Chapter Six – Living an Inspired Life
‘If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.’
Henry David Thoreau
Are you doing what you came here to do?
‘Don’t ask what the world needs – ask what makes you come alive and go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.’
Howard Thurman
One of the first questions I ask any new or prospective client is this:
‘Are you doing what makes you come alive –
what you love and want to do with your one and only life?’
What kind of a response it provokes varies from person to person, but I tend to notice one of the following:
The big smile
The big smile generally comes from someone who is already living an inspired life. They’re thrilled you asked and can’t wait to talk about it. Often, you’ll find their enthusiasm infectious and get caught up in their adventures as if they were your own. You may find yourself offering the big smiler your friendship, encouragement and support almost in spite of yourself.
The heavy sigh
The heavy sigh is usually followed by a wistful glance off into the distance, as if the person is taking one last look at what might have been. Heavy sighers are generally feeling defeated by their lives. They may still be fighting the good fight, but if things carry on as they are, they’re pretty sure they’re going to lose. They have a vague, nagging sense that there’s something else they could be doing with their life which would be more fulfilling, but they don’t know what it is, how to find it, or even if it exists at all.
The glare
The glare, often accompanied by anger in the form of sarcasm, abuse or even rage, can be frightening if you’re not prepared for it. People who glare in response to questions about their lives usually feel like they’re struggling so hard to make ends meet that the very idea that there might be a better way seems like a horrible imposition. But in my experience, the angrier someone gets in response to the question, the more brightly a big dream still burns inside them.
A cab driver named Adolf
‘All men dream, but not all equally. Those who dream by night, in the dusty recesses of their mind, wake to find it was all vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous, for they may act their dreams with open eyes and make things happen’.
T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia)
A few years ago, I was in Chicago as part of a comedy ‘sketchfest’ – comedy troupes from around the country coming together to make people laugh, steal each other’s jokes and generally have a good time playing. Our first show was what could politely be called ‘less than fully triumphant’, and rather than stick around and face it like a man I went skulking off in a cab to visit a friend.
To my delight, within moments of entering the cab it began to snow – and I love the snow. Growing up in New England, snow meant sleds, skiing, snowmen and on a good day, school being cancelled. But when I shared my delight with the cab driver, he glared at me with a look of contempt normally reserved for people you’ve known for years. After a few moments of silence, no doubt spent considering the relative merits of throwing me out of his cab to enjoy the snow I was so fond of ‘up close and personal’, he began to talk.
His name was Adolf and he came from Ghana. He had come to America in 1991 to make his fortune and take care of his family. Thirteen years later, he was driving a borrowed cab seven days a week, three hundred and sixty five days a year. The money sent home each month enabled his family to live well. His mother owned her own home; his brother and sister were able to finish the equivalent of high school. But Adolf had not been back.
A few months earlier, his mother asked him to come home to visit for Christmas. He told her he would love to, but it would mean he wouldn’t be able to send money for a few months. She never brought it up again. Adolf wanted me to know he was a Christian and his great shame that he was living with was that he had spent Christmas Day out in the snow hustling fares instead of in church giving thanks.
Yet through it all, he had a dignity and pride about him that dared me to feel sorry for him. When I asked him if he was doing what he really wanted to do with his life, I thought he was going to kill me.
He got that look in his eyes people get when they can see their big dream a million miles away in their mind’s eye then wipe the slate clean before anyone notices the slight smile forming on the corner of his mouth.
‘I don’t know what I really want to do’ he said firmly.
‘I don’t believe you’ I replied, equally firmly.
By now the snow was beginning to stick to the sidewalks and Adolf pulled the car over to the side of the road. Any thought of visiting my friend was long forgotten. I was in the back of that cab for a reason. Heck, I had pretty much proved I wasn’t in Chicago to make people laugh.
‘Everyone has access to the voice of inspiration’ I continued, ‘what the Quakers call “the still, small voice within”. When you listen to that inner voice, it lays out a path like a blueprint that contains everything you need to know to create a life so wonderful to you it will feel like you were born to live it. But sometimes following that voice is so scary that we won’t admit we’ve got one – not even to ourselves’.
He was watching me in his rear-view mirror intensely.
‘It usually starts with an inkling – a sense that there must be something more to life than getting up and doing the same things day after day after day’.
He nodded his head in agreement, so I carried on.
