Relaxed Woman: On Trusting The Next Right Step Ep 69

Do you ever find yourself stressing about the future — wondering if you’re on the right path, waiting for a big vision, or feeling like you’ve somehow missed the memo on what you’re supposed to be doing?

In this episode of Relaxed Woman, we’re exploring the idea of breadcrumbs — the small, faithful steps that guide us forward and build confidence along the way.

We’ll talk about:

• Why clarity rarely comes as a grand, five-year plan — and why that’s a good thing
  
  
  
• How noticing and honouring the small nudges in front of you creates momentum and direction
  
  
  
• Why uncertainty isn’t a problem to solve but an opening for possibility
  
  
  
• The surprising ways breadcrumbs often show up — and why they don’t always look like the big vision you’re chasing
  
  
  

If you’ve been feeling pressure to have it all figured out, this episode will remind you that you don’t need the full map — you just need to follow the next breadcrumb.

✨ Resources mentioned:

 Reclaim Your Calm — a $20 workshop with simple tools to help you quiet your mind and bring more peace into your everyday life

Explore working with me in a private 1:1 program.

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Transcript

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Welcome back to Relaxed Woman, a nourishing series on the podcast to help you slow down, soften your grip, and live from a deeper place of peace and trust. These episodes are here to remind you that you don't have to hold it all together. You can breathe, release the weight that you've been carrying, and find a more gentle way of living. If you're tired from carrying it all, you are in the right place. Let's take a deep breath together. And release that and let it go, and let's dive into the episode. One of the things that can pull us out of the present moment and honestly create so much stress for us is the future. It's all of those questions. What should I be doing? Where should I be going? Am I on the right path? Have I missed something? How am I gonna get there? I know these thoughts well, but here's the thing. Over the past decade of doing this work, I've never received a grand five year plan or some kind of a booming vision, spoken from the heavens. What it's looked like for me instead is breadcrumbs one small step at a time, and that's what I'm gonna be speaking to you about in this episode. I've definitely conjured up my own visions here and there. But looking back, many of the things I thought I wanted and wanted to work towards would not have actually been good for me at all. And that has taught me the importance of surrendering my plans and the visions that come to me and taking those into prayer and to, and really to seek guidance about them. Every now and then I get impressions about my future that feel meaningful, and some of those things have come to pass. And some are yet to come to pass. But mostly it's been about taking one faithful step at a time. Just the next right thing. And each of those steps has led me exactly where I needed to be. Here's where we often get stuck. We are so busy waiting for the big vision to drop or stressing ourselves out, trying to figure it all out, that we miss the simple step that's right in front of us. So why do we get stuck here? Because our minds crave certainty and control. Our minds always want to know. What's ahead, what's coming, and fear will often whisper to us, what if this doesn't work out? What if I get this wrong? Perfectionism and comparison will often keep us waiting for that big clear sign so we can absolutely guarantee this is the right thing to do instead of moving forward with the little guidance that we already have. Faith doesn't usually look like a giant booming plan. It looks like one direction at a time. So you wanna think of it like GPS. If you are driving somewhere that you've never been, you'd never want every single turn for the next 30 minutes all at once, that would totally overwhelm you. Instead, you are given one turn at a time, and it's the same with your path and your future. It's about taking small steps and those small steps build trust, and as we take small steps of faith and focus on just the next right step, we create confidence for the bigger leaps that are gonna be required further down the track. I always say to my clients, clarity very, really arrives. In one go. As a one grand gesture, after working with many women over the years, I'm yet to see a vision being served up in one go with all of the steps mapped out to get there. I think it would be amazing if it came like this because it would give us a lot more certainty. But how it's most likely to come to you is in what I call breadcrumbs. It's those little nudges. It's those whispers or invitations that keep showing up. And I think there's real purpose as to why our next steps come in, though that way, why we don't receive all of the steps at once is because there's something happening on the inside of us. As we step out in faith, our faith in our trust gets built. It gets strengthened as we take one step at a time. We don't learn to trust. We don't learn to have faith when we have certainty. We only learn it when. We can only see like one or two steps in front of us, but we step forward anyway with those things and we see how those steps actually lead us to where we need to be. So coming