Getting UnStuck: Part 2
“Don’t let the negativity given to you by the world disempower you.
Instead give to yourself that which empowers you.”
- Les Brown
In my last blog I talked about getting your life moving forward again (Getting UnStuck — Chris Carlisle (thecoachcarlisle.com). The starting steps were:
1. Believe You Are Worthy of Your Dreams
2. Develop a Plan
3. Budget Your Time
These steps are happening at the same time. There isn’t a time phase when incorporating these into your life. Every day you need to interject positive messages into your life. This should be part of your daily plan and happens within your timeframe that you have developed for yourself.
As these steps are happening you should start to see a change in your life. You should see that you are more organized. You will begin to be in a better mood. Your days seem to fly by now, because instead of periods of inactivity you are filling them with your life’s mission.
Welcome to MOVING FORWARD. This is the same feelings that the most success people in any category feel. Don’t get overwhelmed. All of these feeling are positive feelings. Remember, if you want to become different you need to think different. Your mind is thinking different, so you are becoming different. Keep moving forward.
So, Now What?
May 29th, 2023, will mark the 70th anniversary of Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay becoming the first to summit Mt. Everest (1953). Can you imagine the excitement that this beekeeper from New Zealand and a sherpa from Nepal must have felt when they did what no one else had done? I’m sure there was a moment of adulation and then the realization that now they had to climb down. Somewhere during that roller coaster ride did they ever look out from the tallest point on earth and say, “So, now what?”
The NEED to continue to move farther is imbedded in out DNA. It is a human need to accomplish goals on the way to achieving our dreams. This is how the human race has moved ahead with inventions and the way we deal with our day to interactions. We’ve all heard the story that our cell phones have more computer power than Apollo 11 did when it landed on the moon.
It couldn’t have happened if we weren’t driven forward with the need to move.
So, your life is moving forward with the first three steps, “So, now what?”
Understand You (Passion)
Now that we are moving forward in our lives it’s time to understand who YOU truly are.
What is your PASSION!
Passion is defined as a: “Strong and barely controllable emotion.” (Oxford Dictionary) What do you feel passionate about in your professional life? What is it that consumes all of your focus and your time? I’m not talking about what you would “like to do.” Or “that looks like fun.” Because 99/100 times if you just “like” something it won’t be long before you “dislike” it so much that you don’t want to do it and if it looks like fun, it’s only after you have fought and scratched for several years do you finally get to the “fun” part.
If this “passion” isn’t pumping through your heart every day, if your “passion” doesn’t let you sleep at night and makes you make up in the middle of night thinking about it. It’s probably not your true passion.
This is where you need to take stock in who YOU really are and what really matters to you. What do you want to invest your life in doing? I heard a great saying on Instagram. “There are only two people who you need to make proud in your life, It’s not your parents, or relatives. It’s not your spouse of your best friends. The only two people that you need to make proud are your 8-year-old self and your 80-year-old self.”
What a great concept. It’s true. If you think about being 8-years-old with all of the possibilities open to you, how would they think “you” turned out? And then when you look back when your time is nearing the end, will you be proud of what you have done in your life and who you have become. That’s where you need to be living your passion daily.
I am constantly amazed when I talk to a student who just graduated after five years in college, and I ask them, “What’s your degree in?” They proudly say, “Business!” I then ask the next question, “What kind of ‘business’?” They always pause and look at me like, “what do you mean?”
It's like going to a pizza place and walking in and saying, “I want some pizza.” The guy behind the counter will ask, “What kind of pizza?” And you stand their dumbfounded, because you have no idea what they are talking about. There are literally hundreds of combinations of pizza ingredients. The same way for a business. There are thousands of different aspects of business from being an accountant to owning the business to marketing the business to shipping to purchasing to human resources.
Then I get really shocked, when I ask them in the realm of business what is it that you are passionate about. Again, the blank stare, and the mumbled, “I don’t know.”
What have you been doing with your life for the last five years? Did this topic ever pop up? During a game of Beer Pong didn’t someone ask you what kind of business you were going in to? Did the professors ever tell you this question would come up? Didn’t your advisor ask the question while you were picking out classes that would lead you to your degree … in Business?
I know I’ve gone on a rant. But we need to understand our passion or we will just remain STUCK. It doesn’t matter how far fetched your passion is. Follow your heart. Go with what you know. Understand who you are and start putting your Plan together. To help you with this task I put in the next step: Understand Your What. Which like the first 3, these aren’t linear. These steps are all blended together. They grow off of each other. As you understand one, it will help you understand them all.
Understanding Your What (Skills / Talents)
In pursuit of understanding your YOU it is best to understand your WHAT. Your “what” is the thing that makes you unique. WHAT makes you special. WHAT super powers do you have and how can you turn these unique skills or talents into your dream vocation. I didn’t call it your “dream job” because when you are doing what you are made fo it ceases being work and when it’s not work then it wouldn’t be a job.
As a metaphor for talents or skills, I use Crayola Crayons. Everyone can understand this visual picture. The crayons that we all grew up with. They came in different sized boxes and dozens and dozens of colors.