‘Then, if you begin to pay attention, you will notice that there are things you think about which are different from most of the people around you. Things you want that are unique to you; consistent daydreams and impulses that keep coming up, no matter how many times you push them away’.
Adolf looked at me a bit suspiciously, as though I had somehow gained entry not only into his head, but into a part of his mind he had all, but locked away. He did, however, continue to listen.
‘The fact is, at some level you already know what you want to do. The more honest you are willing to be with yourself about it, the more your own unique blueprint for a wonderful life will begin to emerge. The voice of inspiration begins to speak louder and more clearly and your life will get easier and easier. But you’ve got to at least be open to it. As someone once said “There are none so blind as those who will not see”’.
We both went quiet for a few moments, then Adolf spoke.
‘I do know what I want to do’ he began. ‘My dream is to learn to build houses the way Americans build them. The houses in Ghana are not strong. I want to go back to Ghana and build houses for my village. Then I would know that I had made a difference. And everything else that I have had to endure would be OK. It would have all been worthwhile’.
There were tears in both our eyes – something I’ve noticed is quite common when someone first acknowledges something they’ve been keeping hidden from everyone, including themselves. And then he sat a little taller in his seat and we both knew it was time to move on.
What is inspiration?
In`spi*ra’tion (noun)
First appeared in print in English in the 14th century:
1. The act of inspiring or breathing in.
2. The act or power of exercising an elevating or stimulating influence upon the intellect or emotions; the result of such influence which quickens or stimulates.
3. A supernatural influence which qualifies men to receive and communicate divine truth; also, the truth communicated.
Thomas Edison was once asked the secret of his prolific creativity, to which he responded ‘Invention is 1% percent inspiration and 99% perspiration’. While I have certainly experienced the need in my own life to put in the hours in order to succeed, I think Edison’s equation is misleading. It seems to imply that inspiration is relatively unimportant, when in fact if what you want is a wonderful life, I’m not sure that anything is more important!
By way of example, I remember going to my local hardware store to get some burnt orange paint recently. The man behind the counter took a large tub of pure white paint, added a few drops of yellow dye and a few drops of red and after a few minutes of mixing I had a whole can of burnt orange paint.
Here’s the point – less than one percent of the content of the can was the source of one hundred percent of the colour.
In my experience, moving forward when you are inspired is like climbing into a canoe and going for a ride down a river. Trying to move forward when you are out of touch with your inspiration is like carrying the canoe up a dry riverbed.
While inspiration without perspiration may be impotent, perspiration without inspiration just plain stinks!
My own definition of inspiration is a bit more prosaic but hopefully a bit more practical:
Inspiration is caffeine for the soul.
Navigating by joy
‘The only tyrant I will follow is the still, small voice within’.
Mahatma Gandhi
The only question you need to ask to begin turning up the volume on the voice of inspiration in your own life is this:
What would I love to do right now?
If that seems a startling question in the context of an almost religious-sounding idea, it’s only because it’s so unfamiliar. Yet the rewards of asking and answering that simple question on an ongoing basis are phenomenal and life changing.
How about this question:
How would I love to be right now?
Or this one:
What would I love to make my life about today?
Whenever you find yourself caught up in suffering or despair, you can be sure that you’re out of sync with your own best interests, doing what you think you should or have to do rather than what would be uniquely right for you. On the other hand, each and every time you take the time to check in with the compass of your own joy, you are re-orienting your life towards an ongoing experience of happiness, joy and well-being.
How do you know when you’re listening to the voice of your inspiration and navigating by joy?
1. You are doing what you love and want to do
I remember sharing the idea of living an inspired life with a minister who had come along on one of my Coaching Mastery trainings in order to gain new skills for helping his parishioners. I could see that he was uncomfortable with the idea, so I asked him a simple question: ‘Do you think God wants you to be unhappy?’
He said ‘No, but I do think God wants me to be willing to sacrifice some of my own wants if that would be for the greater good’.
I then asked him this: ‘If you knew that by giving up some of your own comforts you could benefit mankind, would you want to do that?’
‘It would be an honour to do that’ the minister replied, looking inspired.
‘Then when you sacrifice your desires’ I continued, ‘you are doing what you love and want to do in that moment’.
2. You feel guided
One of the ways to feel guided is by noticing the synchronicities and serendipitous coincidences that begin to happen when you are following your wanting and joy. My most humorous experience of this was when I was walking through a bookshop hoping to gain some insight into a challenge I was facing with a client. Before I could get to the self-help section, I brushed against one of the shelves and a book literally fell on my head. When I picked the book up off the floor, the title was God Winks: A Guide to Coincidence in our Lives. I opened it up to a random page and sure enough, there was the answer to my question.
