Tag Archives: Motivation

Coaching

Letting go

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IndianaFor a long while, I’ve wanted to buy a Victorian rectory in the country; ideally with a few acres and a little river meandering through the grounds. More recently, following a trip to the lovely city of Harrogate, my wife and I set ourselves on moving there.

Now there’s nothing really wrong with where we live now in a quiet little village in East Yorkshire, it is after all the reason we left London. The goal oriented part of me however didn’t feeling fulfilled, it wanted to have even more bedrooms, an estate to stride round in the evening, a swimming pool for all those leisure hours I convince myself I should have and so on.

Whilst restling with these thoughts the perfect epiphany revealed itself while watching Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail. Indiana (Harrison Ford) and the Nazis have been on a quest to find the Holy Grail. Towards the end, Elsa (the bad lady) reaches into a chasm to grasp the grail but it’s just out of reach. Through her obsessive desire and greed she reaches out one last time and over-stretches, resulting in a short fall to her bitter end.

The insightful twist is that the person who should know better – Indiana – then reveals the same human frailty and is also tempted by the allure of the chalice which is just out of reach. Indiana stretches and it’s so close. Just within grasp. Nearly there. He reaches one last time, just as Elsa did before him, when the wise voice of his father (Sean Connery) tells him to “let it go“. In a whirlwind of conflicting emotions, beliefs, desire and engrained thinking, Indy hesitates then breaks out of his tunnel vision trance and realises the truth.

The more attachment we have to something the more  under its influence we become. There never is an end to the material stuff we can strive for in life. If it’s a house or a car there’s always something better. You can never get enough of what you most want but don’t need.

While it’s perfectly ok to be happy with what you have but wanting more, we need to recognise that wanting more always comes at a price. The question you have to ask is whether the price is worth paying. I think for now I’ll acknowledge what a nice place I live in. There’s plenty more things in this short world to experience than stretching to something bigger.
Coaching

Reinvention (or why it’s never too late to be what you might have been)

Matthew McConaugheyI’ve always thought that there’s a deep comfort and sense of hope in a quote often attributed to George Eliot: “It is  never too late to be what you might have been”.

For anyone who watched True Detective last year you’ll have seen a moodier, darker and more intense side to Matthew McConaughey. Now of course he’s an actor and a key ability of actors is to wear different masks and adopt different personas. But McConaughey is coming from a different place. On CBS last year (http://www.cbsnews.com/news/matthew-mcconaughey-on-dallas-buyers-club/)  he said.

“I was going fine in my career. I was enjoying my career. My life started to feel more exciting than my career did… I said, I’m gonna have to stop doing what I’ve been doing. The first thing was saying no to the things that I was doing. I got together with my wife. We said, ‘Look, we’re financially okay. We’re gonna eat and pay the rent. It’s gonna be dry for a while. Don’t know how long.’ That was sort of scary. We didn’t know how long. I just wanted to spice it up. I wanted to shake things up for myself. I wanted to go down to do some roles that shook my floor, that made me uncomfortable.”

I like the idea of taking action to shake things up. That’s a good way to start the process of reinvention. We’re all a work in progress but most of us never consciously invented ourselves in the first place. As McConaughey put it…

“I un-branded, I think is the best way I could say it”.

Un-brand. Re-start. Re-invent. Or more accurately… Invent yourself. You probably never took a conscious decision to be who you are in the first place. As today unfolds, why settle for who you were yesterday? Start shaking things up. It’s time to take the action that will consciously Invent yourself for the first time. Who are you going to start being today?