There’s no need for a fall this autumn
It’s official, our southern hemisphere summer is over. Done. Poro. Finito!
If you’re one of those people, who like me, are partly solar-powered, then the mandatory arrival of extended hours of darkness won’t excite you at all. But while we can’t stop the leaves falling, our spirits don’t need to plummet along with them. We have all the power we need stored inside us to ward off a seasonal fug. To hell with hunkering down and hibernating, let’s do living!
In my last blog I talked about how creating our own compass and being ‘guided by what matters most’ is central to our authenticity. It’s also the way we can take control of our lives, sustaining our effectiveness and our well-being (#1). We can put the weather in its place by taking ownership of our choices.
Here’s five ways that will help you ensure the coming season is a rewarding one.
Employ your passions – they’ll love you for it.
We each have favourite pursuits and pastimes that engage, delight and energise us. Now would be a great time to indulge them. We generally know what our passions are, they tend to call to us, sometimes in a scream, others in a mere whisper. But if you don’t know your passions, then go do the washing up and ask yourself where would you rather be!
Whether your passions are cerebral, physical or social, don’t cage them in over the dark months. For me, the cooler, wetter autumn and winter is not a reason to put my bicycle or cameras away, they’re just the seasons where I need to add fatter tyres, some bright lights and a rain jacket.
Mean it – stay out of the shallow end.
Meaning matters. If we’re regularly engaged in a few somehow ‘big’ things that allow us to feel like it counts; that others are also benefitting from what we’re doing and that we’re playing our part in society, then we’re going to feel more positive about ourselves. The vehicle for this could be our work or what we actively stand for or volunteer for.
There are plenty of invitations out there to spend time in the shallow end of life, you know them. And yes, it can be fun to go there now and again, but living too much of our life only up to our knees as it were, won’t leave us much of a legacy nor sustain our well-being.
Target your days – don’t just spend them, invest them.
Having goals and milestones keeps us active and focused. They protect us from merely going through the motions. If we’re working towards a long term plan, intermediate targets help us keep the faith and believe in our ambitions by allowing us to break up the long haul into shorter term attainable chunks. Hitting our milestones feeds us small instalments of much needed achievement. Don’t underestimate what a tonic regular accomplishment is.
And if I might share a bias here; make at least one of the targets about your own growth. You are by far the best investment option you have and the benefits compound.
Notice life – it’s right in front of you waving.
We should all go get lost every now and again, then notice what we find there. Can we see anything about the world that we hadn’t observed before? Or do we notice anything about ourselves and our response to the new? These discovery adventures needn’t be major excursions either. It could merely be looking afresh at our own street or a scene just over the hill or it could mean us going somewhere we’ve been avoiding or buying music from a totally different playlist. The point is, stay present and curious. Be open to experiment.
Living purposefully does require us to be disciplined and deliberate, but that doesn’t mean living our entire life constantly running down the same well-worn groove. We can feel safe when our lives are tightly defined within a strictly fixed routine, but over time our cosy and familiar place may become a trench so deep we can’t climb out of it.
And if life really is like a box of chocolates, who amongst us can honestly say they knew about salted caramel 10 years ago?!
Keep the door open – invite people in.
For most of us (though not all of us I accept) it is the company of people which adds significantly to the quality of our lives. We’ve come to appreciate that our lives are better when shared. Yet despite this insight, the shorter days can see us withdraw back into our own caves and huddle by the heat pump and T.V., thereby effectively cutting out all but close family. As temperatures and the sun drops, the social side of life gets even more isolated to the weekend in an artificial and not entirely healthy divide.
So if people matter to you, make sure they know it. Get out from behind your walls and regularly invite others inside yours.
A parting question.
The enormously successful author Stephen R Cover when speaking to his best-selling book 7 Habits of highly effective people said that “proactive people carry their own weather with them”. I know you’ll get his meaning (#2).
My parting question to you is, what weather do you have in mind for yourself this Autumn?
Notes:
#1 Well-being is an aspiration state we hear a lot about. Dr Martin Seligman, a widely acknowledged leader in the field of positive psychology, in his 2011 book Flourish offers his PERMA model of well-being.
#2 In his 2017 book Get Better Todd Davis the Chief People Officer of Franklin Covey expands on Stephen Covey’s ‘carry your own weather’ message while detailing ‘15 Proven Practices to Build Effective Relationships at Work’.