While not all coincidences are that dramatic, most people have had the sense of certain parts of their life as having been guided, where things unfolded as if by design and the next step magically appeared.
3. Things seem to unfold as if by design
There is an old story about a monk who teaches his followers that enlightenment is really just a ‘happy accident’. When one of his students asks him why then they have to engage in so much disciplined meditation and practice, the monk replies ‘to become more accident prone’.
The same is true of your quest for happy success. The more disciplined you are willing to be in doing what you love (and not doing what you don’t), the more ‘happy accidents’ you will begin to experience. When you are really following your inspiration and navigating by joy, your success seems almost effortless. It’s not that you are not doing anything; it’s just that you are no longer struggling to ‘make’ things happen.
If you’re ever not sure whether you’re hearing the voice of inspiration or ‘that voice inside your head’, use this simple guideline:
The still, small voice within doesn’t think you suck.
If it’s that easy, why isn’t everyone doing it?
If it’s possible to navigate your way through life simply by asking yourself what you would most love to do and doing it, why on earth would any of us ever do anything else?
Reason number 1: The ‘dangers’ of joy
‘Reasonable men adapt themselves to circumstances, whilst unreasonable men persist in attempting to adapt circumstances to themselves. That is why all progress depends upon the unreasonable man.’
George Bernard Shaw
Many people fear the consequences of doing what they want because at some level they still believe that they are inherently ‘bad’ people. Therefore, what they want would inevitably be bad for themselves or bad for others.
But is it true?
For example, if you always ate what you’d love to eat, wouldn’t you get fat and horrible and unhealthy and die and have to be buried in a piano box?
Apparently not, though most people until recently have been unwilling to put it to the test.
In the 1930s, scientists did a study where they let kids choose their own diets over a 30-day period. The result was that every child in the study ate a balanced diet over the course of the 30 days (although I suspect there were an abnormally large number of chocolate éclairs and cream cakes consumed on the first few days of the study!).
In other words, when children were first given the freedom to eat whatever they wanted, they began by sampling the ‘forbidden foods’. But once the thrill of new-found freedom had been put to the test and the handcuffs weren’t slapped back on, they began to tune in to their own inner wisdom even more deeply.
The reason most of us have never put navigating by joy and inspiration to the test is that we’ve never allowed ourselves to do it long enough to get past the initial burst of ‘naughty wanting’ that inevitably follows an extended period of repression, restriction or (mental) incarceration.
So if you’re a bit worried that what you’d love to do is going to involve robbing little old ladies or having sex with the Swedish volleyball team (male or female!), remember that even the voice of inspiration doesn’t have to be blindly followed.
Think of each piece of joy-based guidance you receive as a direction to move towards rather than an outcome to be achieved. And let’s face it, just because you recognize that true north is ‘thataway’ doesn’t mean that the best path to get there is to blindly plough straight towards it.
There’s a line in Phillip Yancey’s book What’s So Amazing About Grace? that has stayed with me constantly over the years since I first read it. In discussing his personal interpretation of the Christian gospels, Yancey sums up the notion of unconditional love as follows:
‘There is nothing you can do that will make God love you any more,
There is nothing you can do that will make God love you any less.’
Now let’s put religion to one side (I’ll leave it to you to choose sides) and think about that. If we believe in the possibility of unconditional love, regardless of where, when, how or by whom, then our behaviour, no matter how wonderfully ‘good’, will not earn us brownie points in heaven, and no matter how ‘bad’, cannot make whoever it is doing the unconditional loving love us any less.
The question is, if ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stop being the relevant criteria for our behaviour, how do we decide what to do when faced with a difficult decision?
From theory to practice…
On Unconditional LoveThink about a difficult decision you are facing, then answer each of the following questions:
1. What is the ‘good’ thing to do? What is the ‘bad’ or ‘evil’ thing?
2. If you believed in heaven and you knew that you would get in no matter what, what would you choose?
3. If you didn’t believe in heaven and you knew that you didn’t have to be unhappy no matter what the consequences of your choice, what would you choose?
4. What do you want to do?
5. What will you do?
Wouldn’t it be interesting to know that whatever you choose, you’ll be loved all the same?
