Posts from — January 2010

When you live as a designer of life, a funny thing happens.  Life suddenly is not personal.  What I mean is you’ve been living your life … well … your entire life.  It’s yours.  It’s personal or at least, it certainly seems personal.  People do things to you.  Bad things happen.  Good things happen. You win some.  You lose some.  And through it all, there’s a lot of emotion.  You’ve made decisions about yourself and who you are.

So how can I even remotely suggest that life is not personal?  Well, first of all, when I say life’s not personal, I’m not saying that you can’t or shouldn’t experience emotion.  I’m not suggesting that you won’t show your love (or anger) for people.  This is not about you living some stoic life experience devoid of the wide range of human emotions and experiences.

Instead, when I say that life is not personal, I’m pointing to all the drama and meaning that we add to life.  I’d like you for a moment to imagine life minus all the narration that is added to it by your inner voice.  You can even try an experiment.  For one day, try walking around turning the mute button on and off for your inner voice.  Really imagine you actually had a remote control that controlled your inner voice, and you could turn it off and on at will.  From time to time see if you can mute your inner dialogue about what’s happening out here.  I’m not saying think differently about it, or think positively about it.  Mute it!  All the concern, drama and story that you add to life gone.  “She’s so insensitive.”  “I’m never going to be able to pay these bills on time.”  “Where are we going to get the money to pay for Josh’s braces?” “I’m so happy they are coming for dinner on Sunday.”  “Why the hell is he so negative.”  “When am I ever going to find more time?”  Imagine all of this added commentary has vanished from your life.

And now imagine, if you weren’t spending the vast amount of your time stirring things up with the little drama in your head, what would you be spending your time doing?  Think about it.  If all the extra added reporting simply didn’t exist for you anymore, or at the very least, you could mute it, what would be left to think about?

Do you see it?

Yes!  What would be left is designing your life.  Instead of spending your time commenting on the life you have, you’d spend your time creating the life you want.  You’d spend your time like a designer asking questions like, “How do I design my relationship so it works?”  “How do I create my job so it’s rewarding for me?”  “How do I build a life that really fulfills me?”  A conversation for design is a conversation to build something.  It’s not about commentary, narration, opinion, or judgement.  Certainly, you can have an opinion about what you’re designing, but that is not a design conversation.  From the perspective of design, life is not personal.  You build things.  You create things.  You design your life.

This is not something new for you.  You’ve been designing pretty much your entire life.  Your life right now is a result of design.  The only thing that slows down the process is the vast amount of time spent on the commentary of what you’ve designed.  The time spent arguing for or against something.  The time spent wishing that what you designed wasn’t so.  The time spent pining for another life.  All of those things live in the realm of commentary and they make life seem very personal like “What’s wrong with me that I keep ending up with this result?”  We make the results we produce in life personal rather than just getting they are function of the conversation we are engaged in.

So you still might cringe at the suggestion that life is not personal.  Just remember, until you croak, you have no choice about whether you design your life.  Even if you say, “The hell with it, I’m not designing my life,” that’s an act of design.  You cannot escape it.  Perhaps arguably you cannot stop your mind from vomiting commentary and opinion about your life.  The one thing you do have choice about is where you put your focus.  Which conversation is going to win in your life?  Will it be design?  Or will it be commentary?

So if you still cringe, just remember, the concept, “Life is not personal,” is not true.

I designed it.

What if there were no wrong choices?  Okay sounds a little bit extreme.  I mean stepping off the curb into the pathway of an oncoming bus certainly seems like a wrong choice.  So yes, perhaps it can’t be as absolute as that.  Every choice has consequences, some that we won’t see until further down the road.  The thing is that not making a choice, or “choice paralysis” is still making a choice.  The power then in the idea that “There are no wrong choices in life” is not the truth of the statement.  If we were to examine the statement from the truth of the matter, it would only lead to endless debate.

Another way to relate to the statement there are no wrong choices is to think of it as a possible way to live.  If your life is about creating, then a wrong choice while not preferred did move you along the pathway.  As the creator of your life, it revealed to you something that you didn’t want.  It gave you critical information that you might never had discovered but for making what seems like a wrong choice.

And so, I think the real cause behind “choice paralysis” is we don’t view ourselves as powerful creators.  Any choice would only be perceived as wrong or scary if you were afraid that you would be stuck with what you created.  The real skill to master is being a powerful creator in your life.  In fact, you already are a powerful creator of your life so it might better be said that the skill to master is being an aware creator of your life.

