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Issue # 61 |
To Your Success |
February 2010 |
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” ----- Albert Schweitzer
YOUR DREAM HOUSE Hello, Most people would agree that each of us wants to live a happy and successful life. A life with meaning, one in which we regularly experience joy, aliveness, inner peace, and the satisfaction of living with purpose. Who wouldn’t want that?
Why is it then that so many of us go through life doing and accumulating only to fall so far short of this objective? It’s not that we’re lazy. Goodness, no! Most of us work pretty darn hard at life ... one look at our faces shows that.
There are exceptions of course, as some few individuals appear to effortlessly fall into a life that’s the perfect fit. From an early age they live in the ‘ideal for them’ place, doing work and other activities they absolutely love, and are as happy as the proverbial clam. This certainly wasn’t my story.
Some others of us sort things out along the way, arriving at such a place only after a detour or two and countless course corrections. This often requires a tremendous amount of soul searching, personal work, and willingness to change. My story for sure.
Others never do. Except for a series of temporary highs resulting from ‘accomplishing this’, ‘doing that’, or ‘buying some new thing or other’, they live their life feeling empty and unfulfilled. The potential for changing this state and creating something different is always there of course, but perhaps not the awareness or willingness.
How does this happen and why such a difference from one person to another? Let’s consider an analogy that may help us understand.
Think of a ‘life’ as being a house, and that as we grew into adulthood each of us began the process of building a house of our own. Consider also that each of us inherited an incredible property encompassing thousands and thousands of acres offering a huge variety of amazing building sites from which to choose.
How exciting! We got to build whatever kind of house we wanted, wherever we wanted to build it!
That was the good news. The bad news was that many of us were ill prepared for this project. Any instruction received while growing up was limited at best, and examples of beautiful, well built, high quality houses in our neighbourhood were rare.
So there we were, hammering and nailing away, adding this and that, whistling and singing as we busily went about constructing our home. It was fun and exciting, at first. Gradually however, the joy faded as we found that individual pieces didn't come together quite the way we had hoped. Walls were not lining up properly, windows and doors didn’t fit right, electrical outlets and switches were in the wrong places, drains weren’t draining properly. How disappointing!
What the ‘hey’ was going on, how could this be happening?
To understand, perhaps we need to consider the process that so many of us followed, so let’s review it from the very beginning before construction even started.
The first issue was our building site. What typically happened was that, often with very little care and consideration, we chose one of the first sites we came across and simply started building.
It was only after moving into the house and living there for a while that we became conscious of the fact that the location was far from ideal. Although we thrive on sunlight, our house was under a huge canopy of trees and shaded almost the entire day. We enjoy entertaining on the patio, but the bugs ... the bugs were so bad that being outside was almost unbearable. We love looking at the ocean, but being deep in the forest all we saw was trees. How could that have happened?
Then there was the house itself. A few of us may have had a plan with blueprints, but very few. Many of us had little more than a rough drawing on a scrap of paper, and others of us, perhaps most, had nothing at all, we just hoped it would all work out. An interesting strategy.
To make matters worse, many of us began construction on unprepared ground ... we jumped right into the framing process without having given any thought to first laying down a solid foundation. Hard to believe.
And the outcome? Well, in the best case scenarios we ended up with a house that looked great from the street, at least for a few years, yet never really felt right ... and it didn’t take long before the walls showed cracks and the floors sagged.
In the worst case scenarios we ended up with a hodgepodge of a house that looked like a garbage dump, didn’t suit us at all and was almost impossible to live with. Not exactly what we had hoped for when we started out.
As discussed earlier, the house in this analogy represents our life. We can build anything we want but the fact is that regardless of how impressive it may look from the street, our level of satisfaction with the finished product will be strongly determined by the other two components of the project ... the foundation and building site.
The foundation represents our character, attitude, and thought habits. For our house to be strong and stable enough to withstand the forces of nature and provide us with a sense of peace and comfort, a solid foundation is imperative.
