A Second Choice Life

We all know the “you can be anything you want to be” mantra of many parents is patently false.  Sounds empowering.  The brute reality is it can set kids up for disappointment and failure. 

However, you have grown out of it, right?  Maturity has set in and tempered expectations and dreams. Realism now rules.  You have settled in with contentment. 

Not for a lot of us.

Either spurred on by a leadership culture that presses us to grander visions, or our own deeply personal drive for the next thing, many of us develop scenarios and plans to reach toward our preferred life.  We then became heavily invested in that future.  It becomes us.  Our identity and even our sense of fulfillment, legacy or calling are tied into that life becoming reality.

What if it doesn’t?  What if your first choice of a life is derailed or unattainable?



What if you are now living a second choice life?

It’s happened to me.  I pursued a dream  (a God-given dream at that) to develop a ministry to international teams.  Left Canada for Kuwait in 2009.  Came back in 2010 crushed.  The life I now live isn’t what I planned.  It’s good, but there is a nagging sense that an ‘other’ life has eluded me.  The prospects of ever re-engaging it are fading.

This experience is shared by millions.  Refugees, entrepeneurs, modern day slaves, leaders and ordinary people who dare to dream.  What will we do in our second choice lives?

The ancient character Joseph walked this same path. His story (Genesis 37 & 39) has inspired me toward first choice living in a second choice life.  Josephs’ first choice life with his father & brothers was interrupted when he was sold into slavery.  Definitely a second choice life!  Somehow, he chose to live well and with integrity in his new context.  In so doing, he prospered.  Incidentally so did entire nations of people at the time and down the historical line!  Who knows the impact of first choice living in your second choice life?

Though your first choice life may have been taken away from you, the power to demonstrate and enjoy first choice living can never be taken.

It could be that God has made a 'first choice' life for you whether you believe it or not.

Carpe diem.  It’s all you have.

Tomorrow Man

If I were a cartoon character, I’d be Tomorrow Man; able to see through the present and into the future;  capable of leaping from what is to what could be.  Yeah – I’d be great and have a very cool suit, kind of like this:

But Tomorrow man has a weakness. His kryptonite is ‘today’.

That’s the issue with my (your) character as Tomorrow Man.  His Tomorrow consumes his Today.  Now that’s not bad when you think about it in perspective of acting ‘today’ in order to create an envisioned ‘tomorrow’.  However it becomes a liability when a leader becomes so consumed with the future that they miss out on ‘today’.  

 

If ‘tomorrow’ consumes today and leaves it wasted and empty, an unrealistic perspective of life and leadership has taken over.  We often hear of the dreamers who are no practical good; of those who are ‘heavenly minded but no earthly good’.  There is some truth to that.

I acknowledge that I have missed out on a lot of the present; the enjoyment of the moment; the dwelling with others (and myself) in TODAY.  As a result I have learned (painfully) that spending too much time on envisioning and living in the future as your current reality will disconnect you from family, friends, hobbies, interests and even from knowledge, because you are so set on getting there you skim the surface of relationships & tasks.

A few thoughts & self-coaching questions from one Tomorrow Man to another Tomorrow Man or Woman:

YOU ONLY POSSESS TODAY.  

No one on this planet has any guarantee that they will have a tomorrow on this earth.  That being the case, take notice of ‘today’. What & who is in it?

• How can you engage with someone so that if today was your only contact with them, they’d value and cherish it tomorrow?

• How will the tasks at hand be accomplished if today was your only connection to tomorrow? 

ONLY TODAY GETS YOU TO TOMORROW. 

• What practical steps need to be taken today that if not done, only postpone tomorrow?

STOPPING TO EMBRACE TODAY MAY HAVE CLUES FOR TOMORROW.  

If you are a leader working on implementing a vision, this is a critical attention-posture to take!

•  Life and leadership is nomadic.  It is not linear.  As the journey progresses, the turns and twists of circumstances and real-time decisions lead to new and sometimes unfamiliar landscapes. 

• Rarely will future plans ever turn out the way they were originally envisioned.  Instead of being frustrated with the changes, could it be that what happens in your today holds some clues/ideas/new contexts to actually create an even better tomorrow?

• How can you create daily space to reflect on how the day’s events influences tomorrow?

Stopping to embrace today makes tomorrow worth it. 

You could lose it all tomorrow.

Wouldn’t it be great if you didn’t waste today for a tomorrow that never came? 

