an innate gift you have when you’re in alignment with your life path purpose. When you’re out of whack, you tend to be incredibly impatient, have no time for details, and abandon things (projects, jobs, relationships) with resentment. So just know that The 4 P’s are your endgame. When you’re acting upon the power of partnership, patience, and persistence, you feel most purposeful and ultimately satisfied.
3 Life Path:
Here’s the deal with you, focus, and follow-through. As you go through life mastering your 3 Life Path amazingness and all its challenges, your gift is an amazing curiosity, great intellect, and creative talent. And yet sometimes the 3 Life Path has trouble with skipping from one thing to the next and can become scattered and lack focus and follow-through. You like things to be fun and when the “not so fun” parts come into play (completing the last chapter of your book, studying for finals, getting all the information ready for your tax guy), you may turn a blind eye and decide to frolic elsewhere. If you can master the art of follow-through, you’ve made enormous headway in conquering one of the consistent challenges on your 3 Life Path!
4 Life Path:
Here’s the deal with you, focus, and follow-through. As you go through life mastering your 4 Life Path amazingness and all its challenges, focus and follow-through are your stellar attributes – so much so that these characteristics might even become a detriment to your happiness and effectiveness in life. You’re all about orderly systems and thrive with predictable processes and secure routines – so much so that your precision in these arenas can become myopic and lost in detail to such an extent that you never come up for air to take a gander at the bigger picture. Or alternately, if you’re at the beginning stages of getting a grasp around your responsible and hard-working ways, you can laugh in the face of focus and follow-through: “Ha-Ha-HA! Foiled again, focus and follow-through! Catch me if you can!” So for you, focus and follow-through requires a particularly delicate balance.
5 Life Path:
Here’s the deal with you, focus, and follow-through. As you go through life mastering your 5 Life Path amazingness and all its challenges, you’re working at exploring and experiencing the constructive use of freedom in your life. You’re often the Master or Mistress of escape, desiring only the high-energy, fun, sensuous, change-on-a-dime life experience. So you can see that focus and follow-through are super-duper issues for you. This whole “focus and follow-through” thing is a reoccurring theme for 5’s. It’s all about reining it in, baby! It’s all about finding your focus, committing to it, and training yourself to do the follow-through. I know it’s hard. Really hard. Yet, imperative. If you’re on the other side of the 5 energy – which would be in the fearful state of being, over-focused, and emotionally frayed – I still say that this is something that is mandatory for you to master, because even if you’re this “anti-5,” the bottom line is that I’d bet that even in this state of mind, you’re not being successful at actually focusing and following through with a successful outcome. Chances are, your outcomes are stalled, in limbo, and in perpetual “if only” mode.
6 Life Path:
Here’s the deal with you, focus, and follow-through. As you go through life mastering your 6 Life Path amazingness and all its challenges, you can be the “Focus and Follow-Through Champion Of The World!” In fact, since you’re innately “the responsible one” and often find yourself focused on home and family, you’re in your game because you’re the nucleus of the operation. Oh, all right. Let’s face it. You’re a control freak. Yet your focus and follow-through is often like no other; laser focused, with others’ needs taken into account, and served with home-made frosting on top! The struggle? You can be overly exacting and such a perfectionist that you sabotage your own success.
7 Life Path:
Here’s the deal with you, focus, and follow-through. As you go through life mastering your 7 Life Path amazingness and all its challenges, you’re such a thinker and researcher that focus and follow-through can take shape in various ways. You’re innately super-focused to the point of internal combustion. You’re the analyzer, the truth seeker, the researcher. So in this way, you can focus like no other – with the intensity of a laser beam. Yet here’s the rub: often the follow-through takes on different meaning for you. You’re simply on a different wave-length than most people and so the follow-through for you might take an entirely different shape than the standard “Wa-la! Here’s the final report.” And if you’re not in alignment with your higher sense of purpose, your focus and follow-through can be non-existent because it’s lodged in superficial activity. This might look like: having a break-down because you don’t have the right outfit to wear to the cocktail party, being obsessed about how stupid everyone else is, or taking no initiative to change a negative situation with which you find yourself engaged.
8 Life Path:
Here’s the deal with you, focus, and follow-through. As you go through life mastering your 8 Life Path amazingness and all its challenges, focus and follow through are natural outcomes of your intense business-related energy. I don’t call you The Powerhouse for nothing! If anything, you can over focus on something to your ultimate detriment, usually by being so forceful and oddly unaware of the needs of others as you climb toward your goal. Alternately, if you haven’t mastered the introductory class “8 Life Path 101,” you’ll have a horrible time with focus and follow-through because you’re too busy attempting to jump the hurdles that are set up to train you to master your sense of personal power. In this case, you’re the professional victim and it’s everyone elses fault that you can’t focus on what you want and follow-through with positive results.
9 Life Path:
Here’s the deal with you, focus, and follow-through. As you go through life mastering your 9 Life Path amazingness and all its challenges, the subject of focus and follow-through can be a tender one for you. Since serving the world in some humanitarian way is your ultimate, you tend to have a tenacious way about you when it comes to focusing and following through with results. Often you don’t need a lot of pats on the back or acknowledgement; simply a job well done is all the payment you require. You’re often hugely creative and artistic and also can be great with business. So really, you often get high marks in this arena. If you’re struggling with the demands of your 9 Life Path purpose, you can choose to just float along rather than grab the steering wheel and drive your vehicle to where ever you want it to go. So your focus can be undirected and downright fuzzy when you’re feeling overwhelmed or as though you’re facing insurmountable challenges.
So what would your Mother have said about your focus and follow-through in your “Baby’s Milestones” Book?
And better yet, what do YOU have to say about your own sense of “stick-to-it-ness?” When is it advantageous to arm wrestle with it and get it done and when is it best to let it go?
In my “Milestones” Book, my Mother made this handwritten entry about my first day of Kindergarten:
“You were so excited to finally be going to school like your big sister. However, you were upset because you didn’t read anything at school. All they do is play.”
Really Felicia?