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By Phil, March 1, 2010 2:37 pm

Reading Time: 2 minutes 48 seconds

Do what you love?

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I’ve developed a sick fascination with the British TV show Masterchef.   In the show 156 aspiring amateur chefs compete for the title of “Masterchef”.  They cook for two judges, an angry bald man and an equally irate Aussie who critique their food and slowly kill their dreams, one by one.

The Impossible Dream

My fascination is not with the food (although the contestant who cooked a tinned peach and tomato bread pudding was pretty special).  It lies with the contestants.  In reality TV, the head-shot is a vital tool for every director.   This is where we hear the ambition, the motivation, the dream.  Here are a few from the series so far:

“I do know what I want to do in life now, my passion is food.  My dream is to run a restaurant in the Scottish Highlands” Andrew (Property Developer)

“I want my life to be completely about food.  I want to do it full time.” Kirstie (Real Estate Broker)

“I’m very passionate about food – its been a hobby up until know and Masterchef will allow me to move it forward” Peter (Police Officer)

“I love cooking and to do that for a living would be a dream.  Masterchef means everything to me” Kerry (Full-time Mum)

Almost every contestant is hoping to make a living from cooking.  I love their passion for food and their huge dreams.  They put their heart and soul into this competition.  Yet at every turn, these lifelong ambitions are crushed.  Only one can be crowned Masterchef.

That Makes Me Mad

The show makes me angry.  When I hear contestant after contestant laying out their dream for a career in cooking I seethe.  “What’s stopping you?” I scream at the screen.  “Just go and do it”.

9 ways to explore your Passion

There are many ways to start making a living doing what you love.  I don’t think that entering a competition with a 1 in 156 chance of winning and no guarantees of success at the end is the best way.

So how could these contestants go about making a living from their passion?  The answer is one step at a time:

1. Do what you love – a lot. Cook, cook, cook for anyone and everyone.  Practice the skill you want to make a living from as much as possible
2. Develop your skills. Go to cookery school.  Learn the basic techniques and advanced skills.  Hone your style, and practice some more.
3. Join groups that share your passion. Find others who love food and build networks with them.
4. Interview people who already make a living from your passion. Start talking to restaurant owners and chefs.  Learn about the profession from those already in it.  Understand what you are committing to.
5. Get experience. Look for an opportunity to cook in a professional kitchen.  Volunteer to clean dishes for free.  Be a sous chef and chop onions all day.  Get into the lion’s den to see what life is really like.
6. Establish your expertise. Blog about food – share your passion with the world and get a following
7. Take small steps to make money. Write a cookbook and sell it online – find a way to make a small living in a risk free way from food
8. Write a business plan – look at the financial realities of being a cook or owning a restaurant and see how that fits with your other values in life.  Get experts and your network to review the plan.
9. Start increasing your commitment. Set up a street stand to sell food, or take a part-time job in a kitchen

None of these actions are too difficult in themselves, yet combined they will help to live the passion.  Following these steps would allow the contestants to test out if this really is the dream they were looking for, and build the skills and experience to succeed.

If you are ready in making a doing what you love, think about how these steps might work for you.  You can start taking action to explore the possibilities and start making the dream a reality.

What is your passion in life?  What would it mean to make a living from it?  What advice can you share on making this happen?  Please share your thoughts with the LoL Community.  Thank you.

Picture credit : Tracy Hunter (Flickr Creative Commons)

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By Phil, February 18, 2010 5:29 pm

Reading Time: 3 minutes and 12 seconds

Get off the Hamster Wheel

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Have you ever felt like you’re stuck on the hamster wheel – running as fact as you can and going nowhere?

Life can be seen as the sum total of all the choices we’ve ever made.  Every day we’re faced with hundreds of decisions – some inconsequential such as which brand of toothpaste to buy, some very important such as choosing a new career direction.

It is what it is….

Many people believe that our life is determined by fate and that there is no way to influence what happens to us.   This theory suggests that we have no choice in any events in our life.  Living by this philosophy can lead to giving up on life.  In this world, our life is little more than a piece of driftwood floating on the stream of fate.

The Smarter Choice

The alternative mindset is that we live in a world full of choices.   From this view point, the world fills with possibility.  In a given situation we face a huge range of options. If you are in a meeting with your boss, you could choose to answer her questions earnestly and to the best of your ability, you could choose to be challenging and stand up for your views, or you could choose to run out of the door screaming and never come back.   Each choice has potential consequences and inevitably some consequences may appear preferable to others.  However, we have the power to choose.