back to this idea of breadcrumbs, those nudges whispers or invitations that keep showing up, sometimes those breadcrumbs may not look anything like the big vision that you've been looking for. Sometimes the bread crumbs aren't actually about your next job or your next career move. They're about you. The bread crumbs are about taking care of yourself. Maybe learning to process your stress instead of stuffing it down. The bread Crumb could be about creating more stillness in your day or getting to bedard earlier, honoring small commitments to yourself throughout the day. You can think of these as like the inner preparation, getting you ready for the bigger breadcrumbs to come. Sometimes breadcrumbs look like a thought that you can't shake, a door that opens with ease. A conversation that you have with someone that confirms something that's been stirring for you, an idea that sparks joy for you. Sometimes a gentle impression about something to do. Breadcrumbs seems small, but they're actually what is leading you to the full vision that you are wanting. But we have to take these small steps of faith towards them. They're often preparing us and giving us confidence for those biggest steps that come later for me, even this relaxed women series has felt like a breadcrumb. I don't know exactly where this is going to lead. The name first dropped in when I was leaving a carpark after an appointment, and I couldn't stop thinking about it. And every time I've sat down to plan or to record these episodes, I felt so much joy about creating them. And I don't know where this is leading to, but I, I trust that I'm creating these for a reason. Hopefully to help people, but maybe there's another reason I don't yet fully know. Maybe there's a higher reason. Maybe there isn't, but that'll be made clear later down the track. I think it's about resisting the temptation to overanalyze the next step and to just do it. Sometimes you get it right and sometimes you don't. There have been times for me where I've taken steps of faith and felt so sure that it was gonna work out in a particular way, only to find myself disappointed in terms of the outcome that ended up happening. It wasn't what I'd hoped for, but what I've come to really know and understand is each one of these perceived setbacks get used for our good. And the broader plan of our lives. So I wonder if you could see that across your life. I see that for sure. Across the last 10 years of my business journey, the things I thought were a failure or fail to meet my expectations actually became important. Building blocks, there was always something I took from these things, even if I didn't see it right away. It might have been how to handle disappointment or failure and to be compassionate with myself about that or maybe what I took from it was a particular relationship that came out of that experience that ended up being really important, or that it was just a stepping stone into something else. There's a great Bible teacher called Joyce Meyer and she says, step out to find out. Yeah, that's the only way we will really know, step out. To find out. We can only get so far thinking and there's a point where we just have to take a step of faith. And from my perspective of faith, God is big enough to redirect me. If I think I've heard from him, but it's not actually him, and I end up doing something that's in the wrong direction, I will always be redirected. Just like GPS and that perceived failure will always be used for my good and will help me move forward in some way. Some steps also take time to bear fruit, so don't give up if you don't see results right away. I can give you an example. About 14 months ago, I kept getting this clear nudge to hold an online workshop for a particular group of women, and it had been stirring in me for months. And eventually I realized, ah this is a breadcrumb. And so I followed it. I hosted the workshop and it was. Just a really beautiful experience. A great group of women came along. There was a lot of engagement, and I could see that the content was really landing for them. And afterwards I received some lovely feedback from people that were there. Now, sometimes a workshop like that is the thing in itself. It serves its purpose in the moment, and that's just what people need. And for others it might spark something deeper. So a desire to go further, to receive more support. And that's something I really care about because I know one of the most powerful ways I can help women is in that next step of walking alongside them more closely in a program. So at that time, based on the engagement and just the general sense of how much people enjoyed being there, I thought there might be some women ready for that, but nothing came of it straight away, and that did surprise me. Life moved on. My business moved on, and honestly, I didn't really think much more about it. Then about seven or eight months later, I started receiving emails, one after the other from women who'd been at that workshop all that time ago, and they were now ready for more support. And even now, over a year later, I'm still meeting women who are coming into a program with me who trace their way back to me through that one workshop. So it reminded me when you follow a breadcrumb, you may not see the outcome right away. But it doesn't mean that that step wasn't significant. Often the fruit shows up later in ways that