Reason number 2: Premature practicality
‘The heart has its reasons that reason knows not of’.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Having been brought up in a family of engineers and scientists, I learned to place a high value on scientific experimentation. But when it comes to the laboratory of their lives, I find that most people are unwilling to experiment, preferring to first figure out the ‘rules of the game’ and then do their best to follow them.
In the real world, I have repeatedly found that there is a marked difference between the premature practicality of the mind and the inspired wisdom of the heart. When people follow the ‘reasonable’ course of action, they get consistently moderate results; when they find the courage to follow through with what they really want to do, they either succeed gloriously or so enjoy their failure as to make it pale into insignificance.
And very often, what we really want just seems plain unreasonable in the context of how we’ve been living our lives.
It’s not that your goals can’t make sense in the big picture of your life – it’s just that they don’t have to. I find this to be a useful rule of thumb:
The number of reasons you have to do something
is inversely proportional to how much you actually want to do it.
In other words, if you have too many reasons to do something, chances are you don’t really want to do it. But if you can’t think of a great reason to do something and you really do want to do it anyway, chances are that’s an authentic heartfelt desire.
How to walk out on the drama of your life
One of the first questions anyone new to theatre asks when they come to see the actors after a show is ‘How did you learn all those lines?’ While every actor has their own tricks, the basic truth for all of us is repetition – speaking and hearing the same lines again and again until they’re so much a part of your subconscious mind you could speak them in your sleep. (And to your wife’s dismay, often do. Or is that just me?)
Our inner scripting is the result of repeating lines learned from a different source – the scripting we’ve received from our parents, peers and media both implicit and explicit. If you hear yourself saying things like ‘I know I should¼‘, ‘I know I shouldn’t…’ or even ‘Well that’s just wrong’, you can rest assured it’s your scripting speaking and you’ve learned your lines perfectly.
Here’s a quick vocabulary list that can alert you to scripting-based decision-making:
| Should/Shouldn’t | Have to |
| Must/Mustn’t | Supposed to |
| Can’t/Couldn’t | Ought to |
| Of course… | Need to… |
| Because… | It makes sense to… |
If you hear yourself justifying your decisions or explaining your actions with these words, chances are you’re listening to your scripting.
Of course, not all scripting is bad, and it is possible with enough therapy and self-analysis to make changes to your life scripts. But the purpose of this book isn’t to replace your old scripting with some new and improved version; it’s to help you in stepping outside the story of your life, turning up the volume on the still, small voice within, and allowing yourself to be guided to the life of your dreams.
Here’s how to do it…
1. Give yourself permission
I was sitting in a café with a friend I hadn’t seen for years when he shared that he had recently had a successful operation to remove cancerous cells from his lungs. When I asked him how he was doing, he admitted with a little bit of sheepishness how wonderful his life had become since he became ill. He was far more intimate with both himself and his family, he’d learned that he loved gardening, and while he did continue to work part-time, it was no longer with a sense of ‘this is what I have to do’ or even ‘this is what I should do’, but simply ‘this is what I want to do’.
As we mused further about the situation, I shared that many of the people I have spoken with who have contracted fatal or potentially fatal illnesses shared his experience.
‘Why is it’ he asked, ‘that something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me?’
My belief is that it is all to do with permission. Cancer or HIV or even a bad accident not only wakes us up to the reality of the finiteness of life, it also gives us a sort of permission to live outside the cultural norms. We feel that our more eccentric behaviour, guided as it is by our authentic wanting instead of our conditioning, is suddenly excusable. ‘I know I’m not supposed to’ we say to an imaginary audience, ‘but cut me some slack. I have cancer (insert illness/difficult life experience/etc. here)’.
Of course, just because we have permission to do something does not necessarily mean that it is a worthwhile thing to do. Permission to treat yourself and others badly and do bad things does not mean that your life will improve by doing them.
But permission does open up new, wonderful possibilities for what we can do with our lives. And we don’t have to wait until we are ill to make use of them.
When you stop doing what you ‘should’ do and what you’re ‘supposed’ to do, the only way left to navigate is by what you want to do – and if you’re not used to allowing yourself to do what you want that can be a pretty scary prospect.
Here’s a simple experiment to give yourself a taste for what it’s like to be able to do whatever you want…
From theory to practice…
Permission Granted1. For the next 60 seconds, give yourself permission to go with your wanting and knowing. You can do anything you want. (That’s a short enough time period that even the most mischievous among you can’t get up to anything too crazy!) Notice if it feels familiar or strange. Notice if you find yourself behaving any differently than you habitually would.
