These days, as a life coach, I meet more people who were used to the good life, then something happened, and now they are wondering where it all has gone. It happens, they found out, not just to other people.
If something (bad) happened in your life, it might be not a big deal. You feel no worse than lost in an unfamiliar place. Or what happened was a major event and you’ve been stuck in it for a while, sinking deeper, banging your head, bleeding, the walls far from crumbling. There must be another way, you hope, knowing full well that hope alone by itself is overrated.
You’ve never been work-shy. Hard work is in your nature, but you realize your nature is part and parcel of what got you into this bad place in the first place. Massive action is needed, but by itself it won’t be enough.
You don’t want to pick a remedy worse than the ill it is supposed to cure. You don’t want to cure loneliness with a drink, only to find yourself lonely and drunk. You know the danger signs, you’ve seen them and ignored them enough in the past. But the way out you don’t know.
If this sounds familiar, the good news: there is nothing wrong with you. If your radio plays the wrong tune, you simply adjust the tuning. Likewise, if your life produces wrong outcomes, do not question yourself, simply adjust the tuning. The bad news: it’s not that simple, and will take time.
To “adjust the tuning” and find back to the good life, you must basically tune yourself… back to yourself. Sometimes it begins by re-membering who you are. Once you re-member yourself, you realize you’re not alone. How so? For the sake of brevity (additional information in future articles), let’s single out just the aspect of knowledge.
First off, all knowledge comes from learning – are you still learning? Have you made yourself a lifelong student? If not, it would be your step number one. Is there an alternative? If you think there is no need to learn further, or studying is too hard, or too late, or too expensive, your only alternative is ignorance.
Second, locate, access and use all knowledge, not just yours. There are at least three “libraries” of knowledge available to each of us:
- Personal Stuff: Personal stuff covers everything you learned in life, the hard way or otherwise, as part of a conscious learning effort. It’s all in there, but might take effort to retrieve. The best way to retrieve is to think in writing, i.e. write it down.
- Instinct: We share it with other life forms. At the technical level, instinctive knowledge is embedded in the DNA. The more science knows about it, the more impressive it becomes. Plants and animals, sometimes in a cosmic dance together, do stuff that boggles the mind. We humans generally underrate and under-utilize instinctive knowledge. It’s a mistake. Get back in touch with your instinct.
- Universal Wisdom: The universe shares its wisdom with us, quite freely. All we need to do, is tune in. If you’re like me, when you were an infant you thought the music was in the radio – I used to imagine little people performing orchestral music right inside the radio set – but later you see the musicians actually live and breathe elsewhere. The same is true for thoughts. At the beginning you think they are in your mind, but later you see they are actually “out there” and our brains merely transmit them. Universal wisdom is yours for the asking, oops, for the tuning.
To summarize, be a lifelong student and in the process learn to locate, access and utilize all the knowledge, not just yours. Before long you will find yourself back on the path to the good life. Bon voyage!
QUOTES
- “Ideas are changed not by will, but by other ideas.” – Maxwell Maltz
- “I use not only the brains I have, but all I can borrow.” – Woodrow Wilson
- “Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think.” – Benjamin Disraeli
- “Change your thoughts and you change your world.” – Norman Vincent Peale
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