Go to Your Happy Place

This week, I had a good laugh. I’m not reverent, so it’s expected that some of that spills over at work. We have a little messaging system that allows us to customize information about our availability. At the end of the day, I notify the world I’m off duty by selecting a red dot and adding the phrase – gone to my happy place.

One day, I forgot to change back to the green dot that says available – working from home when I started my day. My boss IM’d me, and asked – “Are you working? It says you’re at your happy place.” One of the people on my team said – “Work IS your happy place!” and we laughed.

Sure, I still get exasperated. Sometimes, I embarrass myself and want to jump off a metaphorical bridge, but underneath it all, I have deep confidence that tomorrow, or even fifteen minutes from now, I’ll see things differently. That’s the key. I understand that how I see things is up for grabs.

For most of us, that bit of awareness is like getting the best game controller ever to use on our own darn life. Once we get good at this, we’re like, high-five me. I’m out. But there’s way more to uncover, so this week, we’re moving to the far end of the tool-set. Past immediate relief, beyond awareness and even past seeing our thoughts as objects. For today, let’s spend some time working with dreams, goals, and beliefs.

To get there, I want to take you on a quick journey. We start off thinking that we have fixed character traits. To one degree or another, we believe that who we are is defined by how we show up in the world. We’re smart, we’re silly, we learn quickly but we can’t speak in public. We don’t question this and common speech patterns reinforce it. Also, we believe that the environment we find ourselves in has a huge impact on how we feel. If we have a nice boss, good co-workers, and meaningful work to do, we’re doing great. If not, well then, we’re miserable and we expect our HR department to fix that.

There’s nothing wrong with this, it’s how most of the world views things. It has one major drawback though – we have to wait for someone or something to change before we can be happy again. I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have that kind of time.

Enter awareness experiences. What I call awareness experiences are episodes when we are standing slightly outside ourselves, thinking about our own thinking, recognizing our own role in the drama that is our daily life. This can happen when we’re challenged by a coach, or simply when we observe that other people are having a different experience at the same meeting, discussing the same project. Like the time that slacker you know agreed with you about the new product design. You both knew it was bound to backfire but while you were gnashing your teeth, he was chuckling. What was up with that guy?

Awareness experiences start to soften our view of the world. They get us asking questions.

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Once we start asking questions, it’s a slippery slope. If you always believed you didn’t get math and one day, you wonder if maybe math is just a skill, like playing the banjo, that’s major. Pretty soon, our questions aren’t just about how much change is possible for ourselves. If we can change, how locked down is our experience of the world? You can work with these questions and actually start to change yourself and how the world feels to you. Once that happens, it’s game on. I mean, why wouldn’t you challenge yourself?

Do that enough and you start get a giddy feeling that who you are – just might be – up for grabs too.

Once you have a questioning mindset, you’re ready to do some big dreaming. This work I’m about to describe is my absolute favorite. Some of my clients like to live here. So do I. Sadly, this is not a hotel you can check into and just hang. It’s more like a lumberyard. You come here, look at all the pretty moldings, the cool cabinets, the funky bathtubs, and fixtures, but then, you have to buy something and take it home. You have to work on installing it if you want to use it. Nobody is going to let you just live in aisle twelve, and certainly not in your bathrobe.

From the opposing camp, I have plenty of clients who don’t even want to visit here. We pull up to the door and they’re like : “Nope, got no money, don’t need anything, couldn’t even imagine what’s in there. I’ll wait in the car.” If that’s you, just know, you will not get lost in there. You will not get depressed about all the things you can’t have. You are far more likely to have a beautiful master bath someday if you actually know that they exist. Trust me, some of the stuff in here is quite reasonably priced.

Are we still talking about identity? You bet.

So how do you do this dreaming big stuff?

Ask yourself who you want to be. Brainstorm a long list. Go all in.

Here’s just a few of mine: I want to be a person with few regrets. I want to be beloved by my family, crazy about my husband. I want to be kind and I want to have a big mouth. I never want to believe that I’m helpless. I want to be healthier and more relaxed. I want to write a NY Times best-seller and move my whole family to Hawaii.

Ask yourself how you want to live.

Do you want to live boldly, without fear and anxiety? Do you want to live with wide swaths of free time? Do you want to live surrounded by art? Or music? Do you want to live near the mountains? Do you want to live feeling confident?

And last, ask yourself what would the best way to experience life be – for you?

For me, I think the best way to experience life is to have the freedom to get neck-deep in things that mesmerize me, make me curious, call to me. I think the best way to experience life is to experience it with a tractor-trailer full of compassion for myself and others. I’m not there yet.

And if you do this exercise correctly, you won’t be at your idealized life yet. We’re not supposed to be. What is life, if we believe there’s nothing over the next horizon for us?

Trust me, there is always something over the horizon. It’s up to us to ask what it is.

I love this picture. Did you notice that the person’s headlamp is beaming up at the moon?

OK. I hope you set aside some time this week and answer those questions. Don’t stop until you have at least ten answers for each of them. Got it? Good. Now it’s time to bring the building materials home and put them together.

Just like going to the store, some of the things you’ve listed are out of reach – for now. I’m pretty sure that becoming a NY Times best selling author is not something available to me in the near future. Same as with the store, you all ready have some of what you wrote down. I rarely feel helpless, I have a tremendously big mouth, I’m nuts for my husband. I let myself get up to my armpits in hobbies and interests. That’s how I became a coach.

So analyze your dreams. What do you already have? Circle them on the page. What is really far out? Underline that. What’s left? Possibilities, ladies and gentlemen, possibilities.

I can write a book. I can take concrete steps toward being more compassionate at work and at home. I can set aside more free time.

I can start to redefine who I am and how I experience the world.

I can make this life of mine, even more aligned with my dreams. So can you.

And that? Is just good to do.