Raising the bar

I sometimes think that we live life like a high-jump competition.

We take on new things and have a good go at clearing the bar.  Every time we succeed, we raise the bar a little higher.  Eventually we’ll raise the bar so high that we can’t clear it any more.

Then we feel gutted.  Beaten.  Defeated.

All those clearances we made before feel like wasted effort – in the end we were a big loser!  All our focus goes on the failure.

This approach relies on some rigid rules about how to be successful in life that are hard-wired into our brains.

The Rules

Rule 1 – Strive to be perfect

We must always push us to keep striving to be higher, faster, stronger.  We strive for perfection, to be better every time.

Rule 2 – Never, ever stop

Like the high-jumper, when we achieve our goals, we barely stop to celebrate.  We have to go and get focused for the next jump.  The next task.  The next hurdle to negotiate.

Rule 3 – Failure is not an option

When we fail, we feel crushed, fixate on our failure.  It feels like the end of the world.

How did this happen?

Evolve or die

I guess we have to thank our ancient ancestors for these rules.

Back then it was survival of the fittest – evolve or die.

You had to keep raising the bar – inventing a better spear, learning how to make fire, how to be a great hunter.

Stopping was not an option – life was urgent and primal.

Failure was the end of the world – literally

I’m still thankful that we have strong survival instincts. Yet in our modern world, I reckon it might be time to break these rules apart.

To live a remarkable, high quality life requires a more flexible approach to life than our primal ancestors took.  We need to break all the rules.

Breaking the rules

Stop pushing so hard

Striving to be perfect is such a heavy burden to carry.  We can always find someone richer, smarter, more charismatic to compare ourself against.

Perfection is just an imaginary concept to compete against – it lacks any kind of definition.  It’s like trying to find the end of the rainbow.

Instead of striving for perfection, how about aspiring to do the best you can?  Frankly you won’t always succeed, however hard you try.  Welcome to human!

If you try to do the best you can, enjoy each experience as much as possible and accept the outcome it is hard to ask for more.

Sometimes that means that you’ll lower the high jump bar rather than raising it, and be happier for it.

Give yourself a break

Never stopping is exhausting.

In the modern world, we have the luxury of being able to stop and reflect.  To smell the roses.  To day-dream, relax, look after ourselves and recharge our batteries.  We have the space to prepare for the next great challenge or project.

For most people life flows in peaks and troughs of energy and activity.  Your body and minds will tell you when it is time to go for it and when to slow down and take a break.  If you don’t listen you’ll be cruising for a break down.

So when you clear a jump, take a while to enjoy it.  Perhaps rather than resetting the bar, find a deck chair and take a nap.

Enjoy failure

“If you’re not failing 90% of the time, you’re not trying hard enough”.

The current world high-jump record is held by Javier Sotomayor of Cuba at 2m 45cm.  Check out his jump.

Sotomayor didn’t just wake up one morning, hop out of bed and successfully jump over 8ft.  Sotomayor’s record is the result of a lifetime of failure.

Javier has inevitably failed many more than he has ever succeeded.  All the hours of training involved failing to clear the bar thousands of times.  He has learned to reflect on and learn from his failures to figure out new approaches to clear the next height.

If he had taken his first failure at the age of 5 as an utter disaster and given up, his personal best would probably be about 40cm.

If you can learn to enjoy failure, to reflect on it, to see the good things that happened as part of the failure, two things happen.

First, life becomes a pleasure all the time, not just when you succeed.

Second, you’ll learn more quickly and find success more easily in the long run

Sometimes in the high jump you’ll fail.  If you can enjoy that failure and learn from it, you’ve succeeded in breaking the rules.

Over to you

• What rules do you follow in life?
• Where did they come from?
• What would happen if you broke all the rules?

Photo credit: Selective Focus Photography,  Lord Jim (Flickr Creative Commons)

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Change your story, Change you life

Part 2 of Spring Clean your mind – subscribe now and get a 6-step process for a clearer mind and better living delivered to your inbox

What stories do you tell the world about yourself?  If you changed it how would your life change?

What is a story and how can it make a difference?  Here is a life-story in 87 words:

“I was born in the north of England in the 1970s during a time of economic turmoil.  I never really felt comfortable or confident as a child, and I was bullied by the other kids in my neighbourhood.  At school, I did reasonably well, somewhere in the middle.  I stumbled my way into an ok university, again with average results.  When I graduated, through sheer desperation, I took a job with an accounting firm – certainly not what I was passionate about, but frankly about what I deserved.”