Imagine your skills and talents. Use one crayon for each unique thing there is about you. Take each crayon, using a pen, write that talent on the side of a crayon and put it in a box. Keep using all the crayons that you need to get all of your talents and skills in a solid form.
Now that you have accomplished that start to look and really think about what all these talents and skills say about who you are. When they aren’t put together it’s hard to decide who you are. But when we put them all together pretty soon, we can see a theme to what we are really good at.
Some of us will have 10 crayons in the box. Others have 32, some have 64. There are even the unicorns that have 120 or more crayons in their box. It’s not a competition. Just use these crayons to understand who you are.
Me? I have 8 crayons in my box. And not the skinny crayons either. I’m the big thick crayons that you got when you were just starting in school. You see I’m a grinder, I’m not happy until there is nothing left, and the scars I have attest to this. My mom, Marian Carlisle, was the first to call me that. I wear the title with pride.
I understand there isn’t many things that I am skilled at. But here is how I became the best in my profession. Here is how I lived my life with passion. Here is how I climbed the ladder no one else has climbed. Here is how I succeeded at every level of my profession: I use every one of my crayons. EVERY DAY! Remember when I said my mom called me a “grinder”, she was talking about my lack of “quit”. I am never finished until I have ground down my crayons to wax and have colored every bit of the page. I will continue to do it until I have completely covered the entire page.
I used my crayons to achieve my greatest dream. My dream was a decision I made when I was very young. It took me 40-years of hard coloring to achieve my dream. How many of you would have worked for 40-years to obtain your dream? That’s what makes me a grinder and that’s what makes me successful. I had to use EVERY crayon, EVERY day, to get where I was supposed to be.
So, now what are your skills and talents? Do you use every one of them, every single day? Or do you only use them when you feel like it? Here is the answer to the test: You decide how your life is going to turn out. You can find either excuses or answers, it all depends on you and your crayons. So, what is your WHAT?
When we understand who we are, by understanding what makes you unique we have one more step. We need to surround ourselves with people who are very special.
Surround Yourself with Success (Quarters)
I guess you could try to do this life-thing by yourself. I’ve tried, it didn’t work. In order to do this right and move along faster, and on a truer path, you need a group of friends.
I’m not talking about the people who show up for the party. I’m talking about the ones who were there to help you set up the party, were there to help you during the party and then were there at the end of party to help you clean up.
Not only do these friends need to help you during the good times and the bad times they need to be “better” than you. Jim Rohn once said that, “We are the average of the five people we associate most with.”
Look at the five people who you hang out with the most. Are you the best of the five? Where does that put you on the scale of success? I can promise you that my Quarters are so much better than I am in most everything.
I used the term Quarters in that last line. I take this from a quote by the gangster, Al Capone, who when asked about how he picks the people he can trust he said, “I’d rather have four quarters than one-hundred pennies.”
In short, he had a short list of people who he could trust. Think about this. If you carried a dollar in your pocket all day, would you rather have: four quarters or 100-pennies? That’s a pretty clear picture.
There is also one last, and probably the most important of all of the traits that you Quarters need to have. They must be brave enough to tell you the truth. Not the truth you want to hear all of the time, but the truth that you NEED to hear. A friend isn’t a friend if they allow you to keep doing stupid stuff. There needs to come a time where a friends needs to stand up and say, “No, that is wrong.”
It’s the whole Hans Christian Anderson story of the “Emperor’s New Clothes” story where the royal entourage became so afraid of being put to death that they agreed with whatever the Emperor said. In the end the it took a child to be brave enough to tell the Emperor that he was actually not in a beautiful set of clothes but was naked.
We get so afraid of hurting someone’s feelings that we are afraid to pull them aside and tell them the truth. Sure, the person might spin off in a different direction and not listen to you anymore. But in the end, you will know you tried to do what was best for your friend. And eventually, they will figure that out too.
So, Now What? Part II
As you are getting yourself “UnStuck” you will need to believe you are worthy of being successful in your life. Once you believe in you again, you need to start putting together a plan. When this plan is being formulated you need to keep an eye on your time. Make sure you are using you time wisely and not allowing precious seconds, minutes and hours fly by doing nothing to advance your cause.
To make your planning easier start figuring out who you truly are. To help with this write down all for skills and traits that make you unique. When you have this list, you might see a trend in your talents. Sometimes we don’t realize how important it is to really understand what makes us special.
When we get closer to understanding who we truly are and what we are passionate about, our destination starts to get clear. When we understand where we are going, we can start to put in the mile markers or goals to help us stay on course to accomplishing each goal so we know where we are at on the way to achieve our dream.
As we start to pack for this trip to our true destination, we also need bring along our Quarters. These are the people who will tell us the truth about who we are and how we can keep making positive gains. Since these people are not trying to steer us wrong by telling us “Their Truth” we know we are traveling on the best path possible.
Follow these steps and you will soon become UnStuck, and will be on your way to your optimal life.
Have an amazing day!
