Change Your Life: Living Skillfully

What would make you amazing?

That’s what I asked some of my personal development mailing list members last week.

Some, I know, are still thinking about it (if that’s you, here’s your reminder to email me with your answer). But here are some answers I received:

To be more comfortable around people. I’m always worried about what I’m saying or doing, if it’s the right thing or not, second-guessing what people think of me. It makes being round people tiring and stressful and, guessing again, makes me tiring and stressful to be around. It would be nice to be relaxed around people, rather than putting on a detached and rather fraught performance.

To get the best of here and now, to do things here and now, rather than live in daydreams. My mind is always at least half way somewhere else. Imaginary people and conversations. Dreams of schemes and projects I’ll do ‘one day’.

Better focus and concentration. My mind’s so used to the entertainment and ease of my dream world I find it hard to put the work in to achieve things in reality.

I would like to organise events and activities for my friends and the wider community that are popular and successful.

I’d like to be able to get up earlier in the morning and be decisive enough to get on and do all the things I want to fit in to my day.

I’d love to be able to inspire people to take action on the issues that I feel are important (like environmental sustainability and conservation) both at work and in my social life.

I’d like to be more popular and have more friends.

Among the many things I find interesting about these answers, three in particular stand out.

Common Themes

Firstly, there are some clear common themes between them. I’m sure others will come out as I receive more responses, but being more comfortable when interacting with other people, and being able to take action and achieve the things that are important to you, both recur.

If you think about it for a moment, these are connected goals. To be able to achieve anything significant, you need to impact other people, and you almost certainly need the help, support and involvement of other people (which is why I do things like asking questions of my mailing list – in fact, why I have a mailing list at all). You need to be able to come out of your head and bring your thoughts, dreams, ideals and plans into contact with real life (where they will inevitably be modified). It takes energy, commitment and focus.

photo credit: paul (dex)

Familiar Themes

For a while now, I’ve been asking people who join my mailing list, “What can I do for you?” I would send an email out the day after you joined, asking for your pain points, the issues that you’d love to get solved, and how that would make your life better.

I’ve had a wide variety of responses, but they seem to be converging lately on wanting to be more confident and at ease in the world, and wanting to be able to focus, pull things together and achieve more in life.

My email last week was a straw in the wind to see if changing the emphasis of that first email would work. Rather than focussing on “what problem do you have that you want solved so you can be ‘normal’?”, I’d like to reframe it as, “what change in your life would enable you to be much more than you are now?”.

One thing I’ve learned in my working life is that I’d much rather be involved in creating things than in fixing them. There’s a place for fixing, of course, for helping people who are in pain and in trouble. That will always be needed, and I love to see the difference it makes. But my ambition for the people I work with is higher than just restoring them to being “OK”. I’ve seen some of my clients go on to be amazing, and I want to see that happen more and more.

So here’s the official announcement: I’m changing the welcoming email. Instead of “What can I do to help you fix your pain?” it’s now “What can I do to help you transcend your limitations and be more than you ever thought you could be?”

Themes I Relate To

We humans are odd. We communicate, it seems, at a level that goes far beyond words. We walk around with signs on our foreheads telling other people about ourselves and how we expect to be treated and how we’re likely to react. And we read other people’s signs without even being consciously aware of it.

Without being at all mystical about it, I believe that if you communicate enough, people will be drawn to you who have a good fit with what you’re about, even if neither they nor you could fully explain what that is.

Which is my preface to saying, those responses that I got are about exactly the issues that I’ve been working on myself over the last few years. And I’m sure that’s got across to those lovely people who responded (who have been reading my stuff for a while now).

For most of my life I’ve been shy and socially awkward. Doing improv (which involves a lot of eye contact and connection with your fellow players) has recently helped me become more comfortable with making eye contact with people – which in turn has highlighted to me how much I avoided doing that.

And I’ve always been a dreamer (typing that inevitably starts the Eagles song “Take It to the Limit” playing in my head). Up until the past few years, I’ve seldom followed a project right through to completion or achieved much of anything, because, as one of my respondents put it, my mind was “so used to the entertainment and ease of my dream world I found it hard to put the work in to achieve things in reality”.

Because I’m working on those issues myself, and because I’m a couple of years ahead on them, and because I’ve developed a knack of coming up with practical approaches to help people shift their thoughts, feelings and behaviours, I feel confident that I can provide some useful stuff for other people who are still being held back from their best life by a lack of connection, confidence and sustained action-taking.

So, alongside my series on How Not to Change Your Life, which deals with things that hold you back, I’m going to start running a How to Be Amazing series, on things that will move you forward. They’ll more or less alternate.

We can become amazing together.

And if you haven’t told me yet what would help you to be amazing, email me (mikerm at hypno dot co dot nz) and tell me. The questions I asked were:

• What would make your life amazing? What  do you secretly wish you could do, but you’re not sure you can?
• Why is that important to you?
• And what’s stopping you?

UPDATE: This series will continue on my new website, How to Be Amazing.