I’ve just been adding a few appointments to the diary for next week and I was thinking that as it’s Thursday that we’re nearing the end of the week. It was then that I noticed that actually Thursday is the middle of the week (Monday to Sunday) and there is still almost half a week left of this one. It strikes me that perhaps time is the only thing we treat in this way… for example there are not many people who get half way through a drink and think that they are nearing the end of it!
It’s so easy for us to slip into the trap of living from our free time to our next free time (for most, weekend to weekend) that we forget about the moment. Work occupies so much of our lives and for the vast majority of people, there is no excitement or will to be working. I feel privileged to be doing something that I love, to the point that it no longer feels like work. So for most, there are 5 days of 7 spent dealing (and accumulating stress) with something that enables us to have 2 days that we can call our own. To me it seems as though this is a really sorry state of affairs and one that can be really helped by a shift in attitude.
I’m always banging on about how we need dreams and goals in our lives to make sense and meaning out of the work that we do and I guess that’s one way to help us to remain present and focused during the times we spend at work. If you find yourself in this space of living from precious weekend to precious weekend, with the inconvenience of work in between then the chances are that you do not have personal goals in place to be working towards. It becomes too easy to be tired when you get home and even bring work home to the point where you have neither the time nor energy to do anything in your free time. I suppose this is what is called the daily grind!
In the absence of finding what you love to do for a living, then find what you love to do in your spare time and use your living to fund and facilitate that. I often have clients who tell me that they are in a place that they wouldn’t describe as being depressed, but they are feeling unhappy about their lives. In the vast majority of these cases, simply plugging them back into their personal goals in life, transforms how they are feeling and they are able to move forward in all aspects of their lives.
If you are living your life from weekend to weekend or day-off to day-off, then make sure you have some personal goals in place that will help you to keep upbeat and positive in the stressful times you may be experiencing.
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I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like this: you feel unshakable and if things get in the way, you shrug them off or deal with them fast. It’s like being in flow, in the moment or in the zone. In my experience it’s a wonderful place to be and for me it comes about when I am really excited about and totally focused on something.
The real thing here is to establish how you get into that place and then how do you maintain it? To me it boils down to having a purpose or meaning that you are single-mindedly committed to. In that place you are full of confidence (even if a little nervous excitement is present) and great things seem to happen. I think I’ve mentioned before that an old mentor of mine had an expression “Moments of Intensity” and certainly these feel like them.
So how do you find your purpose or meaning? Well, that’s a tough one. I’ve recommended Viktor Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search For Meaning” which will undoubtedly help. I believe that the first place to start is to consider the roles that you have in your life, such as parent, partner, child, sibling, employee, boss, business owner etc and find things in there that you can begin to define your meaning. The bottom line is to find what your life is all about, which is as simple as you stating what that is. As Neale Donald Walsch says in The Secret, there is no blackboard in the sky with your purpose written on it that you have to find. It is your responsibility to define it for yourself and then live your life to the full, expressing yourself through that purpose. There certainly can be more than one, of course one is a good place to start.
As an Executive and Personal Life Coach, I experience the most amazing things with my clients. The majority of the time, the discussion centres around their goals, dreams, hopes, aspirations etc. for the future. This of course is the main difference between Coaching and Counselling (both of course have their place).
The most astounding sessions occur when a person discovers their inner desires and dreams, that they were previously only superficially aware. Given the opportunity in a session to just talk, people amaze themselves by their level of understanding and knowledge of themselves. Even people who think or believe they have no goals, find things deep within themselves that they can strive for and will ultimately bring meaning and purpose to their existence. Of course, there is no secret meaning or purpose, nor is there a destined meaning or purpose for any of us. As Neale Donald Walsch states in The Secret, “Your purpose is what you say it is.”
The beauty is in the discovery. The un-covering of desires and dreams that can allow a person to change from one who simply exists, to one who creates. They create opportunity, wealth, health, leadership, joy, happiness and many, many other wonderful things in their lives.
We’d all be a whole lot happier if perhaps we understood that the “purpose of life” is to figure out what the “purpose of my life” is.
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