The Hamster Wheel

Even if we believe in choices, it is easy to close ourselves down to our options.  We can get into a routine or a rut.  Life becomes about survival.  Welcome to The Hamster Wheel.

Getting off the Hamster Wheel can give us tremendous energy and power.  It allows you to feel in control of a given situation.

Choose Life

Over time and through self-reflection we can learn to slow down and see the bigger picture.  Once we realise we have options, life stops being about survival and starts to become about possibilities.  We step off the hamster wheel.

When we are making deliberate choices it becomes easier to take responsibility for our actions.  When we choose and commit to our actions we can own the results regardless of the apparent level of success.   We make choices, we commit to them, we accept the results and we grow as a person.

Exercise – Getting off the Hamster Wheel

This exercise is a quick way to get off the hamster wheel and learn to see all the options.  You can work through it in advance to plan your biggest decisions by doing it every morning.  This also works in the moment when you feel stuck on the hamster wheel.  Asking these questions opens us up to the reality that we do face options.

• What is the challenge that I face today / am facing right now?
• What are my options?
• What other choices could I make (regardless of how feasible they may be)?
• What could I do if I had no fear?
• Which choices best align with my values and who I am as a person?
• What support can I get in taking this choice with power and committing to it?

Getting off the hamster wheel and choosing life is a tremendously powerful approach to life.   Try it today and see what happens.

Picture credit – Sebastien Davies (from Flickr – Creative Commons)

Comments (6)

By Phil, January 20, 2010 5:33 pm

Reading time: 2 minutes and 45 seconds

Continuing the series on Finding Focus in 2010 – 3 powerful steps to beat procrastination and overcome fear.  Click here to subscribe and never miss another post – and you’ll help us get to our big target of 500 subscribers (currently 115).  Thank you!

“There is nothing to fear except fear itself” Franklin D. Roosevelt

Fear – gut-wrenching, stomach-churning foreboding.  Even thinking about fear sends a shiver down my spine.  Despite this, we should all be quite grateful to our biology for this emotion.  In its primal form it is there to protect us from harm – the sabre-tooth tiger hiding in the bushes or falling over the edge of a cliff.   Unfortunately this instinct can also be a real obstacle to finding focus in our lives.  It can paralyse us with inactivity, drive procrastination and avoidance, and distract us from the here and now.  Feeling the fear and doing it anyway may be a  a cliché, however learning to manage fear can increase our focus and effectiveness .

When we feel afraid, our ever-active brains conjure up a future scenario that typically involves failure and impending doom.  Before we know it, looking for a new and more fulfilling job leads to us being rumbled by the boss, fired, losing our homes and destitute on the street, stealing to feed our families.  All this imagination requires a lot of energy and takes our eye off the ball of what is happening in the present moment.  Fear also generates powerful hormonal responses in our body (that tightness in the stomach) that literally make us freeze.  Gripped by fear, it is normal to abandon that important phone call, and find something less scary to do (this is where Google and Facebook often kick in for me).  This often causes us to lose all focus on what needed to be done and go into a loop of procrastination and delay.

Learning to understand and manage fear is the first step to overcoming it.  Here is a simple three-step process to start dealing with fear:

1. Find your fear

The first step to making a change is to understand what is happening.  Next time you find yourself procrastinating and wasting time, or avoiding an important task, stop for a minute.  The first thing to do is to figure out what is going on, and these questions may help:

• What activity am I procrastinating about?
• What is behind this – what am I afraid of?  (The most common fears include, fear of taking a risk, fear of failure, fear of rejection and fear of humiliation)
• What unfortunate consequences am I anticipating and attaching to this activity?  (Let your imagination really go wild here).

Often we internalise and hide our fears, so take a little extra time to ensure you get to the root cause of the problem.

2. Rationalise your fear

Next, it is time to explore the situation.  Fear tends to be irrational and based on our own wild imagination’s ability to whip up a terrifying scare story.  Think through some of these questions:

• How realistic is the scenario I’ve created?
• What are other potential outcomes?
• What would the consequences of these be?
• How would I handle these consequences in reality?
• How rational is this fear, really?
• What is the best decision to make in the moment based on my desired outcome?

The objective here is to come back into the present moment and decide the most logical step to take right now.   If you are still stuck with your fear, try this next step:

3. The Power of Ten

Think through the activity you are planning to undertake.  Now ask yourself if you are to do it, how important are the potential consequences in ten hours time?  What about in ten days, ten weeks, ten months or ten years.  Use these answers to assess the fear you feel.  This helps to provide a better perspective on making choices and to diminish fear of the future implications.

