Coaching Videos & Tips - January 22 2019 No.589
LET'S DISCUSS YOUR LIFE'S PURPOSE
Yes, you've got it. In this video I'm talking about your life's purpose. You probably need to watch this!
DON'T FORGET
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Set an alert on your 'phone for 15:09 (that's nine minutes past three in the afternoon!!). If you know you'll be in a meeting or otherwise engaged at that time, pick another deliberately random time.
When your 'phone chimes, stop what you're doing, look around you, feel what it's like to be where you are - warm, chilled, stuffy, smelly, cramped, open. Take note of how you feel emotionally - cool, stressed, annoyed, happy, excited, turned-on, flat, fed-up. Have a good look around you - notice who you're with, where you are, what you see... have a proper look as if you're looking for the first time.
Come to your senses.
Very often, when I'm working in places like London, Dublin or Paris, I find myself, on trains or trams, in the middle of the morning or evening commute. Obviously, it's not something I do every day - but, for the vast majority of my fellow commuters, it's just another day. And, from the look on their faces, just another day or survival.
Of course, I'm being judgemental and I'm generalizing but with people dead to the world on an early morning train, you could be forgiven for observing large numbers of humans simply making it through the day. And, of course, that is what they are doing, that is how we are wired and that is how, according to multiple research findings stretching back over decades, most people feel.
And, all this time, the clock is slowly ticking. "I missed my children growing up" (very often this comment relates as much to being stressed rather than actually being physically absent); "I wish I'd spent less time in the office" (again this is about state of mind - if one was focused one wouldn't have to spend so much time in the office!); "I wish I'd travelled more" (I know someone who books his next holiday on return from his last to "numb the pain"!); "What was that all about?" (an actual quote from an elderly man on his deathbed)... our lives are passing us by before our very eyes.
Despite the fact that we are neurally designed to make it through the day - no more, no less - as sentient beings that does not provide us with a valid excuse for giving up the ghost. Our lives are what we make them - this is not some aspirational claptrap, it's simply a statement of fact. If I choose to zombie into work and through the day, that's my life, mate and, until I do something about it, I'm stuck with it. If I choose "different", "different" will happen. Simple as that.
Now, you and I both know that the average commuter's brain isn't turned to mush by the commute or by the fact that it's Monday and not Friday. We know that what's going on in the average human brain goes on by choice. We choose to exist rather than live - or, hopefully, vice versa. Ordinarily the choices that we make are automated and, if we're sharing an early-morning carriage with other members of the same normal crazy herd, it looks and feels OK. But it's not OK. It's your life... you can choose to live it to the full.
Over the weekend, I was regailed with tales of daring deeds by a retired pilot... someone whose behaviour is neatly encapsulated in his belief that his new SUV is so cool that "it's a piece of piss" to drive (I've no idea what that actually means!)
This guy flew long-haul on the kind of routes that don't immediately spring to mind for a weekend break - places like Turkmenistan and Kyrkystan! He thought his story about the child who fell ill on one flight was side-splittingly funny "We could just avoid having to make a detour if we could throw the little beggar out the over-wing exit!"
Or, more worryingly, that he'd get clearance for take-off in one airport at just the moment where he could taxi the aircraft down the hill and take off in one go, to save fuel, to avoid having to stop to refuel in Berlin. Apart from the time saved in Berlin, they'd save time in Heathrow by jumping the queue because the were "coming in light" or, to you and me, almost out of fuel.
It just proves the developmental psychologists are clueless when they imagine that adolescence ends at around 27 years of age!