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How to be a mess

Many blog experts advise to publish every week, some even multiple times per week.

I haven’t published a blog post in 11 months.

A bit before that, there was a gap of 16 months between posts.

Over the 6 years of this blog, I’ve published a grand total of 32 posts.

To say that I was inconsistent is an euphemism.

I tried to do well, I tried to follow the experts, I tried one thing and the other, in “business” and in life. But you know what?

I’m a mess.

I’ve spent the better part of last year very focused on my own personal growth, I followed multiple programs. I’ve grown a lot, and given that I value growth, I’m very happy about the internal results.

The external results, not so much.

And that didn’t change the fact that for my birthday, a couple weeks ago, I felt like shit. Now, it’s nothing new, pretty much every year I’m depressed around my birthday.

This year, I felt unappreciated, unloved, unworthy. If I’m not worthy, what is the point of celebrating my birthday, or me? Makes sense, right?

I could have tried to numb the pain (doesn’t work), or simply hide it when it comes, pretend like I’m perfect, or say that I’m not but still hide it when something “wrong” comes up.

I’m very good at seeing what’s not right, with people, systems, business.

Yet, I have no frickin idea what I’m doing.
And that’s okay.

I’ve tried to do.
I’ve tried to figure out what I was meant to do.
I’ve read the books, did the trainings, attended the workshops.

I’ve beaten myself up, and I’ve taken care of myself.

I wanna do a million things, I wanna have an impact, I wanna love and I wanna be loved. I wanna create, I wanna help and I wanna have fun.

And I still don’t know what I want to do… and I’m still a mess.

And that’s still okay.

I realized it’s not about what I do, it’s about who I am, and who I am being.

By truly being me, I can do what matters. I can do what is the essence of me.

I’ve grown a lot along the years, and maybe, just maybe, sharing some of the process, being and showing who I am, might help someone.
Maybe I don’t need to wait and wait and produce the perfect guide or answer or blog post.
Maybe it’s more about showing who I truly am, and let others take whatever might help them or touch them.
Maybe I don’t need to know what I want to do or be sure of what matters most before I take action, or create, or hit publish.

Maybe you don’t either.

Yes, I’m a mess.

So what?

Maybe being truly human means being a mess, sometimes, or all the time.

Whoever I am, I am now.

Welcome to my world, I’m really glad you’re here.

Be careful what you live for

Have you ever seen a teenager living for music?

He’s easy to spot: walks with his headphones on, sings when no one’s listening, most likely plays an instrument, and has posters of bands all over his walls.

Let’s say you are a person (a parent, a sibling, a friend, a boss, a.. god?) with the power to grant him wishes, it’s easy to know that he’ll want more music in his life (if that’s even possible).

His life is a statement to what he lives and wants. So you simply look at his life and decide to grant him his wish: “here, have more music in your life, enjoy, dear”. What he wants is what he spends his energy on. Pretty straightforward.

Now let’s talk about that friend, the one who’s unhappy, always complaining about his job, or his relationship (or lack thereof) or anything else for that matter. What does he want? More of his unfulfilling life?
You’d probably disagree, he most certainly does not want that. But who are you to judge whether his life choices are good for him or not? After all, he chose to fill his life with complaining and unfulfilling (so he implies) activities and relationships. He chose that, so that’s probably what he wants. “Here, have some more situations to complain about, enjoy, dear”.

Now you may ask why you (or God) would give him more of what he (allegedly) doesn’t want. But emotion just is, it is neutral, there is no absolute. That friend may desire to experience pain, suffering, or feeling a depressing lack of power over his life. Maybe he needs to learn a lesson from the experience, maybe the consequences of not taking actions so that he can really appreciate when he finally does.

Once again, it’s not yours to judge, your only job is to react to what people are expressing. They live for music, give them music, they live for love, give them love, they live for lack of money, give them more lack.

The Law of Attraction says that you attract what you focus on. And it makes sense. Everything is energy, and everything is neutral. You can choose to experience whatever you want. Your means of signaling the Universe (not only God, but also your family and friends) what you want is how you live your life. By focusing on NOT something, you bring up the same energy (and mental concept) as when you focus on that thing. Whether you actually want it or not is irrelevant. By maintaining active the mental construct of that situation, you attract it into your life.

Take the role of an external objective (and completely neutral) observer, what would the observer say you live for? Is it close to what you want your life to be about? If not, how can you change your life to align the observer’s vision to your purpose?

Your life is your greatest act of creation, and each day, you get to paint a few more strokes. So, what do you live really for?

