Are you living someone else's life?

Are you living someone else's life? Often we are living in our lives in the constructs given to us by our parents, our situation, our friends, or our education. Later in life, we join social or working groups and, as is natural, we begin to meld our views with the group view as part of the acclimation process.

Occasionally we must look beyond the constructs of our lives to see if there is a better way to live life before time passes us by. The only question is: Are you looking?

Parental Constructs. Throughout most of our developmental lives we are most influenced by our parents. This has profound effects on the way we view the world. Who were your parents? How did they view money, God, life, other people, alcohol, school? Part of our teenage years is spent rebelling to find our own way, but our parents worldview remains and often pervades our current lives.

For instance, if you grew up on a farm with farm parents you probably found yourself in routine debt to FSA, the bank, land mortgages and often in risk if weather patterns didn't work out in your favor. This can lead to a number of outcomes. Maybe you fled the farm feeling more risk averse and spend your life preparing for financial Armageddon. Maybe you run bad debts too, figuring that's just the way business is done. Maybe you became an accountant to cope with the stress through understanding the system. 

Any and all of these outcomes are possible, even probable, simply because they are the life we have lived and are living. We may have built up cloaking systems to hide the reality or coping systems to mitigate the negatives, to 'get by', but still the underlying system is there running our lives like a silent autopilot. 

Relationship constructs. Even more subtle is the way we interact with the people we love with our families, our children, our significant others. My guess is that, outside of traumatic event, you haven't thought about the way you interact on a daily basis with your spouse, your kids. You just do it. Did you grow up with a father who yelled until he left for the barn? A mother who never hugged you? Grades were never important as long as you baled enough hay? A Tiger Mom who berated your smallest misstep? A hovering Dad who wouldn't let you climb the monkey bars because it was too dangerous? 

There are countless other examples that have likely crept into your life and you now implement in your own life. You might be overprotective, too. You might throw caution to the wind because you rebel against overprotectiveness. Either way, you are leading someone else's life. You might be following a family pattern of divorce and you might be clinging to your marriage to 'never let it happen to you.' It's still someone else's life.

How to make your own life. 

Step 1: Stop. Put your life on hold for just a few precious hours and look at it from the outside. In practice, you need to segment your life and look at each segment in stages. Space these out over time. You simply can't affect change on too many 'fronts' at once.

Step 2: Wave your magic wand. After seeing the way things truly are, and I mean brutal honesty, I like to wave my magic wand. "If I had a magic wand and could have things change instantly, how would they look? What would that be like?"

Step 3: Write down the ideal situation. If nothing else comes of the process, but you write down the ideal situation you are ahead of 95% of the world. These aren't goals in the classic sense, but all goal setting rules apply.

Step 4: Take one action per day. We've heard the quotes "Begun is half done." "Journey of a thousands miles begins with the first step." News Flash: It's true. Just do one thing per day towards that one goal.

Examples, because I know this is a bit ethereal.

1. Master Charge. A number of years ago I started another business with a partner. We were both young and back then financing was tight. His solution was get a Discover card with a big balance and charge happily away. I either didn't know any better or didn't have any better ideas, so away we went. This isn't your classic tale of credit card financing. The business did well, but that heavy usage of credit cards slowly over years seeped into the rest of my life. After a while I had credit cards with high limits personally. On one rainy October weekend, I realized that I had some big balances and light attendance and it hit me that I was living someone else's life. My partner's usage of cards had permeated my own financial system. I had to stop, reassess how I wanted things to be and make a change.

2. You are fat and your wife deserves better. Many of you have followed this example over the past three years. I came to realize that my body, energy and health were out of whack. I felt bad, was eating junk food all the time, because we had a snack bar as many of you do and I had lost track of my relationship with my body. I was a high school varsity letterman in soccer and track, sang and danced in the Penn State Singing Lions and marched in the Blue Band. I had been in great shape, but the slippery slope of a candy bar here, extra slices of pizza there had caught up with me. It took the traumatic event of my mom's death to shake me free of the false reality I that slowly overtook me. That made me stop. I looked around at my wife and kids and thought, they deserved a better, healthier family leader. I found a program I liked and started on a road that, eventually, made me stronger, faster and leaner than I was in high school. (The programs I've used are P90X, Insanity, Rev Abs, Insanity: Asylum and P90X2, in case you are wondering.)

3. Pay yourself. In my family, the farm is its own entity; its own being. Everything you had was poured into it and everything it produced was returned to it. You lived as a temporal steward of it in hopes it would survive to be tended by the next generation. You most assuredly did not pay yourself. I grew up with depression era grandmother and aunt as our primary babysitters. My father unbelievably saved the farm from financial ruin at age 18 after the sudden death of my grandfather through will and determination. It was also through trauma and that much trauma leaves marks. It wasn't until, again trauma, my mom died grossly underinsured that I got the wake up call. Now we plan for insurance, savings, and a regular paycheck to stabilize our family and provide for the future. We look at the business as a tool to provide for the family unit, not the family to provide for the business unit.

4. A win is a win. We all start our business lives young, foolish and selfish. With dreams go 'big money', dollar signs in our eyes we chase every avenue to cash we can, or at least I did. I was so focused on my business in the early years I'd work late,  sleep in the office and do it all again the next day. The only 'win' was a bigger attendance or more clients. I read voraciously business and motivational books and, steeped in that world of grow, grow, grow, I valued only another sale. It was the only win for me, but it really was someone else's life. I was trying to live the ideal life fabricated from all those books put together. The world was to be my oyster and I was the center of it.

Then I got married - trauma. Then I had kids - trauma. Then that 'success by the dollar' stuff seemed to tarnish. I had to stop and rethink, if I could wave my magic wand, what would life look like now? I had to reboot, reset, reevaluate. Now, going home early to run the kids to swim lessons isn't a distraction, but a win. Lunch with my wife - win. New client - win. Extra choir rehearsals for Easter - win. How wonderfully freeing when everything in life AND business becomes, not a distraction, but a win.

Why do I share all of this? Because I spent years in different segments of my life living other people's lives instead of my own. Some situations were learned, some forced, some just happened over time, but they weren't who I really wanted to be.

• Do I want to get up at 530AM EVERY day? No, I want to be healthy.
• Do I want a new car every year? Yes, but I'd rather be financially secure.
• Do I want our business to be successful? Yes, but I want to be a good husband and father along the way.
• Do I still plow profits back into our business? Yes, more than most do, but I finally understand that the business is part of my life, not the sole focus.

I want this for you this week:

1. Stop.
2. Evaluate and wave your magic wand in just one area of your life, pick something important.
3. Write down the ideal situation.
4. Take just one action a day towards that end each day of the next week.

Steve Jobs said, "Your time is limited. Don't waste it living someone else's life."

See what happens as you pause to examine the constructs that have crept into your life. I dare you.

Have a great week.

Hugh