Paths of Life
Life can be lived in many different ways. You may also have many different lives (family life, work life, adventure life, etc). These two combined sums up where you are and how you do life - ultimately becoming who you are as a person and as a family. In theory, the different lives do not overlap from a purely academic standpoint. This means we can keep work at work and engage in "situational leadership" where we are a bit of a different person in the different parts of our lives. We likely trick or convince ourselves that we can box ourselves up...but we spillover and who we are in one space is, surprise, surprise...who we are in summary. "Nice guy" at work...probably nice guy at home...jerk here...probably jerk there.In practicality, your lanes of life likely look more like this if you're half-organized. The parallel line fallacy that each life is totally segmented and does not intersect probably makes you a robotic drone. In "real life" we have to leave work to let the dog out or take the kid to the dentist. In real life, we have seasons where we lean into or away from particular parts of life. Perhaps we're caring for small children, transitioning into retirement, or some other strategic-level season. If we're able to continuously course correct as we go through life, we can hopefully make our "life graph" look fairly circular and generally balanced, that's a good thing. When we notice that we're getting way too out of sync, it's time to "re-balance" just like getting our tires rotated.
If you're not organized at all, your life graph is probably more like this. This results in inefficiency and loss of effectiveness that puts you and yours into the crazy cycle. This is part of life where we end up racing from one thing to the next, never getting ahead and doing "dumb" things to try to find the "get rich quick" or "get out of chaos immediately" approach that really doesn't work. The old adage, "The best place to go when you're hungry is to a job." Since the beginning of time, we humans have had to get up and get to work in order to bring anything worthwhile into our lives. When you're in this sort of season of life...getting off the couch and hammering on the actions to make progress is critical.
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Roof rappelling. |
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Friendship line. |
All of that to say, changing the model and thinking about your life in terms of a system that you have an influence on helps you make the changes to get to where you want to go.
With you in the arena, from ours to yours...Happy Trails!
Call to Action:
- What are three tangible, concrete action steps that you could take now based on what your life looks like today...and what you want it to look like tomorrow.
- 1 - ___________________
- 2 - ___________________
- 3 - ___________________
- Discussion: Consider what you/your family could/would/should (level of commitment) and start/stop/sustain (action) in terms of your life lines and how they overlap/intersect with your family.
Further Reading, Motivation, and References:
- The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HWRGKfSq3A
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