How to start again

We arrived home from our trip to Hellerup, Denmark where we made the decision to move. We started the 100 day count down to the big move then.

We didn’t know it would only be 100 days. In fact we were aiming, at the time, for something closer to 500 days.

Time is a funny thing though, we aren’t great at estimating how long big projects will take. We all know this but despite knowing this we make assumptions and then let those assumptions guide us.

They most often guide us towards not starting projects, impatience during the process and even quitting because we fear we aren’t progressing.

I observed this lesson a hundred times from watching others but never truly learned it until this experience.

It is only really experiencing that teaches us. Everything else, the collection of knowledge, it’s just pretend. It’s a fantastic guide, a science to inform our practise but we have to be so careful to not let the knowledge become the drug or even lead us to believe we know something we don’t.

Read back through what I’ve written and you’ll see two guiding principles that I use to keep my life on the path I wish it to be on.

One about time and assumptions. The other about the difference between knowledge and experience.

Principles are beliefs acquired through life experiences. They are reflections after the fact that can be applied to create certainty in times of uncertainty.

We run our lives by them in areas where we have greater certainty and we tend to rapidly progress as a result.

Unfortunately we are rarely aware of their existence so we often fail to apply them to areas of greater uncertainty in our lives and so our brains cause us to retreat.

All of the CEO’s I’ve worked with and people I have interviewed on my podcast have been able to point to them.

Few people apply them universally across business, health and personal lives though. Not through any fault, merely through lack of intent to us them to override the current system.

Anyway, back to my story. I was about to start again. In 100 days I would have the opportunity to recreate my life.

What followed was an experience more amazing than I ever considered it could be.

I started writing. In lists at first.

What do I love doing?

What sort of relationship do I want?

How do I want my kids to grow up?

What do I believe about money. Sex. Politics. Health. Parenting. Happiness. Food. Exercise.

Then why why why?

I started to write stories of my life as if I was writing not about myself but about the character that was me in a play. I then started to talk to my coach about what was holding me back.

I started to see that very little of what I had come to define as me was actually me.

Me was merely a witness to the experience sometimes witnessing the joy of life and other times somehow convincing myself that the thoughts and emotions pulling me off course were somehow me. Just like a child can sometimes get caught up in a horror film forgetting that they are only watching to witness their own fear not become it.

I’m down at the beach now as I write this, not to portray any sort of lap top lifestyle or because I don’t believe in hard work. But because it was a constant feature in what I wrote two years ago now and the experience of what it does for my life still out ways what my current knowledge tells me is rational.

The process I followed to create my life is the one I now guide my clients through.

It is simple. It isn’t always easy but I believe it is what we are all trying to do here. To live our best lives.

Doesn’t it make sense to decided what that means and map some values and principles to keep us on track when thoughts try to pull us in another direction?

If you have read all this way then something here has clearly caught your interest.

I would really love to guide you through this process and help you start experiencing the life you imagine for yourself (and in most cases so much more). If you would like to chat then just send me an email on ed@edley.net