There are a few times in one’s life when you have the opportunity (either voluntary or not) to sit back and re-examine your life. To look at where you have been, where you are now, and where you want your life to take you over the next decade or two.

Major lifestyle transitions, like deciding in your twenties to leave the lifestyle of being an employee behind in order to take on the more flexible lifestyle of a creative nomad, is one such time. But not everyone decides to make this type of transition.

Mid-life, however, is generally a time for people to begin re-examining their life. To explore whether they are doing what they are doing because they want to — because it brings them great joy, satisfaction and fulfillment. Or if they are doing what they are doing because it’s what they have always done. Unfortunately, the recent global economic tumbling act has put many people at mid-life into a position where they have no choice but to reevaluate their lives and reorient their careers.

Based on a Photo by Felipe Venancio, flickr, Creative Commons

So, where do you begin this evaluation? And how do you know you are getting reasonable information? After all, at least what you have always done is familiar and comfortable, even if it’s not exciting.

Marcia Bench, a Career and Retirement Coach, has developed an Authentic Retirement Model that is really more like an Authentic Lifestyle Model because it really does help you work through difficult life transition decisions.

The Authentic Lifestyle Model consists of exploring eight key elements of one’s life that will help you transition successfully into an Authentic New Lifestyle.

These eight key elements include:

1. your life purpose
2. your values
3. your motivators
4. your talents and skills
5. your life and work experience
6. your desired activities
7. your lifestyle and environment, and
8. your financial factors.

Over the next couple of weeks, I will explore each of these key elements and how they impact your life transition decisions. Coaching questions aimed at drawing answers from both your logic and your intuition will be provided for each of these key elements.

There is a trick that you can use to help move yourself towards the goals and changes you are trying to create.

The first thing you need to do is to monitor your thoughts — particularly the thoughts that involve the goal or change you are trying to accomplish. Are your thoughts positive or negative?

Negative thoughts obsess over what you are doing and constantly question what you are doing. For example, if your goal is wanting to become a successful online entrepreneur, negative thoughts would involve obsessing over what topics you are going to write about as blog posts next week or next month, or over how you are going to earn a living as an entrepreneur, or over how you are going to get clients, or over how you are going to find the time to do all of this!!! These thoughts tend to be more of the “I should do…” or “I need to do…” type of thoughts.

On the other hand, positive thoughts put you in the centre of your success. They think about you as if you have already achieved your goal or successfully completed your transformation. For example, if your goal is to be a successful online entrepreneur, then whenever you think about that goal you are thinking about how wonderful it is to be self-employed, how confident and relaxed you are with your clients, how easy it is to write your blog posts/articles/brochures, how much you enjoy what it is you are doing.

If you are interested in reading more about this, then check out my post “If You Are Trying To Achieve A Goal, Don’t Think Of A Polar Bear” found online at http://www.agelessnomads.com/2009/08/if-you-are-trying-to-achieve-a-goal-dont-think-of-a-polar-bear/

.

Have you ever experienced a time when you were trying to manifest a significant change or transformation in your life and everything that could go wrong did go wrong? Add to this a nasty little imp called ‘Resistance’ and you end up with a frustrating situation where Murphy’s Law meets the War of Art!!

This is what my life has been life for the past couple of weeks.

For those who are unfamiliar with Murphy’s Law or The War of Art — let me explain:

Murphy’s Law states that anything that can go wrong will go wrong at the worst possible moment. It’s like when your USB memory stick develops amnesia right after you have finished writing three of the best blog posts ever in the history of blog posts!! Which, once you have picked yourself up off the floor after having collapsed to the ground in a quivering, whimpering heap, leaves you scrambling,  trying to remember those perfect ideas expressed in those perfect words and sentences. Yeah — not so easy to do!!

Or — just after you learn that you are probably going to need to have a new furnace put into your 100 year old house and have the slightly crumbling chimney relined to the tune of multiple thousands of dollars, one of the drains in your house (the one that takes the used water from your kitchen including the dishwasher and washing machine) breaks, leaving you without the use of your dishwasher and washing machine — the day before you have planned a family brunch!!!

And this is where The War of Art kicks in. With bills and frustrations increasing, and money becoming ever more scarce, resistance begins taking over vital systems in your brain. Creativity spins from writing to looking for a full time job. Thoughts of entrepreneurship morph into nightmares of punching the 9–5 clock.

But in the middle of all of this, a funny thing happened while I was straightening up some books. The book, The War of Art, fell out of a bookcase. I thought I had lost the book several months ago, but here it was. Loaded with the exact information I needed at exactly this specific point in time. Don’t you love ot when that happens!!

Picking the book up, I began reading a chapter titled “The Unlived Life”: “Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.” Resistance can come in the form of technical mishaps, unexpected expenses, bills, frustrations, lack of confidence.….