we couldn't have predicted at the time. So I wonder if you can see the history of how breadcrumbs have worked in your own life. Maybe there's a step that you've taken in the past that just felt like the right thing to do. Maybe it was even risky or uncertain at the time. But later you could see clearly that it had purpose and it was the seed for something much bigger down the track. The same is true for where you are now. So don't discount those small little breadcrumbs because they're leading you to where you need to be. We live in a culture that worships certainty. So when we don't know something about our future, what's happening in 10 years time, we think something is wrong, but not knowing isn't a problem to solve. I remember when I was about to go on maternity leave and so many people would ask me. What am I gonna do? What's my plan for my business? How am I gonna be working? Will I be working after I have my baby? And when I first got pregnant, I definitely was worried about this and I spent a lot of time trying to figure all of this out in my head from where I was just a few months pregnant. And then I realized that was actually making me miserable and it was making me feel stressed. And there was actually no way I could say with certainty how I was going to work. Or what that would look like because I hadn't yet had a baby in a business before. This was a brand new experience for me. So I came to this place of realizing that I had to give up the idea that I was going to know and just allow that plan to come to me when the timing was right. So I would say, well, actually I don't know what I'm gonna do. And for some people that was really surprising. May be even a bit shocking. What do you mean you don't know? What do you mean you don't have a plan? But there's just some things we can't know until we get further down the track. And that's okay. I wanna let you know it's so okay. If you don't have full certainty about your future, this is a place I see so many of us getting tripped up on. It's not what you need to focus on. Instead, you need to tune into the next right step in front of you. As I mentioned earlier, I've never received a five year plan and I need, don't even know where I'll be in five years time, and honestly, it's not my business to know what I need to know. What I need to be doing instead is faithfully tending to the things that are in front of me and doing those things well. And trusting it through that, I'll be led to where I need to be. Before we finish today, I want to leave you with a few simple reflection questions. You might wanna journal on these or just kind of let them linger with you as you move through the rest of your day. The first question I wanna want you to ask yourself is, what small breadcrumb is in front of me right now? Am I honoring that step or waiting for a bigger vision first and just what is the very next step I can take, even if it's as small as getting to bed earlier? Trust those little nudges is, and I think this is one of these things that makes up. A relaxed woman. It's trusting our future enough to step forward with the certainty that we do have without needing to know it all, or have every outcome guaranteed. So I'd recommend you sit with those questions. Maybe you wanna write them down and just take some time to think about them and to see what's dropping down for you. I'll say them again. What small breadcrumb is in front of me right now? Am I honoring that step or waiting for a bigger vision first? And what is the very next step I can take, even if it's small? If today's episode spoke to you, you'll love the Reclaim Your Calm Workshop. It's $20 and gives you simple practical ways to calm your mind, help you feel more grounded, and bring more peace into your everyday life. And I think when you feel peaceful and you feel grounded, it's a lot easier to hear your inner voice and to sense guidance about what you need to do next. And I often find this is the place. That will often go to when a client comes to me and they're feeling uncertain about their future and the things they wanna be doing next. Often there's a lot of mental activity, a lot of emotional static going on within themselves, within their body and mind. So one of the first places we go to is the techniques that I teach inside this workshop. Ways that we can dial down that overthinking and create. Just a lot more calmness and a lot more stability emotionally within ourselves. And when we do that, it's so much easier to sense, ah, yes, this is the right next step. So if you wanna learn some really practical ways to do that, some tools that you can pick up and start using in your life than the Reclaim your Calm workshop would be a great fit for you. The link to that is in the show notes if you wanna check that out. Okay, so thank you for being here for this episode of Relaxed Women. There are more episodes already waiting for you in the series, and there are more to come. So if this is sounds like something you need more of, hit follow or subscribe so you don't miss what's ahead. And if a friend comes to mind who would love this too, please share an episode with them. And if you're curious about going deeper, you can also learn more about one-on-one coaching with me through the description, uh, the, the link and the description of this episode. I'm looking forward to being with you again soon and take care until then. Okay.