I haven’t found myself living in a shotgun shack (yet) but not infrequently I do find the words of the Talking Heads song ‘Once in a Lifetime’ in my head (if you don’t know it – go search and listen to it right now!). It was an early favourite of mine – in fact Remain in Light was one of the first two albums I ever owned (the other was Parallel Lines by Blondie).
If you love the song, or even if you don’t, you may well have asked yourself, more than once, as I have – well, how did I get here?
One of the reasons the song is so great is it taps into that feeling of – how the hell did my life end up like this and who the hell am I anyway? The haunting chorus of ‘same as it ever was’ expressing that Groundhog Day feeling that life can all too easily fall into. I’m pretty sure all of us have felt this way. So how do we move on?
Midlife crisis anyone?
When that relentless same as it ever was feeling starts to grow, some of us like to blow things up. And some of us like to blow things up more than once. Some obvious things to do include:
- Get a tattoo (although I figure everyone who is likely to has done that already )
- Get a convertible
- Take drugs
- Move to another country
- Quit your job
- Have an affair
If any of those sound amazing and you wholeheartedly believe they will improve your life – go do it – no judgement here. But sometimes we want that ‘blow it up’ feeling without throwing away stuff that we actually value and don’t resent (maybe our health, lovely kids, semi-fulfilling work, a home we actually like).
So, what next?
How do we recapture who we once thought we would be?
For me it was coaching.
Spending time exploring how I wanted to feel about my life and how to create that, rather than focusing on what I could change and hope that might fix the problem, opened up a whole new outlook for me.
I found that my curiosity knows no bounds. I found that there are still things that make my brain fizz with excitement – things I still want to learn – things that make me look at the world as if it is a wonderous place of possibilities instead of a cesspit.
That is not to say that every day is rainbows etc. but/and I can still find joy and things that make me want to get out and do something new. I also feel a lot less bothered by things that used to make me want to give up on everything. I don’t expect everything to feel great all the time, but I know that have tools and skills to discover what makes my life meaningful to me.
I think by now most of us have discovered that that is a large part of the trick. Designing what works for ourselves. But what do we need to be able to do this?
The right tool for the job?
When it comes to rediscovering who you are and who you want to be there are so many different coaching tools that can be helpful. Sometimes that is part of the problem – knowing which tool to use when.
To draw an archaeological analogy. When we excavate a site, sometimes (although less often than you think) we do indeed need to use a paintbrush and dental tools in order to preserve delicate artefacts or details of site stratigraphy. For other sites that would be a complete waste of time. A site might be covered in imported fill or layers representing a recent time period deposition of no interest for studying. In such a case we might use a small excavator machine to carefully remove the uninteresting layer in order to get at the layers underneath that might contain important information. If we started at the top of the fill layer with our trowels we would have given up long before we ever got to the good stuff. On the other hand if we went in with the machine to excavate a well preserved building and underfloor deposit we would loose a lot of information and destroy the site, probably before we understood its significance.
This can be the same with self exploration – sometimes we start at such a detailed painstaking level that we give up before we see any progress. Other times we take a wrecking ball into our psyches when there is a part of us that needs to be reassured and taken care of before we can start to take steps forward.
The good news is, if you are having that feeling of not recognising yourself and wondering how you got here – it means that spark of the other you is still there… it isn’t lost it can be reintroduced into your life – and into your life as it is now – if you don’t want to completely ‘blow things up’.
Because this really is Once in a Lifetime…
Curious? Book a call to talk about coaching and finding the right tools for you.
