If something is important to you, put yourself in charge of making it happen.

A few years ago, I was on a walking trip in Tuscany with a friend and on one particular day, we had a rest day and were exploring the beautiful walled city of Lucca. We were wandering around the ramparts when she said...

“Next time I’m on holiday and someone asks me what I do, I want to be able to say I do something different.”

It’s not that she hated her job but she’d been doing the same thing for a good few years. It was a good job that paid the bills and she liked the team but it had stopped feeling right for her. It wasn’t stretching her and she felt as if she was stagnating. She knew she wanted to do something else but not quite sure what that might look like.

So this was a pretty big statement for her and in the Italian sunshine, it felt exciting and prophetic.

But...the next time she was on holiday...and the next...she was still telling people she was in the same role.

The vision was as far as she’d got at that time. It hadn’t turned into curiosity about what might come next, what possible routes she could take and what might be the first steps towards that.

The author Joel Barker (although this quote is often attributed to Nelson Mandela) says...

Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. But vision with action can change the world,"

My ears always prick up when I hear people say,

·      “I wish I had...”

·      “I wonder if I could...”

·      “I’ve always wanted to...”

Those statements are exciting to me because they hold an element of possibility...of potential.

I’ve just finished reading “Designing your life: How to live a well lived joyful life” by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans based on their successful Stanford University Life Design course. They talk about using design principles to work through four main stages in designing a well lived life.

• Curiosity: if you’ve got a curious mindset, everything is an exploration and nothing is limiting. You’re not tying yourself down to a concrete plan, you’re playing with ideas. This is what I did when I was thinking through setting up People Like Me Coaching and Training Consultancy and also when I explored my dream of writing a book. I played with ideas. I knew the first ideas weren’t likely to be the best ones but I had to start somewhere and it was fun seeing how it could evolve and what could be.

• Having a bias to action: I could have played with those ideas for years! I do love a good mind map and coloured pens and sticky notes! But at some point, I had to try something out. So I had to try things out, test them. Talk to people about what I was thinking and get some feedback. These conversations brought my ideas to life and somehow saying them out loud. This worked for both setting up my business and for writing.

• Reframing: was I trying to solve the right problem? Why did I want to work for myself? Did I just need to get a different job? Or was it something about my mindset that needed to change? Then when I was pretty sure I did want to work for myself for the right reasons, I had to check whether people actually needed what I wanted to offer? Instead of getting excited and potentially going down a rabbit hole about all the things I could do, I had to work out whether there was actually a gap that needed filling.

• I also had to a fair bit of reframing about my mindset regarding writing. For someone is a taskmaster for business, a bit of a productivity ninja, when it came to starting my writing habit, I was a world class procrastinator to begin with. This was mostly due to underpinning beliefs such as “who on earth do you think you are?”

• Remembering life is messy! Change is a process and is likely to contain wrong turns. Early on I said ‘yes’ to a couple of offers of business which were not entirely aligned with what I wanted to do but were helpful to pay the bills. Taking them on left less space to take on what I did actually want to do. It’s a learning process that takes time.

• And after a few false starts, that I didn’t beat myself up about, I foind a wonderful, regular writing rhythm that I still keep today. I’m not attached to the outcome so I can enjoy it for what it brings me.

Because if my business and my writing is important to me then I need to put myself in charge of making it happen.

The cavalry isn’t coming.

Nobody will set up my business or do the writing for me.

It’s important to me so I’ll make it happen.

And my friend in Italy? She stayed in that job a couple more years then did jump into another one without really thinking about whether it was the right one for her. It wasn’t. But that move gave her the impetus to take charge of what was important to her. Her life. Her values. She discovered the joy of curiosity, exploration, mindmaps and coloured pens! Now she has just very intentionally stepped into a ‘Goldilocks’ role that is ‘just right’.

Next time we go on a trip together, and someone asks her what she does for a living, she can answer that question with pride.

 I wonder…is there something in your life that matters to you that you could put yourself in charge of making happen?