Your life right now – the good, the great, the bad and the ugly – is a result of what you created for yourself.  And right now, you have your eyes set on a future relative to what you have.  One way to strengthen your ability as a creator in the future is to take stock of what you created, and then to own all of it as your creation.  And yes, I mean all of it.  Own every last nook and cranny as a result of your creating even if you’re sure it’s someone else’s fault.

If you cannot own where you are today, bad choices and all, then your mind knows that you will not own where you’ll be a year from or five years from now and that’s what prevents you from being a powerful creator in life.  You will hesitate.  Creating you life requires that you be daring.  And daring doesn’t just have to mean quitting your job (although it could mean that) or starting a totally new career (although it could mean that).  Being daring could just be telling your spouse how much you love them or telling your child how proud you are of them.  It could be thanking your parents for the job they did or it could be apologizing to someone for being a jerk (even if you’re sure it’s there fault).  It could be finally taking piano lessons or learning to speak Italian.  Being daring comes in all shapes, sizes and forms.

If you can learn to include as a result with all the other things you want in life, the result called “developing myself to be an aware powerful creator of life,” then it shifts everything about the way you live.  Your task is no longer just to get the prize (although it absolutely is to get the prize), your task is to develop yourself over time to be more and more powerful of a creator, which includes all facets of being one including making daring, decisive choices.  Every choice – right or wrong, daring or wimpy – gives you an opportunity to practice the art of creating your life.  And like any skill that you practice, you’ll get better at it and better at it and better at it over time.  Your life will become about creating what’s next knowing that if it’s not what you want, no problem.  All there is every to do in life is take stock of what you created and then ask the question, “Now, what do I want to create?”

Have you ever asked yourself the question, “Why am I thinking the thoughts that I’m thinking?”  You know by now that I am all about the thinking.  Our thinking is the source of our lives, and we don’t fully appreciate the value in finding what I’ve referred to as the “edges” of our thinking.   When you find an edge, it allows you to see that the way of thinking you’re engaged in is actually very dynamic and yes, complex; but it is also finite and more importantly, your thinking is not YOU.  It’s just one finite way of thinking.  Finite like a chair is finite or a car is finite.  Finite meaning once you can see the whole of it; you really can stop engaging in the thinking if it no longer serves you.  You begin to see that mostly you’re not really thinking, you’re regurgitating thoughts you’ve already had, and thoughts that others have had before you.

Currently, I’m in a 6-month self-development program working on various aspects of my life.  One of the tasks asked of us is to sift through our lives and find every wrong we’ve ever done, every lie we’ve ever told that we haven’t owned up to. Basically, we’re looking for every thing there is in our lives that we need to confess.  This, of course, is not a new concept.  You could get this same advice by attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (which this is not) or sitting in a therapist’s chair (which this is not).  The point of the exercise is to go back and complete those things that have happened in the past so that you can truly own them and leave them where they happened - in the past.

So right now, as you read this, your mind is likely starting to pull out and dust off some of those wrongs you’ve committed in your life that you haven’t owned up to.  And so while it wasn’t articulated this way, your mind is responding to a question, something like, “What wrongs haven’t I made right in my life?”  Consider this, your mind is always responding to a question.  When you go into your closet in the morning to get dressed, your mind is answering the question, “What should I wear today?”  When you’re trudging into work, pissed off that you have to go, your mind is responding to the question, “Why do I have to go to work today?”  The edges of these “whole” ways of thinking are bound together by some fundamental question.

Mostly in life, we are more interested in answers than questions.  Problem is if you’re not interested in the questions, you might be dilly-dallying with answers that are making no real difference in your life.  So for instance, confessing can certainly be a powerful thing to do, but if the intention of the exercise is to confess so that the past is left in the past, doesn’t the asking of the question itself contradict the intent.  Before you read this post, you likely were not even thinking about your past wrongdoings.  Before I focused your mind on that question, your past wrongs likely weren’t on your mind.  Certainly, not all of them!  Absent my question, those misdeeds were residing exactly where they happened – in the past!!!

And so there is nothing inherently valuable in sifting through to find all of our past misdeeds just as there is nothing inherently valuable in struggling in life or inherently valuable in any of the thoughts you are having at any given moment.  There is only what you’re thinking and the impact that your thinking is having on your life.  So you might find yourself thinking about your relationship with your spouse and how upset they make you and what you’re going to do about it, and “Dammit, we must come to some resolution about this issue.”  Have you though ever questioned whether you need to spend your life engaging in that line of thinking at all?  Have you ever questioned whether the problem that you absolutely believe must get solved actually needs to get solved?  That it actually deserves your time?  Have you ever considered that what your spouse did wouldn’t be an issue in the first place until you thought it so?  Until you raised the question, “Why did he do this?”  In other words, we are really good at beating people (or life) up with our expectations and our questions, but we never stop to really consider that we are the one’s holding the expectation.  Without us, there would be no need for beating because there would be no one holding the expectation.  There would be no one asking the question.

