Sky View

Good Friday morning to you. I am back from a great time with friends and business associates in (surprisingly) sunny San Francisco. I was looking out my plane window on the ride home and thinking about how clean and neat the earth looks from that high up in the sky. It made me think of how the home cleaning and design shows make the homes they redecorate look like the model homes you visit when you are looking at new homes.

Do you ever watch those shows? I used to watch them, and then compared the homes on the shows to my own and wonder how I could get my home to look that good. Over the years I would find a decorator who could come in and make it look like that in a matter of a week. In some cases it was not about adding things; it was about subtracting things. Then my home would look like a model home. Well from the plane, looking at the ground, the world looked that way.

So in this week of cleaning up and cleaning out, have you found some things that need to be cleaned out to get back to that model that you once had, or maybe a model life you once dreamed about. We never start life out with the expectation we will be making a mess of things; it just happens over time.

We create the messes by adding things that were not needed, or placing ourselves in circumstances that may seem like they will make life easy. They may work for a while but they usually don’t pan out in the long run. I found this story to ring so true when talking with a young man last week. John told me how over time he wanted to be rich and started chasing money-making ideas just because they seemed like they could make him large amounts of money. But in the end, each one left him with products he could not sell and a contract that prevented him from returning the goods.

John told me how his garage looked like it was a storage shed for one of those hoarders’ shows, he would hold onto things with the hope of finding a buyer and getting some of his investment back. As we talked more, and more he started to think and said those things were just like his life, he had been taking on the problems of life and then holding them thinking he would someday find the solution.

This post today is not about collecting things, which can be a different kind of problem (even in my minimal lifestyle I still have my dad’s die cast truck collection); it’s about how we hold onto or collect problems that keep our world from being the way we once dreamed it would be. Then we become caught up in solving the problems of jobs we didn’t want to be in or the time invested in a group of friends that led a destructive lifestyle such as drugs, excessive drinking. Then we start to see the health effects of those things tearing our own dreams away.

When working with clients, the first two most important questions I like to ask are these:

1. What is working for you in your life? That tells me things they like or love about life and it puts a light on those things they wish they were doing.

2.  What is not working your life? This provides the list of things that we first work on to solve problems, remove issues, and start a process to change their lives. We take that as the starting point to clean up the mess and clean out those things that are weighing them down.

So, as I explained with the young man, John, I met last week, you have to find those areas of life that need cleaning up. Then they must be dealt with – either removed or a having process put in place to make the necessary changes to get you back to that dream. Then, when you look at your life, you get to see the beauty of it like I was able to see from that plane.

I’m Tim Gillette, The Rocker Life Coach. It’s time to live your dream, to love what you do and those you share life with. Cleaning up and cleaning out are the first steps you take to become the RockStar in your world.