Fear is a hardwired into our DNA and learning to manage fear’s effects takes time and determination.  Not one day goes by where I don’t feel afraid about something I need to do.  However, these simple steps can help us to be brave and achieve things we dreamed of but thought were impossible.  This process helps us to take life one small and determined step at a time and be more focussed every day.

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By Phil, January 12, 2010 6:19 pm

Reading time: 3 minutes and 25 minutes

Find your focus

“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift, that’s why its called the present” Eleanor Roosevelt

Finding your focus feels absolutely amazing!  The feeling of being absolutely together, engaged, energised and able to give our full attention to whatever we are doing is pretty much unbeatable.  The biggest irony is that when we are focused it is completely effortless to be there, yet it can be one of the most difficult things to achieve.  This month on Less Ordinary Living we are going to explore how you can become more focussed, so click here to subscribe and enjoy every step of this journey.

I think of being focussed as living in the moment – being completely present in our current situation.  When our mind is in this state, we are able to give all of our effort and attention to whatever we are doing or whoever we are with.  If you’ve met a master in being focused, you’ll probably also notice that they have a presence about them  Presence means living in the moment and it is another benefit of finding focus.

Probably the biggest single factor that blurs our focus is our mind.  We’ve all been gifted with a powerful super computer in our head.  However this computer keeps running 24 hours a day, throwing out thoughts and powerful emotions.  These thoughts and emotions typically relate to two things:

1)   The past – our brain is constantly picking over all the data it has taken in from our life to date.  It generates thoughts about what we have experienced, our actions, and the world around us all the time.   We pick over a conversation with our boss, how we reacted to our partner last weekend, our apparent failures to stick to our new years resolution – anything really.  These thoughts also generate emotions which are our response to the stories we are creating – guilt, shame, embarrassment, sadness, joy.

2)   The future – our brain is also imagining the future based on the data available to it.  We create endless permutations about what will happen if….  We tell ourselves that we couldn’t possibly do something because we don’t have the skills or we visualise all the terrible outcomes of taking an action (unemployment, bankruptcy, homelessness, starvation).  Sometimes we daydream about the good things that might happen, and then the dark shadow of fear appears – I couldn’t do that it would be too risky.  The emotions arising when our mind wanders to the future include excitement, anticipation and quite often fear.

The problem with all this is that when our mind is stuck in the past or the future, it blurs our focus.  We lose track of what is happening right now.   When our mind wanders we cannot be present – we phase out of conversations, we start procrastinating because we want to avoid our fears, we blow off our to do list because it our project is doomed to failure in a hundred nasty ways we’ve imagined.

So how do we start to deal with this conundrum and become more present and focussed?  Here are two approaches that will start this process based on my experience:

1)   Awareness. The first step is to become aware of what is going on in our head  Learning to detach from our thoughts and emotions is a powerful step in becoming more focussed.  Try this exercise to become more aware of what is going on upstairs:

• Sit still and take a few deep breaths – try to clear your mind – keep a pen and paper handy
• Try to focus all your attention on your breathing for 3 to 5 minutes
• Thoughts will naturally emerge – when they do, simply observe them and write them down, then return to concentrating on your breathing
• When you are finished, review your list.  Consider where the thoughts came from, which ones were taking you to the past and which to the future, and also consider how this frequency of thoughts affects your concentration and focus.

If you repeat this exercise every day for a week, you’ll start to learn how to detach from your thoughts and become more aware of them.  As you get more proficient, start to become aware of your thoughts and emotions throughout the day.  You may find that even after a week you’ll start to find more focus through this practice.

2)   Focus your attention.  If we train our mind to focus and be in the zone for short periods of time, over time we can learn to keep our mind from jumping into the past or future.  This simple 5 minute exercise is a simple way to do this:

• Find an object that you find beautiful or interesting (a flower, piece of art etc).
• Study the object intensely – take in its shape, colour, texture, structure, smell, feel.  Bring all your attention onto this object and bring your mind into focus on it.  Become absorbed in the object and make it the sole point of your attention for 5 minutes.
• If thoughts arise simply acknowledge them and move your attention back to the object in hand.
• Enjoy this time and at the end, reflect on what it felt like to be really present and focussed.

Again if you practice this exercise repeatedly you’ll find your concentration and focus improving.  You’ll learn to clear your mind of distracting thoughts and emotions from the past or about the future.