2. As soon as you get comfortable granting yourself permission to want what you want and do what you do, extend the time period. Soon, you may find yourself going with your wanting and knowing for hours or even days at a time!
2. Practice radical self-honesty
One very good reason that many people don’t trust themselves is that they are not really honest with themselves. When I’ve asked people about this, they often express a fear that if they acknowledge what they really think and feel about things, they won’t like what they find. But without the willingness to be completely honest with yourself (regardless of what you choose to express to others), you will never (nor should ever) fully trust yourself, and your own ‘best guess’ will invariably fall short of the mark.
Here are a few tips for increasing your self-honesty:
Make sure that no one overhears the conversations in your head
One of the best cures for writer’s block is to not show anyone your work until you’re ready. This makes it OK to write utter drivel for as long as you need to until the ideas in your head start to take shape on paper.
While finding a coach, friend, therapist or mentor you can trust to be 100% accepting and discreet is a wonderful (if elusive) gift, in the meantime feel free to think utter, uncensored drivel – just be sure not to share your innermost thoughts with anyone you don’t want to hear them until you’re ready.
Choose self-honesty over a ‘positive attitude’
One of my early teachers encouraged us to always answer the question ‘How are you?’ with the exclamation ‘Fantastic!’ People are attracted to people with a great attitude, the teaching went, so if we wanted to score big in the world, we needed to be the most positive people in the room.
I conditioned myself so well that you could call me at 2 am and I would answer the phone in a voice so ‘up’ and chipper you would swear I’d just been reading the comics on an exercise bike. Problem was, the more ‘up’ I pretended to be, the more ‘down’ I became. When I gave up my ‘positive attitude’ for an accepting one, I got back in sync with myself. Oh, I may still tell the world I feel fantastic, but I tell myself the truth and feel a thousand times better for it. (In fact, I feel fantastic! Weird, huh?)
Realize that your opinion is still only an opinion
When my wife announced to me that she was pregnant for the first time, I was convinced that my life (and more importantly to me at the time, my acting career) was over. The only thing that kept me from giving up and running away was knowing that despite the strength and depth of my opinion that having children equalled poverty, misery and pain, I was very often wrong.
Nine months and five minutes later, as I held my new son in my arms, I was relieved to discover that once again, I had been utterly, wonderfully wrong in my opinion. But by giving myself permission to be honest with myself about what I thought without attaching any undue importance to it, I was able to stay in tune with myself and remain ‘trustworthy’ throughout the pregnancy even though what I thought wasn’t remotely ‘politically correct’.
3. Learn which feelings to trust
‘I write only when inspiration strikes.
Fortunately it strikes every morning at 9 o’clock sharp’.
William Somerset Maugham
Another distinction that I have found to be absolutely critical in learning to trust yourself is the difference between something ‘feeling good’ and ‘feeling right’. While these feelings will inevitably overlap, using them as our guide will take us in two fundamentally different directions.
Following only what feels good in the moment can wreak havoc in our lives, causing us to blindly pursue immediate pleasure at the cost of future satisfaction. This doesn’t mean we should avoid what feels good. As you probably realize by now, I believe quite the opposite. It’s just that the pursuit of good feelings in and of themselves will rarely lead us all the way to success, happiness or well-being.
True north, when we are using the compass of our inner senses as a guide, is a feeling of rightness – a knowing that what we are about to do is the best thing we know to do in the moment, regardless of what anyone else thinks, regardless of where the ‘evidence’ points, and regardless of whether it feels good or bad, difficult or easy, familiar or foreign.
How do you consult with your own inner expert?
1. Ask yourself a question.
2. Answer it!
Here’s a more in-depth version of this process that you can use to mine your own expertise on any of the most important issues in your life. It’s based on the latest research into neurophysiology which reveals that the notions of ‘listening to your heart’ and ‘trusting your gut’ have a solid basis in science…
From theory to practice…
Use your Head, Listen to your Heart, Trust your Gut1. Use your head to design a really great question for yourself
Think about an area of your life in which you would like to make a breakthrough. If you were going to ask a very wise friend for advice, but you were only allowed one question, what question would you most want to ask them in this moment?
