WORKLIFEDESIGN

OMG! What am I doing with my life! The DIY Life Guide to creating a life and work you love

Free ebook for subscribers

With the silly season fast approaching, I thought it might be timely to share with you my little all-in-one resource for those who may be scheduling some existential angst or career crisis over the coming months.

This 30-page ebook helps you work out what you want from life and how you can start making it happen. You can work through the eight steps in an afternoon or use it to guide your change over the next eight weeks or eight months.

Each of the steps, from defining your vision to working out what you’re doing about it today, comes with exercises and/or worksheets to help you get your thoughts (and what your committing to!) on paper. Some of the exercises are old friends (hello Future Letter!) and some are new to The Studio (such as Discovering Your Strengths, FeelThinkDo, and more).

You can get access to the free download of OMG! What am I doing with my life! The DIY Life Guide to creating a life and work you love by subscribing to Brilliant!

If you’re a current Brilliant! subscriber, you’ll receive your direct link to the ebook in this month’s Brilliant! newsletter in your Inbox tomorrow.

If you would like to receive monthly updates of what’s new in The Studio, just subscribe to our monthly ezine, Brilliant! Ideas for Work and Life.

Where are you headed?

This is one of the four basic questions I always ask someone who wants to change some part of their life or work.

I find that we can be very good at detailing what’s wrong or what we don’t want or how things should be different, but very few people are clear about what they do want. Even if they are clear about aspects of it, there’s no overall vision for how it is integrated with the rest of their life.

So is it any surprise that we have difficulty making decisions when we have nothing to guide us?

Today’s Studio treat is an exercise that is surprisingly simple and yet quite powerful. The Future Letter asks you to write a letter, dated one year hence, to someone you care about. It asks you

What do you want your life to look like in twelve months?

How will you feel?

What will you be doing?

and other questions to help you get all those hopes and dreams and possibilities that have been swimming around in your head written down.

It also helps you to start bringing your values to life.

This exercise will be enhanced if you’ve already done your Wheel of Life, Sorting Out Your Values and your MyLand Visualisation but you can also just dive in to the Future Letter and explore your values and life domains more fully later.

DOWNLOAD the Future Letter exercise

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As the alarm went off on Tuesday morning, I wasn’t filled with my usual “just five more minutes” mantra. No. This was the day that my mild mannered couch sloth self turns into uber-50s housewife and no dust nor dirt is going to survive.  Yes, it was Spring Clean Day.

Bree Van Der Kamp has nothing on me on Spring Clean Day. I had a list. It consisted of categories (rooms) and subcategories (actions required: tidy, throw, donate, mop, vacuum, dust, clean) and sub-sub-categories (cleaning type: soapy water, spray’n’wipe, industrial strength). The day is blocked out with rest periods and team peptalks (such as the benefits of interrupting the cat’s 18 hour nap so as to freshen up her “apartment”).

This year the team worked seamlessly, perked up in periods of fatigue by “Way to Go!”, “You’re doing a great job!” and “I really appreciate the effort and creativity you’ve brought to dusting the ornamental giraffe!”.

Of course, it wasn’t all plane sailing. Like any highly efficient work unit we did encounter our “challenges”.  Negotiating the 15 year old futon into a “sun-filled” position for the requisite 6 hour rejuvenation did require the use of pilates muscles and  yoga flexibility. But we’d been in training for the Spring Clean Challenge for the last six months and came through admirably

As we clock off at 5pm, admiring the sparkle and clean of my beautiful abode, there’s wine for all workers to celebrate our masterful feat. Beautiful surfaces sparkle. Aah, that’s what the kitchen bench looks like, there are the remote controls, the books are in the bookshelves rather than haphazard book towers throughout the house. A minimalist wardrobe containing only clothes that I wear – bye bye yellow polyester pants. I’m surrounded by the things that enhance my life. I’m filled with overwhelming satisfaction and hope for the future.