The building site represents where we have decided to invest our time and energy. In order for us to feel totally alive in our house (life) it must be built on a site with the unique combination of elements that are meaningful to us. This site (our business, career, activities) must be in alignment with our natural gifts, our personal values, and our core self. A particular site may be perfect for someone else yet completely unsuitable for us, despite initially seeming like a practical choice.
Oh, by the way. Going back to our previously described ‘solid foundation’, I believe I forgot to mention that it has magical properties and can be easily relocated at will should we ever discover that we’ve positioned it on an inappropriate site. How cool.
Now, the elements required for that perfect site vary from person to person of course, but our properties are huge and the possible building sites many ... so an appropriate one is always available if we’re open to finding it.
So what are these natural gifts of ours and how do we discover them, and how do we identify our personal values and find out who we really are at a core level?
This is actually a two part question and unfortunately the answers are too lengthy to fully explore here. To paint at least a partial picture however of part one that deals with our natural gifts, I’ll defer to Monique MacDonald, creator and facilitator of a powerful workshop of discovery called ‘Discover Your Sacred Gifts’. To paraphrase Monique ...
“These gifts seem to be in us but not of us. In a sense, they do not quite belong to us and yet it is our job to use them. They were placed within us at birth and can act as powerful guides if we pay attention to the signs of their presence. When we use these gifts we produce profound effects, far beyond what we could normally create with simply a talent or skill.
Each time we find ourselves acting from these gifts we can have an experience of feeling on purpose ... yet that isn’t their only purpose. They were meant to be given away. That’s why they’re called ‘gifts’. It’s in giving them that extraordinary results will occur for others, while leaving us feeling effective, energized, and super charged. When we align our work and play with our unique mix of gifts it naturally follows that we make better fitting life choices and experience self-appreciation and fulfillment.”
Thank you for that Monique, very helpful.
Uncovering our own natural gifts helps us avoid making career and other activity choices that leave us feeling like a square peg in a round hole ... not a comfortable fit for sure. It also helps us discover and become more in tune with our core self, who we really are.
There’s more than one way to go about discovering our gifts and I know this from personal experience. My own process has been fairly lengthy and remains a work in progress for sure. Among other things, it involves going through life being consciously aware, being ‘present’ to who I am and how I feel in all life situations, and learning from that. It involves being open to what life is showing me and being willing to change. Fun stuff, yes?
If you’re ready to start down this path, or even if you’re already on it, it might be useful to know that there is a ‘shortcut’ available for this gift discovery process that can make it a whole lot quicker and easier (wish I’d known about this 40 years ago). This shortcut is Monique’s workshop, so if you have interest you may want to check that out.
As for building your foundation, the personal development work, unfortunately I don’t know of any shortcuts for that. This process is all about accepting personal responsibility, choosing who you are becoming as a person, developing character, learning to deliberately manage your attitude and outlook, and consciously developing thought-habits and beliefs that will serve you well for a lifetime.
Assuming you’re willing to engage in this process there are programs, like my ThoughtShop and other quality ones available in the marketplace today, as well as many excellent books and online courses, that can outfit you with much of the necessary ‘equipment’ for this journey. You still have to travel it yourself however, no one can do it for you.
Wherever you are now in this house-building process Dilpreet, is where you are. If your life is filled with meaning and you feel joy, aliveness, inner peace, and the satisfaction of living with purpose ... wonderful. I’m so happy for you and wish you that forever.
If it isn’t however, that’s okay too because you have the ability to change that. Your property is still your property and there’s plenty of time yet to select a new building site, shore up your foundation, and build your dream house.
A joyful, meaningful, peaceful, satisfying, purposeful life is your inherent right, it’s yours to create, waiting for you just around the corner only a few simple steps away. Will you take those steps?
To your success, Reg
“No man can live happily who regards himself alone, who turns everything to his own advantage. You must live for others if you wish to live for yourself.” -----Seneca
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