2. Listen to your heart
Put your hands over your heart, take a nice deep breath, hold it for a moment and let go. Do this three or four times¼
Now think a happy thought. Think about something that you love or someone that you love, someone that loves you, something that loves you, a warm fuzzy. My daughter likes to imagine a little bunny rabbit in her heart. My son prefers to think about playing with his friends. I like to reflect on a really happy memory. Do whatever it takes to give yourself a nice warm fuzzy feeling in your heart.
According to research by the Institute of Heartmath, focusing on your heart in this way actually allows your body to align itself to the dominant rhythm of your heartbeat. When you’ve created this state of ‘heart coherence’, you are in the ideal state to ask and answer any questions that you may have about your life.
As well as the question you have designed for yourself, play around with what you intuitively feel would make a positive difference in this area of your life. Use the following ‘sentence starters’ until you find which one works best for you:
I’ve got a feeling¼
I want¼
I sense¼
I know¼
Example – How can I have more energy throughout the day?
I’ve got a feeling that eight glasses of water a day is too many for me. I want to eat less cheese and dairy. I sense that if I slept more, my skin would clear up. I know that the more often I tune in to my intuition, the better my life goes. I know that if I don’t sleep, I feel tearful. I know that I feel best when I eat four or five times a day. etc.
3. Trust your gut
When you’ve consulted your head and listened to your heart, be sure to trust your gut. Don’t just assume that because your head or your heart said it, it must be right for you. Check in for a feeling of ‘rightness’ in the very centre of your tummy – a quite literal ‘no-brainer’ yes or ‘no-brainer’ no!
Remember that you are the expert on you – and be sure to put your inner wisdom to the test in some situations where making a mistake is no big deal before you use it in situations where your best guess will be mission critical!
Time for a change
‘Dismiss what insults your soul and your very flesh will become a great poem’.
Walt Whitman
When I used to do a lot of corporate work in the 1990s I noticed an interesting trend. Within six months of my working with companies, nearly 40% of the people I had worked with had left their jobs. While I never listed that fact in my brochures, I believe it was significant in more ways than one.
To try to ‘make yourself’ want something you don’t or do something that feels intuitively wrong to you is somewhat akin to walking in whatever direction you are facing (or you are told to face) and manually pointing the needle in your compass towards north. While it may work for a while, as soon as you let up the pressure for even a moment, the compass will begin to self-correct and you’ll see that you’re off-track, maybe even headed 180 degrees away from your own best life.
Now if you’ve spent a lifetime ignoring your intuitive feelings and making the best of a bad job or a bad relationship, it may seem like it’s too late (or too scary) to do anything about it.
But chances are that the changes you need to make to realign yourself with your inner knowing are nowhere near as dramatic as you think. So don’t go leaving your family, quitting your job, selling your things and joining the circus or nunnery or even a Fortune 500 company just yet. Because even if dramatic changes are called for, you don’t have to make them in a dramatic way.
Life Maths
A woman went to a success coach in hopes of creating a better life.
‘How can I be of assistance?’ the coach asked.
‘I’m stuck in a rut’, the woman said. ‘I can do my job in my sleep, which is
just as well because I’m tired all the time.’ She sighed. ‘They say everyone’s
life is either a warning or an example – I want mine to be an example’.
‘No problem’, said the coach. ‘How much of your time do you spend doing what you love?’
The woman wanted to scream ‘None!’, but she knew that wasn’t quite true. She loved reading biographies, and she sometimes spent hours studying the lives of her heroes and heroines.
‘I guess I spend about 10% of my time doing things that I love’, she admitted. ‘Between my job and my other commitments, that’s all I’ve got time for. And don’t tell me to quit my job – I need the money!”
The coach smiled. ‘Don’t worry about finding the time or doing anything dramatic. If you really want to experience more success, passion, and fulfilment in your life, all you have to do is to make the following commitment:
Each month, stop doing at least one thing which drags you down and add at least two things to your life which you love.’
While that seemed much too simple to really make a difference, the woman decided to go for it anyway. She stopped driving herself to work, which she hated, and arranged to share the commute with a colleague whose company she enjoyed. In addition, she began taking a yoga class on the weekends. Almost immediately, her energy levels increased and she felt better than she had in years.
The next month, she decided to subtract her morning sugar fix, which always left her feeling strung out by lunch time, and to add in a daily bottle of water and a weekly trip to the cinema. When one of her co-workers commented on how much happier she seemed and asked if she had found ‘someone special’ in her life, she realized that she had - herself.
