The Universe conspires with you when you put yourself in motion
“Consciousness is only possible through change; change is only possible through movement.”
― Aldous Huxley, The Art of Seeing
A failed business in 2020 and an emergency exit from a new life that never truly got started in 2022 left me on the side-lines this winter feeling jaded, uninspired and so, apathetic.
“Why take a risk on another venture that might fail?” — I thought.
They say that you shouldn’t put your toe back on the coals just to see if its hot.
They also say you never step in the same river twice.
Irritatingly, there is a proverb for almost every decision we could possibly take over the course of our lives…
It’s in our nature to look for the wisdom of others to validate our natural tendencies.
But, when we get just a little too familiar with a trained cognition it leads to a cognitive bias.
We start finding evidence that supports our hypothesis and all our subsequent experiences are seen through this disingenuous lens that we hold up against the world.
Over time these ideas are reinforced and slowly become (for better or for worse) our values.
We gravitate towards others who also hold these values and they reinforce our beliefs.
When we get stuck in a rut, it’s the same thing:
- You feel lousy and you don’t want to do anything.
- You eat badly, drink more and thereby sleep badly.
- You feel lousier and want to do even less the next day.
When we get stuck in this negative loop it is easy to declare a crisis of purposelessness, identity or mid-life — take your pick.
But Crises happen to everybody and they offer the very real opportunity to check yourself and establish new frameworks that DO work for you and are in fact more sustainable than whatever it was you were doing before.
In fact, a crisis can just be seen as the undoing of all the wrong efforts made up until that point to give you the space and energy to consolidate all the things were doing right that got lost.
Rewinding the clock to that very first day when things felt off and putting yourself back in motion can feel nigh on impossible.
Knowing when and how to take stock and recalibrate ourselves towards a new goal or direction and when to say goodbye to a fading dream is so key to our long-term contentment.
If you’ve just been laid off, are considering going at it solo for the first time in your career or just need to get out of a rut make these three pieces of advice a part of your bounce back to give your renewed drive and inspiration.
Walk — Everywhere — Often
When I’m back in London I almost never take public transport.
Years working as a tour guide in the big smoke has automated that decision making process for me.
I’ll walk from Paddington station right across to London Bridge and think nothing of it.
As I walk down Oxford street, looking at the sunken faces smeared up against the fogged-up windows of the double-decker buses in standstill, my sense of awareness is at its peak.
Andrew Huberman talks about how forward movement suppresses the fear response — the one that stuns us into passivity or worse anxiety. He argues that lateral eye movement is one of they key factors in relaxation because we have evolved to scan our environment for threats.
You can’t expect to be thinking creatively when you’re worried about the future.
We are hardwired to fend for ourselves before aspiring to loftier goals — It’s Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Screens are the worst for this — the lens focuses on a flat object in the near distance and the rest blurs out of focus.
Without peripheral vision our fight or flight response is triggered, anxiety rises and our creative faculties which are not essential shutdown altogether.
Movement on the other hand gets the mind working from a place of stability. Optic flow leads to real life flow — the synapses fire together more quickly and create new neural pathways in the brain.
Ideas are not static — they wax and wane with the people who use them and if people are immobile their ideas are stodgy too.
Get out there on your feet while you still have them and immerse yourself in the frenetic jazz hum of the technicolour world.
See life as an Odyssey
Sometimes a lack of concrete ideas is itself what leads to inaction
Either We feel more overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities of what we could do with our lives than the practical impossibilities.
Why on earth would it make sense to you right now?
In the Odyssey plans you chose your future — three times over.
The dream life you’ve skewered your imagination with since you were a child may loom large but perhaps you’ve never road tested it or even put it down on paper.
Devised by two Stanford professors, The Odyssey Plan is a series of maps that you create yourself for which you are asked to dare to dream about parallel lifestyles and careers you may envisage for yourself, crucially, in detail.
