• You may have reached a plateau in your life, and you are on a quest for more motivation and drive.
• You may be questioning the meaning of your life and your sense of fulfilment and purpose.
• Perhaps you have started a new job, or you are looking for your first job; maybe you have been made redundant and are having to take a long close look at what you want to do next.
• Perhaps your children have finally flown the nest and you are left with bags more time than you originally had as the lion's share of your life has been focused on looking after your family; now you finally have some time for yourself.
• Perhaps a major event may has caused you to take a harder, more analytical, view of your life.
• You may be simply looking for a boost of energy and drive so that you can start the next phase of your life in a more purposeful way.
Whatever circumstances you find yourself in, this book has the tools to help you motivate yourself, find meaning and discover your purpose, get a greater sense of fulfilment which will accelerate through to the next exciting stage of your life's adventure.
Together, we are going to go on a journey, and we will be travelling through different emotional landscapes until you arrive at a point where you feel ready to get motivated, engaged and purposeful in your life.
All you need to travel is this book and your journal.
How to read this book
I have organized the book into three distinct sections:
1. Discover yourself – A journey to yourself
Here we explore what lights you up, what makes your life worth living, what you hold most precious and dear.
2. Free yourself – What gets in the way of your happiness?
Here we will be surfacing all your negative thoughts and feelings that stop you from being the wonderful, self-resourcing person you could be.
Also in this section, we begin the work of re-wiring your existing mindset to make you a motivated and more fulfilled individual.
3. Motivate your life – Design the life you want to live
The third and final section provides a step-by-step guide including tools and tips you can implement immediately.
Everything starts with a decisIon
Transforming your life is not time related. It starts with a decision and a strong yearning and desire to have it be different, and then follows through with some radical actions.
Many people lack confidence, motivation, or are lost with no clear direction meaning or purpose. They are oblivious to what they are truly capable of. They are often underestimating what is possible for them in their lives.
It may be that they have no job, or it may be that they are a top level CEO; it does not matter where they are or who they are if they are not happy and fulfilled – if they don't experience a strong sense of purpose on some level, their life does not work.
Where they live in the privacy of their own head is what needs to be surfaced and examined.
Once again, ask yourself: Why did you pick up this book? Perhaps part of you is not really satisfied, but you don't dare admit it – not even to yourself – for fear of invalidating your life to date.
Sure you have made some great decisions – after all, you may on the surface have a successful life. You have the luxury to provide the best things that money can buy for your children and family, but still there is something missing.
Part of getting to the answer of some of these deep questions is examining your purpose. It is vital to reconnect to the energy force and your values.
Everyone has values but are not necessarily conscious of them.
Becoming conscious of your values is an essential part of redirecting your focus, and we will be discussing this in much more depth in the first section of the book.
It is my experience that once individuals get a glimpse of what their life could be like, it's like a drug.
Then begins the quest of creating a life where they experience themselves as more fully engaged and expressed.
We race through our lives never pausing to consider who we really are and, more importantly, who we really want to be expressing.
Before I became a facilitator, my career began as an English Literature teacher when I taught in some of the roughest and toughest areas of London.
Here I would meet many teenagers, some of them coming from difficult homes, and I learned very quickly that the first lesson they had to learn was to believe in themselves. I believed that as their teacher I had a responsibility to get them to where they felt confident and strong.
Unfortunately, they had had years of being told:
• you are no good
• you are worthless
• you are bad
• you will never amount to anything.
The difficult ones would end up in ‘sin bins’ (classrooms manned by strict teachers where the pupil was not allowed to talk or leave the room for the whole day).
Others would be in exclusion units. I realized early on that while the school and teachers felt they were helping, all they were actually doing was supporting the body of evidence these children were gathering about themselves –‘I am not good enough, and I am not worthy'.
Getting these pupils to believe in themselves really paid off because, under the hard shell, they were just young people who had been let down and were disillusioned.
Does any of this sound familiar? My work as a facilitator focuses on getting people to stand back and challenge some of their limiting beliefs about what is possible for them. They may have inherited these beliefs from their home life, school life, classroom or cultural background.
However they have acquired these beliefs, they become accustomed to thinking of themselves as smaller than their problems, as victims of circumstance, and generally end up blaming others for their situation or for not having what they want in life. In this paradigm, we are all powerless to effect any change.
‘I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.’
The big challenge is to get back in touch with what we value, what lights us up, what motivates us in life.
Once this is achieved, we can begin to take a fresh look at every area of our life. We can stand in a place of possibility and choice rather than resignation.
It is my experience that once individuals get a glimpse of who they could be, they become passionate about creating a life where they experience themselves as more fully engaged and expressed.
The innocence of children
As children we start out as positive, wide-eyed beings, willing to explore and get things wrong. At this early stage we do not have labels for these experiences, we are not preoccupied with success and failure, we just have experiences from which we learn.
Young children can drop an object from a table over and over again and find the whole process fascinating. Sooner or later the adults in our lives intervene and give us their view of the world. Eventually, we begin to adapt to other people's view of the world and how they view us.
We become preoccupied with seeking approval, conforming or rebelling. Expressing ourselves authentically and dropping the armour-plated coating we have developed to shield us from external criticism, becomes one of our biggest challenges.
Living in the gap
• Are you living ‘in the gap’ between where you are now and where you want to be?
• Do you yearn to do great things, but ultimately remain in your comfort