Get A Life

You can do anything

I spent last weekend at a rock festival running life club workshops and the one with the longest queues was for creating your ideal life.

It might be hard to believe that people at a sunny festival could think their lives weren’t ideal, but that is what lack of self-esteem does to us. We all imagine that everyone else is leading a better life than we are.

The truth is that most people’s lives could be better.

I started thinking about what would make my life ideal when none of the pens on my desk worked.

As I was throwing them one by one into the bin, I vowed that in my ideal life I would have working pens around me.

Once I knew what it was I wanted, I immediately bought myself a box of black ballpoints and the creation of my ideal life was under way. But what was it that stopped me treating myself to enough working black pens in the first place? What made me buy one at a time?

One of the main reasons we don’t take the steps necessary to build our ideal life is that we don’t really believe that we can achieve it.

Our low self-esteem stops us even thinking about what our ideal life would be and certainly stops us thinking that we can achieve it. Perhaps we will be able to in the future, we think, but not now. The idea of improving our lives seems so enormous and so daunting that we don’t know where to begin.

Our low self-esteem can make us feel that we’re out of control and have somehow lost the plot. And yet control is something that, slowly and surely, we can remedy.

Where are you most out of control? What do you worry about most? What could stop you worrying? Often it’s a simple little tweak that can point you in the right direction.

If you’re in debt and unable to live within your finances, what would be a good first step to stop that debt? Get someone to countersign your cheques? Not allow yourself to buy anything “just because it’s only £20” this month? Think about what you’re saving up for that would make your life ideal and remember it when you’re about to buy another “nothing”?

Low self-esteem can also make us feel that we aren’t yet ready for our ideal life now. We will have it, but not just yet. Yet what is there to wait for? It’s so important to live that ideal life now – today. Work out something you want to do for yourself this week – whether it’s a walk in the park or an evening with your friends or a visit to a festival – and do it.

Don’t wait for an ideal life, start doing what you want to do now. So it’s another visit to the stationers for me.

Confidence

A man with a mission came to my Life Club this week. Self-employed and as charming as you have to be when you are self-employed, he wanted a change of career but was lacking confidence and dreading the thought of having to sell himself all over again.

“It feels like a mountain,” he told me. His metaphor for the future was of being surrounded by mountains, one of which he’d have to climb in order to get where he wanted.

Do you remember those dreaded long walks with your parents? What did you do to make hill-climbing fun? My brother and I used to push and pull each other. Sometimes we’d walk up the hill backwards. Sometimes we’d run up it in short bursts and then collapse until we got more energy. Our mother, meanwhile, would slowly and steadily tramp to the top. We would all get there at the same time but it struck me that she was having a lot less fun than we were.

When we started talking about mountain-climbing, my “man with a mission” began to understand that he, like my mother, was attempting a slow and steady climb – sitting for several hours badgering clients he had previously worked for and leaving endless answerphone messages that he knew would never be returned.

Metaphorically, it was leaving him out of breath, under-confident and all too aware of the long path he still had to take before reaching the top.

When he began thinking about ways to make his climb easier, the fun times my brother and I used to have began to translate into reality.

“Pushing and pulling” each other meant he could involve his partner in the process; “walking backwards” could mean making casual phone calls rather than feeling as if he was cold-calling; and “running in short bursts” translated into making two or three calls a day rather than spending hours at it.

Sometimes our confidence can desert us, especially if we do things the way we think we ought to. By imagining our problem as a metaphor, and finding unexpected solutions within that metaphor, we can have far more fun and feel far more in control of any situation. And isn’t that what 99 per cent of all confidence is?

Photo by Andrew Crowley