• How do you respond to this story?
• What sort of person do you think this is?
• How do you think they feel?
• How would you respond to this person if you met them?
• What lasting impression would you have about them?

In less than 60 seconds, this story has set the foundation for how you relate to someone, and we all know that first impressions are hard to change.

This, of course, is my story. Or more importantly, one version of my story.

Everything in this story really did happen to me.  If someone asked me to “tell me about yourself” I could choose to tell this story.

Two truths about storytelling

Two things that happen when we tell stories:

1) We choose which “facts” to include in the story.

The building blocks of stories are experiences and memories, which we often think of as “facts”. When we tell the world our story, we have literally billions of these building blocks to choose from.  In my story I count somewhere in the region of 16 that I selected to let you know about me.

You may think that your story is your story – yet you choose the building blocks in every story you tell yourself or anyone else

2) We add our own editorial.

We choose how to present these “facts”.  We pick the tone and the editorial direction.

Clearly in my story, I’ve chosen to tell a hard luck story.  At every turn I am playing my little violin.

“I was born in a time of economic turmoil” – really?  I was 1 year old at the time and my parents both had jobs.  Yet I chose to add this little zinger in.  I’m trying to make you feel sorry for me.

“I never felt comfortable or confident.”  Find me anyone who can’t say something similar about parts of their childhood.

“About what I deserved” – now I’m busy making judgements about myself.  I’m telling you that I’m not self-confident, that I feel pretty worthless and inviting you to feel the same way.

In storytelling, the narrator chooses whether to create a hero, anti-hero or villain.  We have the choice on HOW to tell the story.

Our life is little more than the sum of all our experiences.  When we tell others about who we are, we tell them our story. We weave together some selective memories from the past, and bind them together with our interpretation of those “facts”.

Choice is good

The important thing is that we always have a choice when we tell any story.  We can pick the building blocks and we have a choice over the narrative glue we use to stick them together.

Once we become aware of what stories we tell and what impact that has on us and the world, we can start to tell stories that we love and stop telling stories that drag us down.

Here is my story again in 87 words:

“I grew up in a happy home and went to a school that I loved.  I thrived and was able to study history at a great university, after travelling the world in my gap year.  I met and married my soul mate along the way.  I’ve been blessed to be able to travel and live in different cultures.  It took me a while to find what I love to do, however now I’ve found my vocation and am thriving by helping others live life to the full.”

Ask yourself the same questions about this person that you did about the first story.

When we change our story, we really can change our world.  We also change how the world around us responds.

Even writing the first story, I could feel myself getting drained of energy.  I literally slumped in my chair, and felt overcome by worry.

Writing the second story, I felt my energy growing.  I felt great about myself, clear and confident.

In my mental spring clean, I’m going to look at the stories I tell the world.  For each story, I’ll ask:

1) Choosing Facts

• What facts did I choose to share?
• Why did I choose these facts?
• What other facts could I have chosen?

2) Narrative / editorial

• What kind of story am I try to tell?
• What is this story telling the outside world about me?
• What is this story telling me about me?

3) Alternatives / changing the story

• What do I really want to tell the world?
• What other stories could I tell that would serve me better?

If you are taking part in spring-cleaning your mind, ask yourself the same questions.

Good stories to look at include

• How you introduce yourself at a work or networking function
• What stories you tell at a job interview
• What stories you are telling on your resume
• What stories you share with your friends
• What stories you tell your family, what stories you tell your other half and if applicable children.

I know I’ve found some stories I love and others that need junking.

Try changing your story and see how your life changes.

Next time – we’ll look at the stories we tell ourselves.

Picture credit : Victoria Peckham (From Flickr Creative Commons)

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Spring Clean your Mind

A five part series to find clarity, focus and the energy to be your extraordinary.  Click here to subscribe and have every post delivered fresh to your inbox!

Spring is in the air!  Nature is waking up.  The earth is blooming with fresh buds, blossom on the trees, a whiff of hope in the air.

Spring is a time of renewal, new life, new possibilities, new hope, new beginnings, fresh thinking.  It’s a time to emerge from the shadows of hibernation, shake off the lethargy and face the future with joy.

