Hindsight is such a wonderful thing isn't it?
Or is it?
All too often looking back is a draining and somewhat demoralising experience, we can spend hours or days or even months dwelling on what has passed and how we misjudged a situation or made a bad decision. Agonising over tiny details can lead to anxiety, anger or bitterness and an inability to move on sometimes making us feel depressed.
During coaching and training sessions I encourage clients to look forward and embrace possibilities rather than dwell on what is past and no longer here.
Well, what if looking back can help shape a more positive future?
What if looking back helps you pinpoint errors, highlight them and resolve not to repeat them?
What if making this the starting point of a new beginning, a way of wiping the slate clean and setting in place a plan that will turn your life around and help you create a life that sets you free rather than constrains you?
Writing this blog is the first step in achieving this for me. I want to create a life that allows me to be creative, challenges me intellectually and is not so financially draining that I am lurching from one panic-ridden month to the next worrying about how I am going to pay the bills. I figure that if I share my journey, thoughts and experiences I can stay focused and on track. Hopefully, that sharing will help others facing challenges and difficult choices too. I am going to use my very best coaching skills and practice what I preach for the first time ever (honest). I may fall off track occasionally, but I will ask for help when that happens (another first).
I want to stop the cycle of highs and lows so that I can get my mojo working - creatively, professionally and personally. I want to stop the short bursts of inspiration followed by rapid all engulfing action, which invariably leads to complete exhaustion and a loss of mojo; an almost perfect circle.
The second step is to simplify my finances and top of that list is the biggest expense I have bar none - my house.
I bought this house after my divorce and used my entire financial settlement and a fairly large mortgage to renovate and extend it. It turned into a protracted project that invariably cost way more than I had budgeted - why this was a surprise I don't know, I have been watching Grand Designs for the past decade I should have known!
Anyway needless to say I ended up living to the maximum of my means leaving little or no security. So when I decided to build a small creative business in 2011 and leave my full time job, with no savings, nothing could have prepared me for the financial avalanche that ensued, I played chicken with my credit card for over a year before accepting that something had to give. That something had to be the house.
Thankfully it sold last week, well hopefully once the contracts are exchanged and when it is complete I have worked out that I will have precisely, almost to the penny EXACTLY the amount of cash I had when my divorce was finalised. Not much to show for 4 years hard graft, blood, sweat and many tears I know, but I am not going to dwell on that. I am going to use this valuable hindsight to my advantage.
The project was probably not the best idea I ever had, but I have a choice, I can see it as a big mistake and the reason I am in a bit of a pickle and allow it to engulf me in a wave a remorse, resentment and despair, OR I can choose to see it as a second chance, a lucky escape, a way of putting right the decisions I made four years ago and learn from them. I can choose different options this time and make decisions based on my new knowledge and experience. Which is precisely what I am going to do.
I don't know precisely how to earn a living doing what I dearly love, or where exactly I want to be, but I do know what I don't want, so I am starting with that and top of that list is the following: a huge mortgage, to be far from my family and friends, a full time job in an office 9-5, to stay in at the weekends and never take a holiday.
For now that is a good starting place. I have also learnt that I won't achieve ALL of my aims in one move so to be patient and to compromise a little can be the first things on my list of wants.
This weekend I will sit and sketch out a rough plan to get the thoughts that are swimming around in my head onto paper, because thinking about everything all at once is seriously clogging my brain and sapping my mojo. Then I am going to enjoy each and every step of this, possibly long journey, whilst viewing potential new homes.
Wish me luck!
