The Art of Living

How to take your time....

How might your day be different n'allez pas trop vite?  An advantage of not going by too fast is that the world has a chance of becoming more interesting in the process.  What else might we notice if we don't go by too fast?

Try reading How Proust can Change Your Life by Alain de Botton for an interesting and amusing perspective on problems like;

• How to take your time
  
• How to suffer successfully
  
• How to open your eyes
  
• How to love life and 
  
• How to put books down

The World of Boxes or The World of Circles?

"I live in nature, where everything is connected, circular.  The seasons are circular.  The planet is circular, and so is its passage around the sun.  The course of water over the earth is circular, coming down from the sky and circulating through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again.  

Do people live in circles today?  No.  They live in boxes.  They wake up every morning in the box of their bedroom because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up.  They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box.  Then they leave the box where they live and get into a box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken up into lots of little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxes in front of them.

When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to their house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment.  They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box!  

Does that sound like anybody you know?  Break out of the box!  You don't have to live like this because people tell you it's the only way.  You're not handcuffed to your culture!  This is not the way humanity lived for thousands and thousands of years, and it is not the only way you can live today!"

Eustace Conway, quoted in The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

Cubicle Inspiration?

One wonders how inspired and innovative the employees of this blue-chip corporate are feeling when they are greeted by the following image with instructions above the toilet roll in the bathrooms.  If instructions are required on the use of toilet paper, we are guessing that the culture isn't one of notable innovation and thought leadership.  Depressing!

 

Have a look at Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett's beautiful 2010 season program for the Sydney Theatre Company (designed as a series of tear out postcards for each production) at www.sydneytheatre.com.au

Live theatre explores what truly excites, confronts, saddens and inspires us in life. The STC's 2010 program promises all of this and more in the planned productions of both new and much loved works.

In Optimism (by Tom Wright after Voltaire) our blissfully happy hero, finding himself ejected from his happy eden begins an epic journey around the globe experiencing the world as cruel and frequently brutal. Will it chip away at his insatiable optimism?

There is a new adaptation of Aeschylus' great tragedy Oresteia, as well as one of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial which plots the hero swept up on an inexorable tide of bureaucracy. Other highlights in the program include Uncle Vanya starring Blanchett and Tusk Tusk by 22 year old English sensation Polly Stenham.

However uncomfortable or confronting some of these works may be, they might just give us a new insight or perspective on the challenges everyday life presents.

Clarity & Certainty

As memories of summer holidays and days at the beach slip beneath the horizon with the end of January, it is worth stopping to consider what 2010 holds before we pick up our familiar routines that carry us through the year.  Are you clear about what you want to achieve or what you want to change?  What are you certain of?  Are you moving at a considered, elegant pace or a sweaty sprint?  Are you taking the time to think about the course that is sustainable for you and for your work?

2009 was a time of great uncertainty and fear, with many people at work spending much of the year wondering if they were doing a good job, or doubting their value and contribution.

How might 2010 be different if we stopped doubting ourselves, and instead started asking ourselves the question “how could it be better?”  It is only a small shift but it might just be the question that creates some contagious optimism in the spirit of hope that accompanies the dawn of a new decade.

 

Inspiration - How truly alive do you feel today?

Recently I attended the Byron Bay Writers Festival on the gorgeous northern NSW coast.  I got to wander between workshops, panel discussions and interviews over the three days listening to such amazing minds such as Geoffrey Robertson and David Williamson talking about their sources of inspiration and creative process.  As I did so I was prompted to reflect differently upon my own sources of inspiration and ask some questions.

Whilst writing and indeed creating anything can be a maddeningly frustrating and capricious process, almost every person emphasised the critical importance of environment to success.  The Australia Council also understands this critical importance and offers residencies to grant winners in art, music and literature to allow them to immerse themselves in their work in an inspiring location.

As you head off to the motorway and the cubicle this Monday morning, I'd like you to think about your source of inspiration and creative process today.  What do you hope to achieve?

Australia Council Grant Winners have the choice of working in such places as the Keesing Studio or the Cite Internationale des Arts in the Marais in Paris.  