An important tradition at this time of year is spring cleaning.  This is the ritual of cleaning house, sprucing up our dwelling, clearing away the clutter.  We cast off the baggage we’ve picked up over the winter.

This year, I’m planning to take the opportunity to spring clean my mind.  I want to sort through some of the dusty old boxes I’ve been storing in my mental attic.  I’m pretty sure that there are some hidden treasures I can polish up and enjoy.  I also know that there is a lot of junk up there that I no longer want to hump around with me.

My Mental Spring Clean will cover four areas:

Stories

We all spend a huge amount of time and energy creating stories about our identity.  We tell the outside world all about ourselves – what we do, our social status, how we interact with others, our expectations from the world around us.

We also tell ourselves stories about who we think we are.  I know that one story I was telling myself was that I had to do everything myself because there is no-one out there who would want to collaborate with me.  Since I recognized this story and started to change it, I’ve found that suddenly people are starting to want to get involved with my projects.  A simple change of story and led to a big difference.

Our stories are usually based on some simple facts, however we choose how to weave these facts together.  We also have the choice of which facts to select in creating the story.  Understanding the power of our personal narrative and how we communicate it can hugely change our lives for the better.  Change our story and we change our life.

Games

The psychiatrist Eric Byrne wrote the seminal book Games People Play in 1964.  He identified the human need for attention and the need to fill the unstructured void of time.  Byrne identified that human interaction is based on conversations and analyzed these transactions in more detail.

He found that almost everyone plays games to get attention from others.  Often we don’t realize what we are doing.  Some of the games Byrne talks about include “See what you made me do”, “Ain’t it awful”, “If it weren’t for them” and “Stupid”.  Any of these sound familiar to you?

I know that I’ve spent most of my life playing “Just good enough”.  In this game, I try just hard enough to get the result I want without standing out from the crowd by being the best.  It is a game to keep me safe from unwanted attention, yet it also stops me from taking risks, really going for it, or feeling fulfilled.

In this mental spring clean, we can assess the games we are playing, figure out which ones are helpful and which ones are holding us back.

Gremlins / The voice in my head

This one is an old chestnut.  I have that horrible voice in my head that tells me;  “you’re not good enough, you can’t do that”, “who would listen to someone like you anyway”, “get over yourself, you’re no-one”.

These gremlins are powerful forces.  Typically we created them in our childhood to protect us from a situation that would have been detrimental.  Perhaps to overcome a fear of being embarrassed, we created a gremlin that stopped us answering questions in class.  The gremlin was there to keep us safe.

Often, this voice in our head has long since stopped being useful.  It stops us from taking action and being our best self with the old warnings.  In this mental spring clean, we’ll look at how to gracefully retire some of these gremlins and free ourselves to be whatever we want to be.

Habits

As children, we sponge up huge amounts from the world around us.  We learn routines about how to live our lives.  We pick up habits about how to behave from our parents, peers and everyone we meet.

Habits can be extremely positive, like a regular exercise routine, the process we use to keep ourselves organised or taking 10 minutes each morning to plan our day.  They can also be unconstructive – procrastinating, avoiding using the telephone when we know we should, drinking to relieve stress.

To some extent, we are what we do, and these habits become a large part of our identity.  We can understand more about how habits form, identify which habits to change and apply some of the rules of change to create positive new habits.

Get Cleaning

This Mental Spring Clean will look at each area in more detail and give practical advice on how to change for the better.  I’m planning to use the journey to create a mind that feels shiny, fresh and new  – ready to face the renewal of spring.  Please join me and enjoy some mental sorting, dusting, cleaning and polishing.  Let the Mental Spring Clean begin.

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Life's Too Short

To make the most of every day, click here to subscribe and get every Less Ordinary posting.

“Every morning, we are born again”  Buddhist Maxim

How do you get through the day?  A simple question.  What keeps you going when the going gets tough?  One common way is to put our heads down and soldier on.  Humans have a remarkable ability to put on a suit of armour that protects them from the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.  Another way is to ride the emotional roller-coaster.  Like all roller-coasters we tend to feel sick with fear and anticipation on the way up and scream on the way down.  These approaches both get us through the day, but it feels like a struggle to survive.

Life shouldn’t be ordinary and it shouldn’t just be keeping our head above water.  It’s too easy to forget that our days are limited and precious.  I’ve found that creating some daily principles for living help me to be more intentional every day.  It gives me a foundation for how to approach life.  These rules help me to live life to the full.