My point is that mostly in life you have very little control.  You don’t have control of whether the sun shines.  You don’t have control of what the economy is doing.  You don’t have control of your boss’ personality, but the one thing you have absolute 100% control over is your thoughts.  And don’t interpret the above as some sort of strategy like “Oh, he’s saying confessing is bad, and we should never confess” or “He’s saying that you should never confront your spouse about something.”

No, he’s not saying that.  What he is saying is you have a finite number of heartbeats to have on this planet.  You have a finite number of moments to live and thus you have a finite number of moments to have thoughts.

You get to choose how you spend those moments.

You get to choose the thoughts you think.

We all get to choose the questions we ask.

It’s a new year.  It’s a time for reflection on what we’ve accomplished.  It’s a time for thinking about what’s to come, a time to think about what we are going to create.  We all know that predictably most resolutions will get broken.  And if that’s the case, then why do we do it at all?  Why do we take the time to imagine the possibility that the coming year can bring?  Is there something to be learned just from the act of making resolutions?  I believe that there is.

Imagining what we want to have happen this year gives us an opportunity to touch a space that unfortunately we only seem to allow ourselves to experience but once per year.  That space is the future.  Think about it.  You ponder where you want to be a year from now.  You imagine the possibility of your life.  You envision the possibility of a year.  You become inspired by thoughts of a slimmer body, more money, or a more loving relationship.  You find yourself filled with joy – the joy of creating something new, creating what you want.  Then when this part of the process is done (or at least that’s how we think about it), we set off to do the work of making our futures come true.  And for most of us, about two to four weeks later, not only is that experience of joy and wonder a distant memory; so too are our resolutions.

What’s happening here?

To fully appreciate this dynamic, I’d like you to imagine that you are sitting in a chair.  To the left of you is an apple tree and to the right of you is a yellow bicycle.  If I said to you, “Fulfilling your future requires one simple thing of you.  For the next year, for most of the time, you must keep your eye on the yellow bicycle.  Sometimes you can look at the apple tree, but for most of the time, you must maintain your focus on the bicycle.”  Putting the ridiculousness of this scenario aside, if that’s what it took to fulfill your future, the task would be clear and simple.

With respect to your future – your New Year’s resolutions – the water gets muddied.  You create your future (yellow bicycle) and then once that’s done, you spend most of your time with your attention focused on your past (the apple tree).  And the real kicker is you actually think that you’re spending most of your time with your focus on your future.  You think that you’re focus is on your future because you’re working so damn hard to make it happen.  You think you’re attention is on the yellow bicycle, but it’s not.  You’re engaged most of the time telling the old story about the old life that you’ve already created wondering why it’s so damn hard to have those things you wanted.  Wondering where the inspiration of your life has gone.

With regard to our resolutions, most of us spend some relatively small amount of time at the beginning of the year telling the new story of our lives.  “I want to have a strong healthy body and weigh 150 pounds” (yellow bicycle).  “I want to have a fantastic job that brings me alive everyday” (yellow bicycle).  “I want to have a loving intimate relationship” (yellow bicycle).  Then we spend the rest of the year telling the old story of our lives.  “It’s really hard to not eat pizza, but I guess I’ll have to suck it up” (apple tree).  “I just can’t find time to exercise and plus, I really hate it” (apple tree).  “There are no jobs out there for me.  Oh well, let me send out some resumes.  Not that it’s going to make any difference” (apple tree).  “Men/women suck.  There are no good ones out there.  I’m tired of dating” (apple tree).

So what can you do differently?  Simple.  “I want to have a strong healthy body and weigh 150 pounds.”  That’s the first line of your masterpiece.  Now write me the rest of the story.  Write me the story of how it’s going to go in January, February, March and so on right through the end of the year to 150 pounds.  But not the story of how it’s going to go based on your past.  Tell me the story of how it’s going to go based on your future.

“What?  How am I supposed to know how’s it going to go based on my future?”

Exactly.  You don’t, and that’s really the point.  We don’t know how the future is going to go, but we live like we do.  And since we live like we do know, if you don’t write another story; if you don’t write the story you want, then your past (the apple tree) will be the only one you’re left with.  It will, by default, become your focus and the only story you’ll be able to tell, and you pretty much know how that story is going to go.

So yes, make those resolutions, but this year, tell the whole story.  And not just once, tell the whole story again and again and again.  And keep telling it until the new story (just like the old story did) becomes your life.

All that’s missing in your resolution process is the rest of the story!