So we’ve started our journey towards finding that amazing feeling of focus consistently.  Tune in next time to continue finding your focus, or click here to subscribe so you don’t miss it.

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By Phil, December 1, 2009 7:24 pm

Reading Time: 3 minutes and 49 seconds

We’re hoping to get 100 new subscribers as our Christmas present, so if you enjoy this, please click here to subscribe.  Thank you.

Are you still keeping your New Year’s Resolutions for 2009?  A quick show of hands please.  To the valiant few with hands aloft, congratulations.  For the rest of us mere mortals, don’t despair.  A study by clinical psychologists at the University of Scranton showed that of people making a resolution, only 75% made it past the first week and less than 50% were maintaining their resolution after 6 months.  New Year’s Resolutions are one way that we try to make our lives happier, so how can we improve our chances of keeping them?

Making a resolution is usually a commitment to a lasting behavioural change – whether it be exercising more, eating healthily or changing the balance of how we spend our time.  Changing ingrained habits and behaviour can be extremely difficult.

New Year’s Resolutions are typically an all or nothing immediate leap into the deep end of change.  They are the equivalent of putting all your chips on number 23 at the roulette wheel of life.  Psyhcologists who have studied successful change have found that taking a longer-term approach which has a clear strategy can dramatically improve our odds of successfully changing.

The powerful “States of Change” model created by James Prochaka and Carlo diClemente in the 1970s outlines a robust six step approach to making lasting personal change.  Following these steps with due care and effort has been proven to increase the chances of making a successful change:

Step 1: Precontemplation. Prior to making a change we need to admit we have something to change. In this stage we have yet to admit that something is worth changing, although the issue may be buzzing around in the back of our mind.  This stage is sometimes thought of as being “in denial” due to our claims that a pattern or behaviour is not a problem.

Step 2: Contemplation. During this stage, we start to consider the benefits of making a change, however we often focus on the downsides.  This creates fear of change and can lead to extended procrastination and delay before moving forward.  The contemplation stage is about admitting that we want to change and seeing the positives of the change (for example, if I were to lose weight I would feel healthier, happier and fit into my old clothes in the wardrobe).

Some of the key questions to answer at this stage are:

What is your motivation for wanting to change?

What are some of the benefits of changing?

What may be holding you back from changing?

What are some factors that could assist you in making a change?

Step 3: Preparation. During this phase, we start lay the groundwork for the wider change ahead.  We may start to introduce smaller changes into our life.  For example, if you are planning to get fitter, you might start walking to the next bus stop each day on the way to work.  This stage requires creating our plans for a successful change.  Good preparation is vital to success and some of the key things to do include:

• Find people with a similar goal that might support you, or find others to hold you accountable.
• Research as much as you can about the area you want to make a change in – find out about others who have been successful in making the same change and how they did it.
• Identify and write down your motivation and inspiration for making the change.
• Create a clear plan for change and design a process for monitoring and rewarding progress.
• Design contingency plans for “falling off the wagon” and prepare yourself for this happening.

Step 4: Taking action. This is where the rubber hits the road.  If your preparation has been thorough, you’ll start executing on your plan and using your support systems.  Its important to take action in the knowledge that changing personal habits takes dedication and time to achieve.  Ingraining a new habit can take months or even years to achieve and will almost inevitably involve ups and downs along the path.  This step will need you to reward success and forgive yourself for slip-ups.

Step 5: Maintenance. Once you’ve taken action successfully, you’ll start to see the fruits of your labours.  If you’re objective was to stop smoking, you may last a day, or a week without a cigarette.  The key to maintenance is to find ways to avoid being tempted to relapse (for example, avoiding a trip to the pub with your old smoking buddies) and rewarding yourself for success (for example, treat yourself to a massage to relieve the stress of nicotine withdrawal).

Step 6: Relapse. Relapse is a normal and inevitable part of making a life change.  If not managed correctly, relapse can undermine all the good work that you have put in, and take away the self-confidence you’ve built up.  The key to moving through a relapse is to understand the reason for falling down, and to work out the best way to avoid a repeat.  Remembering that everyone who has successfully made a change has been through this process can be helpful in forgiving yourself.  Once you’ve understood the relapse, it is best to go back to the preparation phase and “get back on the horse”.

Finally, the best chance of keeping your resolution in 2010, is to start at Step 1 today.  Following the six-step change model above, and particularly focusing on the preparation phase prior to jumping in, is proven to increase your chance of making a lasting change in your life.  So get started on making 2010 your best year yet!

If you missed our three step guide to Thinking Big for the next decade, click here to get started….