What do daily principles look like?  Well here are mine:

1. Life is a Precious Gift – Make the most of it
2. Treat others as you’d like to be treated
3. Be authentic and true to your values
4. Find joy in everything you do
5. Inspire others to make the most of life
6. Work is love made life – put your heart into everything that you do

I created this list a few weeks ago.  I took myself out on an hour long run with the plan to capture the essence of how I’d like to live my life.  Running is my most creative place and the ideas just started to flow.  At the end (after mopping my sweaty brow), I wrote down my first draft.  I stewed on these for a day or two, made some changes and suddenly I had this powerful list.  Now I have this list up in my office, on my fridge door, and carry it around on a card in my wallet.

We are born again each morning .  I love to review these ideas every morning to get my head in the game.  I’m able to set my intention for how I’d like to be that day.  Just to be reminded that life is precious every morning is crucial.  When I wake up feeling sad, stressed or unexcited I’m reminded to find joy in life. Most importantly the principles take away the temptation to simply survive – I remember that life is too short to be ordinary.

What are your principles?  How do you remember to live life, rather than just surviving it?  Please leave a comment and share your thoughts.

Picture credit – Moustaque

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Reading time: 2 minutes 48 seconds

The next in the series on finding your focus – click here to subscribe and never miss another post.

Oprah Winfrey is one of most focussed people on plant.  From humble origins she has built a one woman media machine.  Over the last 25 years she has logged over 4,000 hours of the Oprah Show, speaking to audiences in over 100 countries.  Her empire includes a magazine, book club and one of the world’s most popular websites.  Oprah is the only person to have appeared on every Time Magazine list of the 100 most influential people in the world every year since its inception.  When Oprah speaks, the world listens.

So how does Oprah stay so focussed.  Here are 4 of her secrets:

1) Be Authentic – Find your Vocation

“The Biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams”

Oprah walks her truth.  Her personal drive comes from the feeling that she was put on earth for a purpose.  We all have a unique set of skills, strengths and abilities and personal values to serve.  Finding a vocation – what you were put on earth to do – creates massive personal focus.  Think about what you were put on earth to do – it needn’t be as grand an ambition as Oprah, Gandhi or Martin Luther King – perhaps it is to be a great parent, to care for others in your community, or to design a new technology to help mankind.  If you can find your purpose, you’ll feel the urge to use every second on earth to achieve this.

2) Work Smarter – be more effective than everyone else

“The Big Secret in life is there is no Big Secret.  Whatever your goal, you can get there if you are willing to work”

Oprah is renowned as one of the hardest working people on the planet – she never stops.  Yet her secret is that she has learned to work effectively – to put her energy and attention into the most important activities and let the less important things go.  Learning to work smarter is a key way to find more personal focus – it will free up energy and help you feel more fulfilled.  Later in this series, I’ll share some key ideas on how to work smarter and be more effective.

3) Never give up – don’t let them drag you down

“We are each responsible for our own lives – no other person is or even can be”

Oprah could have given up before she even started.  What are the odds of a girl born into poverty in rural Mississippi to a teenage mother becoming one of the most influential people on the planet.  Early in her career many media insiders were scathing of her rise, Time Magazine writing “In a field dominated by white males, she is a black female of ample bulk. As interviewers go, she is no match for, say, Phil Donahue.”  Her secret is the ability to live in the moment and to face triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters the same.  Oprah doesn’t’ operate in a rose-tinted wonderland where everything is wonderful.  She takes a realistic, pragmatic approach to success and failure.  She looks for the learning in every success – how to be better next time.   Think about how you can cultivate a realistic determination to achieve your vocation.

4) Help others – Follow a Higher Calling

“What I know for sure is that what you give comes back to you”

Oprah is a woman on a mission.  Everything she does is designed to help other people to make the most of their lives.  By putting the welfare of others above that of herself, she has selected a motivation beyond serving her own ego and needs.  Finding a motivation that goes beyond ourself is powerful way to increase our focus.  When others are depending on our actions, it is harder to find an excuse or wimp out of helping.  To increase your focus, consider the motivation behind your actions and look for opportunities to serve the greater good where possible.