I’m thinking “You know, if I did a little bit of cleaning every week it would always look like this” and get all giddy at the thought of gliding through life in my ever sparkling palace. Or, maybe it’s the alcohol. The thought quickly gets relegated to “Another great idea” and I get comfy on the clean couch, spilling wine on the clean coffee table and welcome back the sloth.

Spring Cleaning is a wonderful process. It’s a chance to take stock of what you have or what you really need. A chance to look in places you usually don’t go.  A chance to toss out all those things that are just cluttering up your life and to keep or accentuate those things that actually enhance your life.

And just as we can do it for our physical environment, we can also spring clean our lives with remarkable effects.

So, what’s going to get the ol’ heave ho in your life this Spring?

What are you tolerating?

What’s no longer serving you?

And what do you want to have more of?

What has to be happening in your life, who needs to be a part of your life so that you can truly shine?

And where are the places you’ve left dust accumulate?

What are the things you’ve stuffed in the storage cupboard of your life, always intending to “do something with” later?

And when you’ve tidied, tossed, mopped, polished, vacuumed, sprayed and wiped your life, what does it look like?

And what if … you did a little cleaning, tidying every week? How would that feel to have this buff life for 52 weeks of the year instead of just one?

This is what having a coach is like. Rather than going through peaks and troughs, having enthusiasm for something for a couple of months then giving up disappointed or bored, you have a place to sit down, find out what’s working, what isn’t and what you need to do to make sure you are living your life according to what’s important to you.

Or you can do it yourself. Building a support and feedback network around you that gives you a space to talk about what’s going on, work out if your take on it is what is really happening and take the steps needed to keep it all happening.

This is your mop, bucket and broom.

Happy Spring Cleaning.

Just Breathe wall decal by innercircledesign*

Today’s brilliant! idea is to breathe. I know, you’re thinking I’ve gone all new age, woo-woo, bumper sticker (“Remember to breathe!”) but beyond the butterflies and dolphins there really is something in this one.

The particular approach to reconnecting with our breath I’m talking about is called mindfulness. It’s a pretty hot area at the moment with what seems to be every therapist and their cat is incorporating it into their practice.

I’ve recently started a book group centred around the mindfulness classic, Full Catastrophe Living by Jon Kabat-Zinn, and am gaining such a deep respect for the approach.

At its simplest, mindfulness is about moment to moment awareness. The breath is used as an anchor to focus the mind, and from their you can increase your field of awareness to include body sensations, sound, sight and thoughts.

One of the most significant changes I’ve experienced through mindfulness practice is being able to observe my thinking and not be so influenced by the emotional charge attached to certain thoughts. For example, a deadline is not the be-all and end-all of life. It is a signpost; life will go on after the passes, there will be more deadlines in the future. Anxiety, stress, worry disappears. Now I can go and be fully present in doing what I need to do (rather than a ball of frazzled energy).

The other great thing about Mindfulness is how it incorporates the body. We are such a body-obsessed culture and yet very few of us are truly connected with our bodies, able to feel where our emotions manifest or how to live fully in our bodies. As someone who lives most of my life in my head, Mindfulness is a breath of fresh air. [sorry, I am trying to keep the puns to a minimum]

There’s a scene in the classic Al Pacino film, Scarface, where the Pacino character, Tony Montana, is sharing his drug-lord words-of-wisdom to his young protege (who thinks that now he’s a big-time dealer he can spend his time chasing women):

First you get the money,

Then you get the power,

THEN you get the woman.

In a similar, and yet oh-so-different way, Mindfulness has three sequential elements:

First, you get to relax

Then you get the clarity

THEN you get the energy (channelled effectively and responsively in stressful situations)

In other words, by simply focusing on your breath you are able to handle whatever life throws at you.

And that’s Brilliant!

You can receive a roundup of Brilliant! ideas for work and life in your Inbox every month by subscribing to the Brilliant! newsletter here