48 hours left to join the challenge

In my article The 30-day Passionate Being challenge, I started a challenge to help you create a Passionate Life, for free. Now there are only about 48 hours left to join the challenge. After that, it’ll be to late, as I probably won’t make that same offer again.

One free session with me (I estimate the value at $100-200) just by filling in the following form with your email and your time availabilities. Good deal, isn’t it?

Get more information or fill in the form below to join the challenge. Remember, after September 21st, it’ll be too late.

All fields are required.


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How to be better than MacGyver

If you’ve ever seen a few MacGyver episodes (and who hasn’t?), you almost certainly witnessed some bomb almost explode. Disarming a bomb with only 1 second left is one of MacGyver’s specialty (along with creating all sorts of devices with chewing gum and duct tape). Though defusing a difficult situation only moments before it’s too late is a great ploy to create tension and emotion in the viewer, it also happens quite often in daily life.

Deadlines

T-Shirt
photo credit: psd

You have deadlines, taxes to pay, DVDs to return, meeting presentations to prepare, etc. What all these situations have in common is that they cause significant pain (financial, emotional, etc) if you don’t take care of them in time. You may push them back for a while, but the closer you are to the deadline, the more your brain is obsessed with it. At some point, you will drop everything else and take care of the hot potato. In order to deal with it, you might do it yourself, ask your friends for help or even hire a freelancer.

Whatever it takes.

What happens is that the mind doesn’t want to be bothered with it, so it tries to avoid it as much as possible, until it gets real, and realizes there’s no way to escape it.

What happens when you have to do it? You bring up the big guns. And you make it.

Being a hero

Being a hero is about having the courage to do what’s right, what has to be done, when most people wouldn’t.

But when you do what is necessary to make that deadline, you are a hero, you save the day.

I might means you called in all your favors, you dropped or put on hold what wasn’t really important, but you fought, and you won.

But who decided you had to wait until the last moment to do what heroes do?

Everyday hero

You know that when the pressure is right, when you’re close to the end, you find a way to do it.

So how come you always wait until the last moment to invoke these resources?

You don’t need the gloom of the eleventh hour to call your friends and ask for help, or to set aside time and energy to deal with your obligations. Use the resources you have.

Imagine it is the eleventh hour, give yourself an earlier deadline, and be a hero. Not only it will remove some stress from your life, it will also train you to use the best resources for the job, while keeping your mind on your passions.

Let’s say that you spend a week every month dreading some project you have to get done. If you can gather the resources and get it done before the stress comes up, you instantly gain 12 weeks a year that your mind can spend on a subject that you love instead of one that you dread.

I’m not saying it’ll clear your all schedule, but it might clear up a lot of the background processing of your brain, allowing it to be free to enjoy and be passionate instead of being tense and unhappy.

It’s simple to be better than MacGyver, gather all your knowledge and resources and deal with the bomb as soon as you have the tools to defuse it at your disposal, instead of waiting until your mind can’t simply hide it anymore.

Tell us in the comments how you are better than MacGyver.

How to make me want to punch you in the face

I’m not a violent guy. Well, most of the times I’m not.

Sometimes, though, I seem to forget all my manners and I imagine I’m grabbing some deeply unhelpful rep called Randal, and shaking him until he gets rid of the crap he keeps in his ears.

But I don’t do it. Partly because I don’t feel like going to jail, and partly because somebody has yet to invent a way to do that by phone or email.

What puts me in this state of darkness? Glad you asked!

Please Kick The Shit Out Of Me!
photo credit: laverrue

The beginning of the story: do you care about the experience?

More specifically, do you care about the experience of your clients, customers, and whoever you’re doing something for?

You want to provide a service, that is useful and appreciated, so you care.

You probably remember a situation when a clerk, let’s call him Randal, was complaining, and you even felt like you were bothering him. You thought “Why are you doing this job if you hate it so much?”.

And you really, really, don’t want your customers to feel the way you did.

So yes, you care. And you try to make sure each experience is the best possible. You want to improve your service so your customers are happy.

But you can’t always know what goes on in your customer’s mind.

Where you ask for feedback

So you ask for feedback. I mean, you know your customer knows best what she wants in her encounter with you and your services.

And you’re not the only one asking for feedback, the big ones do it too.

Let’s say Randal Corp. is a big Internet service provider. They record the support calls so that the “customer support experience” can be improved. They even send an email after a call to the support asking for a small 30 seconds feedback. So small that the only thing they ask you to do is click on a simple radio button to express whether the customer rep was competent and helpful. They don’t give you the opportunity to ask why the h*** they don’t provide support via email!