Of course, there is only one Oprah.  Finding your focus is a very personal process, yet we can learn from her example.  One way to this is to try modelling Oprah.  Pick a day, think about the focus needed to achieve what she has and then try being her for the day.  Concentrate on acting authentically, being as effective and focussed on your priorities as possible, being indomitable and genuinely helping others.  What did it feel like to be Oprah for the day?  Please leave a comment and let everyone in the Less Ordinary community know.

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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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2010 is here, the first year of a new decade.  This decade is so new that it doesn’t even have a nickname yet.  For me, this symbolic change brings with it a combination of emotions – excitement at the possibilities ahead, trepidation at some of the complex challenges out there, but most of all hope for the amazing possibilities in the future.

At Less Ordinary Living, the vision is to help you live your life to the full.  I believe that everyone has vast potential to make a difference.  This year my goal is to be a catalyst to help you make the most of your potential and fulfil your ambitions.  With dedication and support, everything is possible and it would be an honour to be part of your support system this year.

The plan this year is to cover key topics to help you grow and develop each month.  The theme for January is Finding Focus in 2010.  Our worlds are becoming so complex and full of distraction that it can be a real challenge simply to stay focused on what is really important.  Over the next month, I’ll cover some key techniques and ideas for developing an inner sense of calm, taking control of your time and increasing your personal effectiveness.

If you think that this would be helpful for you, please do subscribe by clicking here to make sure you don’t miss any of the series.

Beyond January, we’d like your help to shape the future direction of Less Ordinary Living.  Please leave a comment or email me at phil@lessordinaryliving.com to share:

What are your goals and plans for this year?

What are the biggest challenges you face?

What are you excited about?

What are you afraid of?

How can we best support you in fulfilling your potential in 2010?

I look forward to hearing from you and sincerely wish you a very Happy New Year.

Phil

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The Lost Art of Being Happy – by Tony Wilkinson – Reading time : 3 minutes and 24 seconds

The Lost Art of Being Happy

It’s tempting to think that happiness is achieved by solving life’s problems. But if you wait to be happy until all your problems are solved you will never be happy, because when today’s problems are gone others will take their place. If you are going to live happily you have to live with your problems.

I worked for twenty years in the City of London, but few of the rich and powerful people I met seemed happier than poorer folk. In the course of writing my book, The Lost Art of Being Happy: Spirituality for Sceptics (Findhorn Press) I finally realised why. The book shows that living happily depends on cultivating inner peace. It’s a very old idea, of course, but I’ve worked on the practical details as they can be applied today.

Living happily depends mainly on your inner life, meaning your thoughts, emotions, desires – your entire mental and emotional scene. Happiness is about what you think and believe, how you feel, how problems affect you. This may sound obvious, but often we focus instead on our external lives, on getting and spending and “having fun” and then wonder why we are not happy. But it’s when our inner lives are serene that we are happiest – and this is inner peace.

The difficulty is that our inner lives are based on patterns and habits. You don’t choose, occasion by occasion, how you respond inside. This happens and you feel angry; that happens and you feel sad. Because of these habits, events don’t necessarily leave you with inner peace. So the key is to change the patterns and acquire new inner habits.

Deliberately learned habits are of course skills. Inner skills are very like virtues, but if you think of them as skills rather than virtues you benefit from a liberating shift. Instead of “I must become a better person” you can think: “I could live more happily if I worked on my skills”. It’s a process of training yourself, like all skill learning.

I suggest five main groups of skills, although the training system is less important than the commitment to devote time to improving your inner life skills. Practice is the key and it requires effort but the reward is what we all want most – deep happiness. Here are the five:

1 Mindfulness: The problem most of us have with thought is having too much of it – the worrying and mental “chattering” our minds are prone to. Mindfulness is awareness without the chattering. Concentrating on your breathing is one way to practise but many people achieve the same focus through sport, dance or martial arts. Mindfulness is a key inner skill because, as it gets stronger, it lets you focus on your own inner life and catch your habits in the act. Once you can see what they do the change you are seeking often happens of its own accord.

2 Benevolence: It comes as a surprise when you first hear it but benevolence or love starts off as a practical skill which counteracts negative emotions like anger and hatred, terrible wreckers of happiness. Try it the next time someone annoys you: put yourself in their place and ask yourself what they might be thinking or feeling to behave like that. It doesn’t mean they should get away with it, but if you get into the habit of thinking more tolerantly – understanding that their actions are also ruled by inner habits – you’ll find you can react with less anger. And less anger equals more happiness for you.

