This week was my birthday and as often happens when we complete another lap around the sun, I took time to reflect. To look in the metaphorical mirror at me and see if I am the person that — deep down — I want to be…to look at my life and see if it’s the one that I want to be living.
You see, many years ago when I was working in cut-throat corporate sector, I had a conversation that changed my life. I didn’t know it at the time, but that discussion would prove pivotal in setting the tone and direction for everything I have done since and in providing the fire in my belly, the why behind the how, and the vision that weaves my daily steps into a tapestry of passion and purpose.
It was my first session with my first mentor, a senior leader at the international oil and gas firm where I had been working for a year or so. In preparation for our first meeting, he’d given me an assignment that sounded fairly straightforward: tell me what you want to be known for in 25 years. For two weeks I chewed on that question, tasting the flavour of different answers, and sketching out what would become the bones not only of my career but my life from that day on.
I walked into the conference room and sat down, nervous about what he would think of my answer. After all, I had no idea if I’d done this right at all! He mentored seventeen other people at the time — many of them were top leaders in our industry — and a big part of me was terrified of screwing up the opportunity to work with him. Tamping down my nerves, I offered up the answer to his question that I’d spent weeks thinking about: in 25 years, I want to be known for two things. First, I want to be known for loving other people more than myself. And second, I want to be known for living life wide open.
I felt the first part was pretty self-explanatory. Loving other people more than myself meant that every day, I wanted to become less self-centred, less focused on my own wants and needs. To live my life in service of the greater good. To walk daily with the intention of bringing joy and peace and happiness to the people in my life, strangers on the street, and the multitude of humans I will never have occasion to meet.
I knew the second part would require some more explanation, so I offered a lengthy list of examples of what I meant by “living life wide open”. It was things like sky diving on multiple continents, sailing around the world, getting my Ph.D., and becoming a certified rescue scuba diver. It’s been so many years that I can’t remember all of them, but the point was that I wanted to live life to the fullest. To suck the marrow out of my all-too-brief years on this planet. To go through every door of opportunity that opened in my life.
He leaned back, surprise darting across his face. He’d had people tell him they wanted to be known for being on the cover of Fortune Magazine or being a CEO of a Fortune-50 company, but he’d never heard goals as tough as the ones I laid out for him that day. I laughed because I disagreed completely.
More than a decade later, that question and the answers I came up with continue to provide the fire in my belly, the ground beneath my feet, and the vision that ties my life together. The details may have changed a bit — especially because my taste for danger continues to diminish as I get older — but the core intentions remain the same: loving others more than myself, and living life wide open.
In coaching parlance, we call these commitments. Commitments are different than goals because you can’t really measure them. They don’t really have deadlines. Instead, they are ongoing and aim to shift the quality and the very fabric of our lives. Commitments speak to the big why that gets us out of bed every day, even when times are tough. Goals are how we get there. As Robin Sharma says, small steps in the right direction over time yield incredible results.
If you’ve struggled to reach your goals, perhaps it is time to consider the strength of your commitments. Taking the time to clarify the why behind the how is the first step to breaking free from habits that no longer serve us and building new ones that do.
