Is life…holding you back? Face it, most of us live 90% of our lives feeling like Norm on Cheers when he walked into the bar and was asked how his day was going: “It’s a dog eat dog world and I’m wearing Milk-Bone underwear.” Millennials – you will have to find your own comparative for my thirty year old quote.
We will describe “meh” in others ways: going through the motions, punching the clock, working for the man. We fill our workaday lives with the flotsam of the ordinary though our secret heart is desiring the extraordinary. We crowd our lives with meeting the daily needs of others – our spouses, our kids, our employers. It’s easy to lose our perspective on the big, life changing ideas that roll around the bowling balls sitting atop our shoulder.
As we age we can become increasingly frustrated with our own perceived lack of progress. We haven’t become what we wanted to become when we were writing the high school yearbook quote. Who am I? Why do I matter? No ready answers and you have an all hands on deck mid-life crisis.
To add outside perspective to the navel gazing, a Cornell University Legacy Project study (http://finance.yahoo.com/news/americans-over-65-shared-greatest-120000285.html) of older people had Americans over 65 share their greatest regret in life: WORRY.
Too often, worry is about others not us. We fear repercussion. We fear not being good enough, what others think, that our ideas are too unusual, or that our physical appearance doesn’t meet the impossible shown on fashion magazine covers. We fear how others perceive us or will react to standing out from the crowd. And it’s holding us back from achieving our highest aspiration of ourselves. When we don’t achieve our own aspiration, we also aren’t fully enabling it for our families and our work. We aren’t contributing to talent pool we need to make communities great, and to be more globally competitive.
One of the biggest audience reactions I get when I do conference presentations is an Internet meme that says: “When work feels overwhelming remember you are going to die.”
I think the reaction comes from something so simply said reminding us that we are – roughly in the words of another Internet meme – a happy circumstance of a few billion cells that gathers to be us for a while. Said in a more raw way: you don’t get out of life alive.
You’re sitting in yet another meeting. Your eyelids start to feel like they are a million pounds. Voices start to sound like the Charlie Brown teacher. Things are going nowhere. You stopped trying so hard long ago…the corporate machine is grinding. You are there, but you’re not there. You’re not engaged.
This time, try a reset with that simple head-space self-talk: you are going to die. I started using this technique early in my career. I wrote my epitaph in my mind: “This Isn’t So Much Different Than Lying On My Couch Except There’s No Channels To Change.”
It’s such a simple, momentary thought process with such a powerful ability to reset that deeper sense of urgency to make your life a reflection of the highest hopes you have for you, family, work, community, and country. You become more willing to break the constraints of convention – or someone else’s idea of what you are or should be. You become the joy in being a maverick, even if it’s only your “rebel yell” underwear you hide from others. You take back your power to try to change the world, no matter how big or small. The frame of mind is an adrenalin rush.
Add a few like-minds and you are off and running, changing organizational culture from the inside. From there, anything becomes possible. If you think of performance as an onion, attitude lies at the heart. Too often, we work the other way around – blaming bad planning, or compromised infrastructure, or bad marketing, for lack of progress. Let’s organizationally get back to our middle and adopt “Core Power” strategies.
We can blame others for our lack of amazing. Or we can get busy making it happen for us. Our life depends on it.