Did you ever stop in life and look to make sure you have everything you need? Think about what your life is like each day. Do you make more than two trips back inside to get something you forgot? When we were kids and misplaced things (I say misplaced because we all know I would never lose anything), my mom always had the saying “It’s in the last place that you left it.” Or we make the comment it’s always in the last place we look. Well, yeah it is. Why would you keep looking if you already found it?
Now with our lives as we get older we seem to misplace things more. A few weeks ago while on a ride, my honey misplaced her iPod. It was good because it was getting old and many things were going wrong with it. Just like with my bike, she got a great deal on a new one that suits her much better than her old one. But it got me to thinking when I misplace things how many times I retrace my steps to find the thing I’m looking for. Usually it’s under a coat or jacket I put on top of it. But I wanted to use this idea today to explain another thing in life that would be a back to basic to help us reach our goals.
When working with Starbucks a few years ago, they were doing a lot of inside evaluating to see how many steps we took each day. Then we started to work on the process to get the same result but making fewer steps. This is also the idea that I wanted to put out in the post today. If you have been reading this week, you noticed that I am traveling on my bike again. I use a great site to find my places to stay along the way. It’s called Couchsurfing. I get to stay in other people’s homes and it gives me much more of a feeling of being at home while on the road. Well this morning while packing up my stuff, I had to make a trip back into the house after I had my bike all packed up to find a silly thing: my iPod. After I finished charging it, I had set it down on the bed. But then it fell off and was under it.
When I am at home I have a system to put all of my things where I can find them. A key rack on the wall has my key chain; I put my wallet on a shelf by the bed; my phone gets plugged into a charger on my night stand. Clothes are put on a chair. When I’m done with it, my laptop is put on a stand with the charger attached to be ready for me when my day starts. While I’m on the road, my world is a bit interrupted; I don’t have these comforts to set things up. So this morning I had to look to find my iPod.
How does this fit into our topic this week? Well, we need to have a system to set ourselves up for success, a way that we build habits to place our things to get us out the door in a proper amount of time each day. Imagine if your life worked together like the parts in your car’s engine work together to make it run when needed. You turn the key, press on your accelerator and you just hear the purring of your engine. On our bikes we twist the throttle and you just hear the engine smoothly run.
So what are some ways that we could set our life up for success and not have to re-trace our steps in times like mine, being on the road? You need to build habits into your life that get you to repeat a process that makes it build your success system in life. For me, I have to learn to pack my bike the same way each day so that I do not forget things. Last year on my trip I lost a cap that I’d had for many years by breaking my daily habits. While I have lived without the hat, if I had learned to build a system, even with waking up in a different place each day I would still be wearing that hat.
In our world there are more gadgets, all different kinds of brief cases, and back packs for taking more things with you for travel and keeping them in a kind of order so that you never lose things. As I work this week from Phoenix I will be setting myself up for success. If you want to do the same for your life like we do at home, I suggest you look into a professional organizer, have them come and look at the way you have things in life and the way you live your life, then develop a system to keep you moving.
I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach. It’s time for you to live the life you always wanted, to love what you do and those you share your life with.
