Congratulations!
Today is your day.
You’re off to Great Places!
You’re off and away!You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.
You’re on your own. And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy who’ll decide where to go.— Oh, the Places You’ll Go! By Dr. Seuss
That’s how Dr. Seuss started his book, Oh, the places you’ll go. In my opinion, this is one of the best personal and professional development books I have come across but I digress.
As kids, we have this vast imagination and the curiosity to discover, explore and try things. My 2 year’s old favorite word is Why?! And let me tell you, it’s more than 5-whys! :)
When we get a bit older however, we get conditioned not to ask too many questions. “Don’t rock the boat”, they say. We end up settling for this idea that things are the way they are and there’s nothing we can do to change. And the most dangerous idea is this idea that we are just the way we are and there’s nothing we can do to change ourselves. Then there are these voices in our heads (or saboteurs — a topic for another day) that tell us “curiosity killed the cat!”.
The wheel of life spins at full speed ahead and we forget what the wheel looks like. It’s like watching this gyroscope spinning at its full speed. It gets harder and harder to notice the patterns. It’s hypnotizing and we only come to realize what it looks like when it finally slows down and be still. Sometimes we think, it’s too late now to change but as the adage goes, it’s never too late!
I get it! We all have busy lives coupled with much distraction and an attention span that gets shorter by the day. This spinning wheel however prevents us from being curious! It prevents us from asking ourselves the right questions. Those questions that need to be asked. You know, the ones we have been avoiding for so long.
Sometimes we know what we want but we already decided to give up on it. Other times we don’t really know what we want and we are afraid of what we might find. We don’t dig deep or look in the dark places. It’s like the basement that is filled with the stuff we accumulated over the years until it becomes a huge task to even think about tidying it up! And perhaps we have no clue where to start.
Well, let’s look at the wheel of life. Imagine this wheel slowing down until it comes to a stop. This wheel is made up of a pattern (8 different aspects of your life). What are these aspects? What aspects would you put down?
The aspects could be family, career, health, finances, etc. Now, rank your level of satisfaction for every aspect on a scale of 1 to 10. Be honest with yourself. This is a self assessment tool used to evaluate where you are in different areas of your life and where you want to be. What you are looking for here are awareness and reflection rather than accuracy.
Now, what?
After you rank your level of satisfaction for every aspect, you could do the following:
1. Connect the dots (No pun intended) across the different aspects of your life and voila! This is your wheel of life. How bumpy is your ride? (Take a few minutes to reflect).
2. Rank where you want to be in terms of level of satisfaction. For example, if you ranked health at a 5 for your level of satisfaction today. Where would you like it to be? Maybe an 8 or 10.
And oh, did I mention? The places you’ll go!
To be continued…
Ready to explore the places you’ll go?
I would love to work with you. Book a 30-minute session here to explore the places we’ll go together.