If these don't suit, winners can also select from the BR Whiting Library in Rome, the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Ireland 

or Ledig House in New York.

Inspiring indeed.  What would it take for you to feel so shockingly, vividly, passionately alive that you created something truly extra-ordinary today? 

Re-fresh, re-consider, re-invent

In the past few weeks I have been quoted in a number of newspapers nationally and been interviewed on breakfast radio talking about the ever increasing number of redundancies in Australia, what the impact is and what people should do.  I am also seeing more and more people in my business every week who have lost their job.

I continue to be surprised every day at the number of these people who, in the face of significant doom about employment prospects, are deconstructing and re-inventing their lives.

Now that many of the accroutements of a booming economy, double digit payrises, bonuses, hefty stock options and flash company cars have largely evaporated, many clients are telling me that there is just no excuse anymore to avoid the hard questions about their career and their life.

Whilst this can be a confronting and often life-altering exercise, the alternative of spending up to 40 years in a career and life that doesn’t really fit is far more confronting.  With Time magazine doing a cover story last week about the massive exodus of ex-pat workers returning home, I am delighted to see several of my clients pursuing and obtaining great roles overseas.  It is inspiring to see that great Australian talent is still sought after and that if we fit a different lens through which we view our career, exciting outcomes are possible.

Many people are going back to school and immersing themselves in learning.  The seasons of life and the economy ebb and flow and are inevitable.  Imagine hearing of a world forum to try and avoid winter next year because snow blocks the roads and makes people late for work.

The winter of the economic cycle is a perfect time to retreat, reconsider and re-invent.  Have the conversation you have been avoiding.  Turn off the TV and invest in some reading and thinking time.  Consider whether you are doing what you really want to do and what you are really good at.  

If not now, when?

The Art of Business

Inc. magazine editor Jane Berenston writes in the publication’s 30^th anniversary issue about the art of business, very much integral to the art of living.  She talks about leaving a high level computer job 30 years ago exactly to join a magazine.  Though undoubtedly not the best financial decision at the time, Jane took the path less traveled following her passion where she says “the idea that I could have a job in which I read interesting stuff all day long and called up fascinating people was too compelling to ignore”. 

 Jane goes on to talk about a businessperson being an artist using both sides of the brain.  Her concept that a businessperson is someone with the soul of an artist and that their expression is business.  This really strikes a chord with me and I think it is a really nice way to frame how we think about work and career.

 Instead of thinking of work as a necessary evil, what if you considered how your innate strengths, passions, ideas and unique intellectual property might be best expressed in business.  Framing from this space opens up a whole new landscape of possibility and ideas that might just allow you to transform your life and career.  Sometimes just a slight shift of emphasis, an accentuation of a different aspect and an appreciation of our own unique brilliance results in ‘work’ and career becoming an artistic expression.  Are you in touch with the artist in you? 

7 Day Living Week - What are you enduring?

In recent months I have been spending a lot of time with people who have lost their job and I have been quite surprised.  Surprised by how happy nearly everyone I have met with has been in the face of being newly unemployed.  Most people are telling me that having been forcibly removed from their comfort zone, they now have a chance to make some changes to do something completely different, or at the very least change the way they have been working.

It seems that in our current times, people don’t need to just get back into employment, they need to get their spirit back.  I was recently alarmed to read that up to 40% of people believe they are in the wrong job or career.  What a disaster.  If we stop and think about this for a minute, 40% of the population believes they are in a job that is not a match for their strengths and potential as a person.  This isn’t good for anybody.  No amount of training, incentive schemes and motivational CEO chats over breakfast are going to get you excited if you fundamentally think you are in the wrong job.

Every day I am seeing people living lives of quiet desperation, where five of the seven days in their week is traded off for a few hours of pleasure, interest and entertainment on the weekend.

People are crying out for freedom from an ordinary, boring, mundane existence.  We want to be not bored and to lead a life, work for an organization and live in a place that is not boring.

The Chairman of KPMG died recently of heart failure at 58 years of age.  People in that organization are now questioning if the old ways of working are really worth it.  Life is something to be enjoyed not just endured.

Are you enjoying life or just enduring it?