And why? Because they don’t want to know. Because they don’t actually want to improve the experience, they just want to rank it, to normalize it, so that it’s appropriate, not so that it’s good, or better. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they give the opportunity to send forms via email? Or – God forbid – put them on the web so their customers don’t have to spend 15 minutes waiting on a call then wait a week for the forms to arrive?

Where you get feedback

I want to make things better. This is who am I at the core. And I’m pretty good at pointing out things that could be improved. But more importantly, I’m a (potential) customer willing to help.

This is a message for the Randal Corps of the world: Most of the time you ask for feedback. Often, I give it. Sometimes you answer. Most of the times you make me understand that my suggestions won’t go further than the Trash mailbox. If by chance, you not only listen, but hear me, and I ask you to keep me posted on the elements that prevent me from buying from Randal Corp., why do I never hear from you ever again?

You say you care about your “customers”, but don’t understand it is always one at a time!

Where I want to matter

I want to be cared for. When you tell me you care, because you want feedback, I trust you, and I give. Then you do whatever you want with my gifts and forget about me. Why don’t you go until the end?

What I learn from your actions is that you want to use me and dispose of me.

Then I just want to punch you in the face, because, seriously, it’d be so easy to do it right.

Where you do it right

If you are passionate about the experience, and if you listen, I mean really listen to me, make me feel that I care, I’ll be devoted to you, I’ll help you grow and serve your clients better than ever, I’ll bring you new customers, and a wealth of ideas and services I want to buy from you.

But that brings up a question: do you want a relationship with me, or do you just want me to buy stuff from you?

Be passionate about your customers experience, and you’ll get loyal fans. Be a Randal, pretend to care and don’t follow through, and not only your customers will not care about you, they’ll jump ship as soon as something looks better on the other side.

If you’re not passionate about your customers, are you serving anyone but yourself?

No Randals were harmed in the making of this post (though I certainly thought about it).

What to do when you’re scared of change

You want to improve your health, finances, your life.

You really want to go forward towards your goals, but you’re afraid of what it takes to accomplish a change.

A world of changes where everybody stays the same

Everybody wants to change something, but everybody is also scared of it.

Have you noticed how most people, when talking about change, want the change to come from someone else?

The government, a company, their employer, their spouse or friends. Rarely we find someone who truly understands that any change worth making comes from within.

And that’s not surprising, humans are creatures of habits, we cherish both comfort and safety, and we find them in routine.

However messy and always-changing the lives of some of us are, they still provide habits and comfort, if only by their unpredictable nature. It can be the food you’re eating, the TV you’re watching, but most importantly the image that other people have of you.

Change IS scary.

Why?

Simple: you know you can survive in your current situation, you know you can handle how people see you, because you are! But any change that threatens the status quo begs the question: will I survive this? How much pain might I encounter along the way? Will I succeed? Will I fail? How people will look at me either way?

It doesn’t matter whether it looks like a good change or not, if it is significant enough, fear always creeps up.

It doesn’t mean you should never change. On the contrary, sometimes, fear shows us what we care about.

When to consider a change

Simply, when you feel the current situation isn’t right, when it doesn’t satisfy you. When you wake up dreading your work, or even worse, feeling completely apathetic.

Now, if you don’t know what to change, or how to change it, your mind will trick you into believing you don’t want/need the change.

Acknowledging you want a change and knowing how the hell you’re gonna make it are two completely different things. The first step is bringing more truth. If you want to change, accept it. Only then, look at your options. It might take time, be patient.

What if you don’t feel ready?

Why don’t you?

If you believe you’ll be ready when you’re not afraid of the change anymore, the next change you’ll make is going six feet under.

Do NOT wait for the fear to disappear, the more you care about the change, the more the fear will try to stall you. As Susan Jeffers wrote, feel the fear and do it anyway.

Now, if you wonder if you’re ready because of your financial situation, or career, or [insert very good excuse here], does that also prevent you from taking one step forward?

No, you do not need to quit your job tomorrow, but what about looking for classes to improve your skills or job offers to see how the market is going?

Assume the change you want to make, and start gathering information, go to workshop, the momentum will help you go forward. Your worst enemy is inertia. The more steps you’ll take, the easier it’ll get, even if the fear stays.

If you still doubt, here’s the killer trick: on your deathbed, what will you regret more? Making a scary change in order to attain your dreams, even if you fail, or stalling to keep the fear and safety under control (and failing by default)?

Share what you can do today to bring you closer.

Thanks to Bon for inspiring this post.