3 Story skills: Your beliefs, including the ones you are almost unaware of because you have never questioned them, have great power over your life. Start to think of them as stories and it is easier to accept that other things might be true as well, or even instead. Even true stories only select the little bit of reality we are focusing on at the moment: no one story is the whole truth about any situation. This is not about make–believe, it’s about ‘reframing’ situations to look at them from a different perspective and see a different truth.

4 Letting-go: This is particularly helpful when we are unhappy not getting what we want. Generally, we are encouraged to think that more will make us happier, whether it’s clothes or money or even love. But wanting is a treadmill and to be happy you either have to satisfy all your desires (which is unlikely) or let go of some of them. Sometimes what we want is revenge or retribution, which is why forgiveness is an important letting-go skill: it’s not about letting anyone else off, it’s about letting ourselves off the hook of anger about the past.

5 Enjoyment skills: This last group includes patience, humour and especially gratitude. You don’t have to be grateful to someone, it’s enough to cultivate gratitude for things. Our minds naturally scan the environment for dangers, probably once a useful mechanism but it can make us unnecessarily pessimistic – focusing on the 5% we lack rather than the 95% we have. Cultivating gratitude will help redress the balance.

The important thing is to practise your skills, preferably until they operate without you thinking about them. Practice itself can be a rewarding way of life, a path between religion and materialism. I look on it as a form of secular spirituality, spirituality without any supernatural belief, because it has so much in common with traditional religious spiritual practice. But that’s just my way of looking at it. It’s the path to living happily if you follow it.

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We’re all human and change can be tough.  Its easy for us to get stuck in a rut, or in our comfort zone – and this can lead to our good intentions and Big Thinking dying on the vine.  Nasty things like fear and emotion can sometimes block us from action.

Getting unstuck and out of a rut is challenging.   I always start out by taking baby steps.  For example, looking at my personal vision and goals, my first step is to identify my most urgent goal.  Currently this is getting more involved in my community and building out my network of friends.  My goal in 5 years time is to be a leader of a community organisation, and to be an active member of a two other groups focused on areas of personal interest.  The next question is – what can I do this week to move forward with this?

I’ve learned that to successfully achieve goals like this I need to take two parallel tracks – taking actions in the world around me, and working on what goes on between my two ears in my internal world.  To achieve my goal I came up with the following plan that covers both areas:

1. Actions in the outside world – I’ve already researched community groups that interest me on the internet and identified an organisation called Slow Down London and a local running club.  I’ll commit to calling a representative of Slow Down London to find out more about how I can be involved.  I’ll also commit to going to the running club next week to see how I enjoy it.  Making these real life commitments and keeping them moves me towards my goal and vision.
2. Actions in my inner world – Although I’m a sociable and outgoing person, I have always avoided joining groups and societies.  Something inside me has held me back from this for all of my adult life.  I’ve been meaning to attend this running club for nearly a year now and haven’t done it.  To successfully achieve the goal in a sustainable way, I need to understand more about this and overcome this issue, or the initial actions I take will probably quickly fade away.  I’ll commit to observing the thoughts and emotions that come up this week as I take my first steps.  Perhaps I’ll identify a fear of rejection if I turn up to the running club and no-one talks to me the first time.  I know that I have a tendency to think I can do things better than anyone else (I’m wrong of course), and get frustrated in group situations, so I’ll look out for that feeling.  I’ll record the thoughts, emotions and stories I’m telling myself about groups, and spend time analysing them to see what is working for me and what isn’t.  I’ll come up with different ways to think about clubs and different stories to tell.  If I commit to this and work hard at it, it should make it easier for me to happily commit to clubs and societies in the future.

I know that joining a new group is hard for me and the physical action of doing so will help.  However, unless I can get my head straight, it will never get any easier.  So taking the first step, actually involves taking two steps and each is vital.  At the beginning, I said that making change is hard for us, and this explains why.

