I found myself the other day, as I often do with a sense of cabin fever having spent the last few days sat glued working at the computer.
It can often feel, that despite the hours spent working on a project, nothing seems to be happening in terms of progress.
It’s that familiar feeling of busy verses productive.
The hard part is distinguishing between whether I’m being productive and have just underestimated the time it will take to produce a lucrative product, or whether I’m just distracting myself in being busy but with no direction.
I am also aware that being busy inside of what I find interesting, is often really procrastination and distraction techniques that translate to ‘I’m not sure I even believe this shit so keep looking.’
It reminded me of, as quoted from the Star Wars site, when ‘Yoda is being brutally honest with Luke, who breathlessly says, “I don’t believe it,” after his Master raises an X-wing from the Dagobah swamp. Yoda replies – That is why you fail’.
It’s a definitive statement that comes from Yoda’s years and years of experience as a Jedi and a teacher, and it cuts through both to Luke and the audience.’
It’s easy to be evangelical when we are naive to the facts. It’s easy to be driven to create a ‘perceived product’ that can offer us an escape from our daily grind and do the thing we love, so often popularised these days but rarely demonstrated even by the instigators.
We can easily get lost in the fact that people are willing to buy this and disregard the fact that it doesn’t really work as we’ve sold it – especially not for us.
The more we learn and the more we discover, the more cynical we can become towards what we want to create.
As congruent individuals it’s hard to sell something that we know as a singular ideal is BS.
I recently wrote about the power of going for a walk to get out of negative mind cycles or overwhelm.
This simple act can really make a difference, if for no other reason than it gets us out of our current environment and stimulated by the surroundings.
Going for a walk gives us space to think. It’s a time out inside a proven idea that our physiology changes our psychology, even if it’s just for the time we are walking, it gives us a break.
Even if like me, you would rather be walking in the country side or by the sea, just getting out can really help.
At times I feel like a zoo animal wandering in an artificial urban landscape that has me question ‘what the bloody hell am I doing?’
And it’s not perfect. Solutions that work often are not shiny. They are often ‘tempered old tools’ that have stood the test of time in the real world.
As I walk along I deliberately take a road I’ve never been up so I’m stimulated with new data and the potential for a new experience.
And as I walked this time along the streets, I wrestled as I often do with that idea that on one hand I’m advocating certain ways we are told make our lives better and yet, here I am using these things and still walking the streets as lost as everyone else.
Often I think, even more so.
But what I clarified for myself was ‘no one thing’ is going to make the difference.
I’m a big advocate for breath work and meditation for example and for creating habits and building resilience but none of these will stop us being lonely, or depressed, or anxious.
Nothing in and of its self will make us confident, or get the job we want.
We won’t meet the person we want to fall in love with sitting there visualising them.
It’s how it’s had to be sold, but I haven’t found it to be so.
Because life fluctuates. It’s full of surprises. It can lure us in and trip us up. It can give us what we want and take it away. One day its bad the next it’s great.
Our emotions change day to day as does our perspective on our situation.
Not all of us can be at the top of the pyramid and it’s because we have been tricked to believe we can that creates even more disruption and distraction from what ‘incredible lives most of us actually have’ and instead towards those things that we don’t have.
On my walk I recognised the necessity of certain components to strengthen our mental resolve, but equally, if not more importantly, the necessity to examine individual area of our complaints whether that’s our work, relationships, our finances, our mental states and anything in between.
It’s crazy to hope it might be and that there’s a blanket solution that will make what we don’t want go away and what we do want magically appear.
It’s what the marketing does, but it’s unethical.
My reality on my walk was not to throw the baby out with the bath water, but to accept things for what they are rather than creating or offering ‘the panacea’ of change and be honest about that, even if it that means it’s not marketable for the masses.
Secondly it’s being willing to divide the big picture up and to look at what we need to add to our lives rather than in my case to remove everything to feel xyz – aka safe.
I also had that thought that here I am peddling these ideas that help shift other people, but not me.
I thought to myself that my advice should be simply – ‘If you do everything that I don’t do, and none of what I do, you should be successful!’
And although that sounds perhaps very defeatist, it’s isn’t when it stops becoming about others, but about ourselves.
About looking at our results based on our current and past actions and where we’ve perhaps got it wrong and being willing to try the polar opposite.
And I’m not talking about manically just doing the opposite of everything we do and expecting our dream lives to appear. If we eat a healthy diet doesn’t mean we should pig out on KFC.
But rather, in my case, what are we doing, for perfectly legitimate reasons that may still make sense, but are possibly and paradoxically working towards and adding to our sense of misalignment.
But also being very aware that this will be bloody hard work, especially when it’s us against us.
But bit by bit, inside the idea of experimentation and curiosity maybe it just might work.
My working hours have changed.
When there’s lots of uncertainty in our lives or if we are lacking direction, stressed and not to sure of what needs to be done to make progress it’s easy to start to feel overwhelmed.
Every morning I get up an hour earlier than I need to to do my morning routine.
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