Harv Matchullis

Storms on the Horizon

No matter where you live in the world, storms exist. They also have very different natures. I come from Canada and am used to snowstorms. Imagine my wonder at the sight of my first sandstorm in Kuwait...

Here’s the leadership point... the kinds of storms you will face on your leadership excursion vary as do weather patterns around the world. Our storms are rarely repeated. Have any of these “weather patterns” affected your leadership life?

· A vision that is getting swallowed up in a fog of daily reality

· Employees rising up in a storm of anger, protest, resistance

· Economic turmoil

· The ‘perfect storm’ of multiple challenges that threatens to take down your leadership or organization

· Being frozen out of influence and realizing you are being sidelined

· A weather front from your personal life rolls in to affect your leadership

· ...

There’s a disturbance on my horizon. I started out here in Kuwait with a clear plan and confidence. But a storm started to brew, and things happened that I did not anticipate. Tried to wrestle it down, find a solution, and make mid-course corrections. In the end (actually I am not yet at the end), tough decisions had to be made that were right, but not easy.

How do you handle the storms? As I write this, I am still in a life & leadership challenge, so the things I am writing about are current. The following steps are helping me; some are still in-process. Some I take by faith that they will lead me to clear skies. So, as many blogs go, this is a personal journal of what I have come to know over the years can help me ride out the storms and emerge into clear weather.

So, as the weather gets bad around your leadership, or your life as a leader, here are some process considerations to help navigate the storm successfully...

Reflect

The default for many leaders is “dive in and solve this”. You are much wiser to step back and simply start reflecting. Reflecting is at its simplest: “taking a look”. Don’t bother analyzing yet. Take a snapshot of the storm. You can do this by asking some simple questions like:

· What is actually happening right now?

· Who else is affected by this?

· How might others be viewing this? (How can I get their opinion?)

· To what extent am I committed to successfully getting through this?

Process

At this stage it’s time to ask: “So, what does this mean?”

You can do this yourself, but I strongly advise against that! Most of us in reality are like a horse with the blinders on. We see only so far and usually in a particular direction. Involving others helps us get a 360 view of not only our situation, but also our thinking about the context.

Indulge me and let’s do some thinking about our thinking. The prefrontal cortex is where our executive functions are located. The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals. This area of the brain takes up about only 7% of our brain, but it consumes a high amount of physical energy. That’s why learning takes so much work! It's like the RAM in your computer... fussy and an energy drain! So, what our brain does is ‘hardwire’ everything it can, sending it to the "Hard Disk" so that it can be retrieved later with a minimum amount of effort. Our brains are wired so that we default to the ways in which we have thought in the past. It takes less energy to access that information, so we usually tend to ‘go there’. That’s what I refer to as ‘default thinking’; it’s the first thing we think about because our brain can access that thought (or pattern of thinking) without taking up so much energy.

But, think about this – in a storm, can we always rely on old patterns of thinking and behaviour to serve us well? This is where your friends and peers come in to help you ‘think’ from a different angle. You may find a new perspective that will help you face your storm. You may need help to learn a new way of not only seeing something, but of thinking about it.

And, if you have a major decision to make, you want the best of your brain on your side, not just ‘what comes to mind’.

Wait

Before a decision, it’s a good thing to create space between the issue and your need to make a decision. Walk away from it for a while.

Have you ever noticed how often an “AHA” moment occurs at some point after you have been hard at work thinking through a problem? There’s brain science behind that phenomenon too, but I won’t go into that here. (see the book reference below)

Decide

You do have to make a decision. They say that ‘not to decide is to decide’. That’s a half-truth. Not to decide is to:

· perpetuate the current chaos, which will control you if you decide not to control it

· live with lack of clarity and conviction, which will undermine your self-confidence

· create a destructive pattern in your thinking

Rarely, if ever, do we have all the facts in front of us when it is decision-time. We each make our decisions based on our own sets of criteria, which usually are a mix of the logical and intuitive ‘gut’ or ‘heart’.

For a fascinating read on how our brains work in decision making, I highly recommend John Lehrer's book "The Decisive Moment".

Act

Execute. Jesus once said: "Let your yes be yes and your no be no" - in other words, be integral once you have committed yourself and carry through on it.

I have made a decision. It’s time to execute. I still will have some of the storm to get through as a result of that decision. But the one thing a decision does is set your course for the next phase of your leadership. You now know where you are going.

Press on!

Harv Matchullis – June, 2010