Delineate:
- what your ideal career and lifestyle that is in line with your experience/s would look like
- what it could still look like if it were subject to cut-backs and
- and a third and final alternate life that you’ve maybe dreamt about but never considered as a realistic or viable option
I want to know the 3 maps that you’re going to overlay one on top of the other to find the hidden blueprint that bi-sects all three plans and which inspire you to navigate the next season of your life.
No plan for your life survives first contact with reality — Bill Burnett
This is particularly valuable if you are just starting out in your career and don’t know which path to take.
Maybe you’re at a fork in the road — you have the opportunity to move country or change jobs and you’re not sure if its the right one to take.
Each permutation demands a five year plan, with hypothetical resources, levels of confidence and coherence taken into account.
The exercise allows you to indulge your daydreams in a structured way and follow each scenario through to its natural conclusion.
Allow curiosity to get the better of you and let you imagination run wild.
Ask the question:
“what would that look like exactly if I did this…?”
and
“where would it take me if I did this instead of this…?”
Very soon you will start to see webs of connection, opportunities and experiences in front of you that you never thought were possible.
Create heat in the body
Movement flow like walking gets the ball rolling on new ideas but heat flow is the wellspring of deep insight….
Kinetic energy + an external force leads to oscillation and therefore potential energy.
Yoga. Resistance training. Weights. Climbing. Calisthenics.
Anything that channels energy and heat to different parts of the body will test your core and your mind.
Intense, concentrated physical focus acts as a pressure and release valve and shows you what applied energy is capable of.
This is your Qi. Your vital energy.
It emanates from you and when you realise it can be summoned out of nowhere, you realise that you have a superpower.
Dabble and Experiment like your life depends on it
Starting a new hobby from scratch as an adult is a critically underrated way of shifting your worldly perception.
Young adults are pretty experimental but once they hit 30 they settle into habits and routines as they find their zone of competence and pride dampens their curiosity.
A hobby for for life is no bad thing but over specialisation equals calcification.
If you want to be more creative in your domain start a terrifyingly unfamiliar activity if only for the sake of play and experimentation and watch as it seeps across into your domain of competence and elevate your skills in unexpected ways.
If you’re just starting out use this precious excess of time to explore as many different spheres as possible.
Ten years ago if you had odd-jobs here and there without an obvious career destination it was a mark against your name — now it’s called a portfolio.
I don’t like the term multihyphenate — it sounds like someone whose thinking is scattered, unfocused, easily distracted.
I prefer the term polymath.
More and more, smaller companies are drafting in freelancers who fit the bill for what it is that they need done.
Their employees who have been marching to the beat of their drum have become so moulded to the company model that they’ve lost the ability to think in a divergent way and take new risks creatively.
As a result, the work gets outsourced to a freelancer whose role is to think outside the box and offer consulting services followed by practical services.
Moving swiftly in an erratic or uncontrolled way, blindly accepting the project that you can land is not sustainable in the long run but in the early days it should be a necessary part of figuring out what you like doing, what you are good at doing and what you see yourself doing more of in the future.
This period of experimentation can be micro-dosed throughout your career too so if you’re further along the line don’t worry you get to (and should) play ball too.
Make Flow States A Priority
Underneath the dopamine-craving receptors that get set off like pachinko by short-form content lies our instinctive yearning for depth activities and flow states.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it happiness; that state when the sense of self diminishes, time dilates, the work we’re doing becomes all consuming and labels like ‘tricky’ and ‘difficult’ become irrelevant.
This is the real secret of life — to be completely engaged with what you are doing in the here and now. And instead of calling it work, realize it is play. — Alan Watts
Anyone who has ever written, learnt a musical instrument, a language, coded etc. to a high level knows that immersion is infinitely more satisfying than distraction.
Take writing for example, it has been democratised by the internet and academic/formal training don’t seem to be the unfair advantage they once were. A niche is not everything but it gives you depth, the ability to solve problems with associative thinking
When the playing field is levelled it’s a just a test of will, discipline and delayed returns — who’s going to buckle at the first marshmallow test?
Do these five things and the rest will naturally follow…
I write about language, communication, flow, collaboration and technology.
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