The War of Art challenges resistance. Its funny, inspirational, and most importantly motivational — great for anyone trying to overcome resistance, to move forward with their life — to change, to transform, to live the unlived life within us. It was just what I needed to read in order to get myself back on track.

So, how do you cope with resistance, procrastination, and the other little imps that life likes to throw in your way while you are busy trying to build your authentic life?

TTFN

The War of Art: Breaking Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles is written by Stephen Pressfield.

~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~

If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!

In her book, The Four-Day Win, Martha Beck describes this phenomena as “The Polar Bear Effect”. I’ve also seen it described as the “Don’t Think of a Pink Elephant” phenomenon. Basically, to experience how strong the IMP effect is, try this little experiment:

Are you trying not to think of a Polar Bear? source: Allie Caulfield, Flickr Creative Commons

For the next 10 seconds, don’t think of a Polar Bear (if you don’t like Polar Bears, try not thinking of a Pink Elephant). Think of anything else you want to think of, but do not think of a Polar Bear or anything associated with Polar Bears for 10 seconds — no fluffy white fur, no coal black nose, no sparkling white ice, or frigid blue waters — for 10 seconds. Ready? 1 steamboat .…. 2 steamboats .…. 3 steamboats .…. 4 steamboats .…. 5 steamboats .…. 6 steamboats .…. 7 steamboats .…. 8 steamboats .… 9 steamboats .…. 10 steamboats.

Could you do it?? Could you think of anything except Polar Bears?? Or did you think of Polar Bears?

The ironic thing about the IMP is, that the harder you try to avoid thinking of a specific thing, like the Polar Bear, or your fear of flying, or food, the more stressed and anxious you become and the more you think about the very thing you are trying to avoid.

Martha Beck has this to say about the IMP: “Trying to suppress something tends to cause anxiety, which makes the self-suppression more desperate, which makes the ironic effect much worse, which makes us even more upset…” The result is that the “more desperate and pressured you feel, the more intensively you’ll brood about (and potentially do) the very things you’ve sworn off. The higher the stakes, the worse the ironic effects.” (The Four-Day Win, pages 34–35).

So, how do we tame the IMP??
There are a couple of things that we can do to try to tame the IMP.

For starters, we need to become aware of how we are thinking about the behaviors we are trying to change.

Changing Habits

If you are trying to change a habit think of the outcome not the habit. For example, if you are trying to lose weight, stop thinking about losing weight and begin thinking about all of the benefits you will gain by losing weight. The increased self-esteem, the higher level of energy, the more fun it is to shop, the more self-confidence you will have meeting new clients, etc. Letting your brain obsess about the positive outcomes is a good thing. Quoting the Law of Attraction: What you think about, you bring about.

Achieving Goals

If you are trying to achieve a different type of goal, for example, increasing the number of clients you have, or becoming a solo entrepreneur, then let you brain obsess about the benefits you experience by having achieved that goal — the fun you will have meeting new clients, the new lifestyle you will have achieved, the wonderful people you now know, etc. You can choose to obsess about how difficult it will be to achieve your goal, or you can obsess about how wonderful it is to have achieved your goal.

Overcoming Fears

If you are trying to overcome a fear, then there is another trick you can use, again thanks to Martha Beck. In her September 2009 column for O Magazine, Martha Beck writes about the debilitating, powerless feelings we get from our fears.  The more we think about our fears, the more powerless we become, thanks mostly to the IMP phenomenon. However, if we switch those thoughts of fear to thoughts of love, we become powerful.

For example, suppose that you want to become a location independent professional but the more you think about it the more you start becoming aware of your fears. You can embrace those fears, acknowledge those fears, and then work to overcome them. Which works for some people. However, every time you think about one of your fears, even if you are working to overcome it, you are still think about “fear” and all of the negative connotations and debilitating feelings that fears bring.

Try instead to think about what you love about the situation that is associated with your fear. Love is an empowering emotion that will help you overcome your fear. For example, if one of the fears that is preventing you from becoming a location independent nomad is the fear of being lonely and you find yourself obsessing over finding ways to overcome that fear, try this:

• rather than thinking about your fear of loneliness, think instead of all the things you love about the idea of being a location independent nomad — the people you will meet, the communities you can be part of, the stories you will be able to tell friends and family back home. Think of how much you enjoy emailing friends and family, of the video emails and photos you could send. These are powerful thoughts that get the IMP working for you, instead of having the IMP working against you by escalating your fear.

Do you have any little tricks that you use to help you overcome the IMP and negate the “Polar Bear Effect”??

TTFN

~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~♦~~~~

If you enjoyed reading this post, maybe you’d like to subscribe to our RSS feed, or subscribe via email (enter your email address in the box at the top of the page, on the right) so you don’t miss any future posts. Thank you for visiting!