Living YOUR life…following YOUR dreams…

I thought long and hard about what my first article should be about and thought it best to write about my own experience and something that helped me on my way to where I am now and where I am going to. My current journey probably started in April 2009. It was just four months after being made redundant and I was enrolled on a Start Your Own Business course with Fingal CEB. It was quite a practical course in many ways and an experience I am glad to have had. Over the ten weeks or so we learned lots of really practical stuff about Accounting, VAT & Taxation, Employment Law, Sales, Marketing, how to register your business name, how to register with this group and that organisation, the importance of Networking, USPs, RWRR and even a thing called Mind Mapping. The list of business jargon went on and on and on…

However, apart from the highly useful and somewhat jargonistic nature of the course, the one thing that stood out is a simple one-liner from one of the very experienced trainers. They advised us that, no matter how well researched, financed or staffed our business was it would go absolutely nowhere if ‘…those closest to us did not support it…’  That set alarm bells off in my head because, it rung so true.

I didn’t have the support of those around me and I wasn’t living the life I wanted. I was surrounded by good people but people who didn’t really understand me nor what I wanted. It would have to change otherwise I was destined for a life of even greater stress and unhappiness. From that point forward, something that I had known for some time, was brought to the fore and needed to be acted on. I needed to get back to who I was, the real me, who I had been many many years before. Yet this time I would live that ‘me’ with confidence.

The reality was that I had not been myself for a long long time and I was playing out a script written by someone else – who that ‘someone else’ was I didn’t know but it wasn’t me. And not knowing who that ‘someone else’ was and indeed believing that there was a ‘someone else’ was an easy opt for me. It meant that I didn’t have to try. I could happily slump into this other role and play out the script written by this ‘someone else’ and I could blame it all on them when it all went pear shaped, and of course it did. I was rapidly gaining weight, which came from over-eating to block out the reality that was my life – and of course I blamed ‘someone else’ for that too.

What was the result, well as Judy Garland said, “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else” I was a 2^nd rate (or even a 3^rd or 4^th rate) version of someone else.

I had been trying to lose weight for some time and even increasing the numbers of times I went to the gym made no difference. In fact it got worse as I was eating even more rubbish, safe in the knowledge that I was going to the gym and could burn it off. A vicious vicious cycle.

The gym didn’t work for me – the reasons being that I didn’t enjoy it and I never really knew why I was there. ‘You were there to lose weight’ but NO I wasn’t. I was (literally in some cases) running away and hiding from the fact that there was something wrong and missing in my life. My relationship wasn’t working and my half-hearted attempts to find employment after redundancy weren’t working either – I simply didn’t want either…and they didn’t want me.

When I got clear on what I wanted and took responsibility for where I found myself, I moved into a much happier place – within and things started to happen without.

I had had enough and decided it was time to change. Often I think back to what it was that made me want to change and I still don’t clearly know. I have racked my brains to discover the exact point in time when the change occurred so I could replicate it and increase it. It may have been when I finally became brave enough to end the marriage knowing that underneath that heavy exterior lay the real me. It may even have been the few compliments that I received when I first started losing weight that egged me on to lose even more. Not sure exactly, but I suppose it must have been sometime after seeing, just one too many photos of a man looking at least 10 years his senior and having a few too many inches around the waist! That happens to ‘lots of people’ in marriage but I was never ‘lots of people’ So when we decided that the relationship we were in was no longer serving us, we parted. Maybe others need to face the same reality? Or think twice before entering into it?

It does really matter when it started or even how. What matters is that it started and it went in the right direction. As Chuang-Tzu said in ‘The Little Zen Companion’:

“The purpose of a fish trap is to catch fish, and when the fish are caught, the trap is forgotten. The purpose of a rabbit snare is to catch rabbits. When the rabbit is caught, the snare is forgotten. The purpose of words is to convey ideas. When the ideas are grasped, the words are forgotten.”

So we don’t really need to know the how and the why (well, not always – not in this instance anyway), we do need to know that this is for us and we truly believe in it. All I know is when I knew that I wanted it there was no doubt in my mind and no going back whatsoever – that much was clear.

Until next time, take care…