Each month, she added and subtracted until she could honestly say she was enjoying her life. Although she still didn’t love her work, she had so many things to look forward to each day that it almost didn’t matter anymore.
‘That worked wonderfully’, she reported to her coach. ‘Do you have any other things I can try?’
‘Of course’, the coach said. ‘Now that you’ve developed your “maths muscle”, make a list of “the big ones”. What are the five biggest drains on your joy? What are the five most wonderful things you can imagine adding to your life?’
Some of the things she came up with were obvious to her – her job was still a big drain; finding a loving partner to share her life with and a job that was an expression of her highest values were pretty wonderful sounding additions. Other things occurred to her later when she wasn’t trying so hard to think – like how much easier her life would become if she stopped trying to impress her mother or be perfect all the time, and how wonderful it would be to actually meet some of her heroes and learn from them directly.
She decided to start with the easiest of ‘the big ones’ first – creating a sacred hour at the beginning of her day to read, meditate and do yoga. Then one day, she read something during her sacred hour which inspired her to make the biggest addition and subtraction of her life – to finally leave her job and start her own business doing work that made her come alive.
It was in a book by Joseph Campbell, and he was sharing a bit of advice given to a young Native American at the time of his initiation:
‘As you go the way of life,
you will see a great chasm.
Jump.
It is not as wide as you think’.
Some final thoughts on creating a life that makes you go ‘Wow!’
‘Desire marks the path’.
Mandy Evans
I was driving to the shop to buy some milk one day and I was listening to a radio show on the importance of commitment and goals. ‘If you’re not one hundred per cent committed to the achievement of your goals’ the host was saying, ‘they’re not really goals, they’re wishes’.
My inner rebel chafed at his strident tone, but I found myself exploring which (if any) of my goals I was truly one hundred per cent committed to, as in ‘I will get there or die trying’. To my surprise (and slight disappointment), not one of the many things I wanted, including more money, nicer stuff, happiness and spiritual enlightenment, fit the ‘one hundred per cent commitment’ test.
‘Surely’ I thought to myself, ‘I must be one hundred per cent committed to something’.
I decided that perhaps the problem was the time frame. Most of my ‘Wow!’ goals would be a lifetime in the making. Perhaps I could commit one hundred per cent to reaching a certain target within the next five years? Three years? One year?
Finally, I negotiated myself down to the next five minutes. After all, I must be one hundred per cent committed to getting to the shop, right?
But when I really thought about it, I realized that if I got a sudden inner prompting to go left instead of right, I would follow it. If I saw someone in need and was moved to be of service, the milk would have to wait.
It was in that moment I realized what my one true commitment was: to follow the voice of inspiration and the inner promptings of my highest self.
More than any other, this next exercise will help you to reset your compass to create a life filled with joy, inspiration and desire. I call it ‘The comfy chair’ both because it involves sitting in a comfy chair and because, for some people, the first time they do it is a funny sort of torture…
From theory to practice…
The Comfy Chair
1. Choose a comfy chair and a period of a few hours where you have no appointments or commitments. (You can do it for as little as five minutes at a time, but longer does seem to work better.)
2. Turn off the phone and go sit in your comfy chair. Your job is to stay in that chair unless and until you get in touch with an authentic heartfelt desire: something you’re really inspired to do.
3. Each time you get an impulse to get up and do something, ask yourself if the impulse is coming from your scripting or your wanting: the voice of the ‘should’ or the voice of inspiration.
– If you suddenly remember something urgent you have to do, it’s probably just your emotions trying to re-assert their authority. Kick their butts back into line by sitting on yours just a little bit longer.
– If it’s inspiration calling, get up and do it, then go back to your comfy chair and wait for the next authentic impulse. (It’s important to always go back to the chair between each task.)
Here is the only commitment I will ask you to make in this book:
I, __________, commit to listening to the voice of inspiration and living an inspired life.
By making (and keeping) this one commitment, your life will change forever. Effortless success and all good things will begin to follow you, and it may seem at times as though the entire universe is conspiring to do you good.
Where will your inspiration take you? I have no idea. But tuning in each day and finding out will become the greatest joy in your life.
I’d like to finish this section of the book with the words of W.H. Murray, the author of The Scottish Himalayan Expedition:
‘Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too.
‘All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
‘I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets:
“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it.
Boldness has genius, power and magic in it”’.
This excerpt is from You Can Have What You Want by Michael Neill. For more information about the book and to purchase a copy, click here.