So how can you take your first step?  Follow this simple process to design your actions this week:

1)   Identify your most pressing challenge or area that you want to work on (for me, my community)

2)   Identify the specific area for development (for me, involvement in community groups)

3)   Design some specific actions to take that are realistic over the next week.  Remember that great journeys start with a single step, so don’t overdo it

4)   Think about how your thoughts, emotions, fears, beliefs and stories might be impacting your ability to be successful.  Determine to observe these over the next week without judgment and write these things down.  When did you feel fear and what was behind that?  What stories did you tell about yourself (I’m not good with new people) that might stop you in your tracks.  Consider which thoughts might be holding you back and analyse them – is that story, fear or emotion realistic?  How could you think in a different way or tell a different story that would be more helpful in achieving your goals?

This approach was difficult and frustrating when I first tried it, however over time and with practice it has become more instinctive.  If you can stick with it, you’ll find it gets easier to take the actions in the external world as you remove the mental and emotional blocks you’ve built up.  Week by week you’ll start to get unstuck and make steady progress towards living your vision and achieving your goals.

So now you have the three steps that I use to think big and make it happen– creating a vision, setting a 5 year plan, and taking external and internal steps to achieve this.  The world is your oyster, so think big and make the most of your life!

For the rest of this year, Less Ordinary Living will focus on making the most of 2010, so please subscribe to make sure you don’t miss a post!

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What could life look like in 5 years?

What could your life look like in 2015?  In the second part of this three part series on Thinking Big, the focus is on creating a clear picture of how your life could be in five years time (for music lovers, this post was inspired by the song 5 Years Time by Noah and the Whale)

What were you doing in 2005?  What was life like back then?  What were the most important things in your life?  What did you want your life to look like at the beginning of the next decade?  One thing I’ve found for myself is that life was a lot different 5 years ago.  A lot has changed, a lot has happened and I’ve learned many lessons (some easy, some pretty tough).  I also know that creating a plan back then, along with a certain female country singer has helped me to make the most of my life.

Five years ago, I was very happy in my personal life and quite dissatisfied with my professional life.  I was an accountant and couldn’t get excited or see the meaning in the work that I was doing.  My department was struggling and shipping people off to anywhere projects could be found for long periods of time.  At one point, I found myself in Minneapolis, working 14 hours plus a day, seven days a week, doing a repetitive task.  I was out of shape, bored and missing my wife and friends back home.  One night I drank most of a bottle of red wine, and found myself weeping into my pillow whilst listening to Sheryl Crow.  It was time to change and start thinking bigger.

In 2005, I started to think about what life could look like in 5 years time.  I realised that I couldn’t change everything overnight, but I started to formulate a picture of what my ideal personal and professional life could look like in 2010.  Professionally, I knew that I wanted work that I enjoyed, that allowed me to work with interesting people and most importantly was meaningful.  Personally I wanted to be a happier person, be able to react more calmly to life’s ups and downs, and to have enough time to enjoy life.

I started to get specific on each part of my life – career, family, health, financial, my community and my spiritual development.  Some of the areas were easier than others to think through and visualise.  I started with the question, what would be ideal in this aspect of my life in 5 years time?  When I got stuck, which I did with the career question, I then asked how could I find out?

To answer the career question, I started to look around me at people who seemed to enjoy their careers.  I asked them about the reality of their work – what they enjoyed and what made it meaningful for them.  I also looked internally and started to ask myself important questions – what are my values, what gets me excited and passionate, what are my strengths, what DON’T I want from my career.

It took me a fair amount of time to work through each area and come up with an answer to the question of what would be an ideal situation in 5 years time.  It wasn’t always easy to do and I was lucky to have support from a coach, my mentors, friends and family when I got stuck.  Once I had the questions answered I’d developed a blue print for what life could be.

So, your challenge is to think about how life could be ideal at the start of 2015 in each of the following areas; your career, your family situation, your heath and mental wellbeing, the community you live in and your support system, and your spiritual understanding.  Use the vision you created in the first post to help guide this process.  I won’t pretend that this is easy or won’t take time.  Get support, think it through, do some research, don’t get put off and think big about the possibilities.

So how does my life now compare to the plan I created in 2005?  Well first, it certainly isn’t everything that I’d visualised.  A lot happened between now and then including some unexpected and delightful opportunities.  I used my vision as a compass to set the rough direction, rather than a map that had to be followed.  However, I have found incredibly meaningful work, a much better balance in my life, more peace and the ability to react to external circumstances with more calm.  Without Sheryl Crow and my 5 year plan I know that a lot of this wouldn’t have happened.

In the final post, the subject is taking action to start Thinking Big.  Subscribe here to make sure you don’t miss it!

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