Disney Leadership Keynote Speaker
Five daily blogs about life's 5 big choices on five interconnected sites.
Focus, discipline, mastery
Personal responsibility is the antidote to avoid or at the very least, minimize the damage of a midlife crisis.
When is that drilled into us?
Um……Never.
Unless you are exceptionally lucky.
Society expects personal responsibility to fall from the sky and land on us when we become adults. How’d that work out for you when you turned 18 or 21?
What if mental, physical, spiritual and career responsibility was taught to us from childhood, in our school systems, the way we teach reading and math?
Life is pretty simple. We’re born. We grow. We live. We die.
Midlife offers us an enormous opportunity to decide on a few things, with one of the biggest being this question:
Am I going through the motions?
The reason people who are successful have time to work hard is because they have traded their time trying to catch a buzz, for time trying to catch their dream.
There are enormous hours and energy wasted on having a good time.
But when the only one benefiting from your buzz is you, you are really being selfish.
Plain and simple.
When you decide to free up your time to create a buzz to help others, you’re whole life changes from meaningless to meaningful.
In life, it’s not the material things that matter. How many times have we heard that? Makes sense to us too, doesn’t it? Stuff is not important, people and relationships are.
So then, let me ask you, do you own your material possessions or do they own you?
Please consider doing yourself a favor and read this. It’s not what you think, it’s better. And it revolves around an epiphany from a cross-country backpacking trip. Yeah, everybody is so stinking busy. Busy accumulating stuff.
“Have you ever had a midlife crisis?”, I asked the US Airlines flight attendant yesterday as we were waiting to disembark in Orlando. We sat across from one another, face to face – me in the exit row aisle seat, her in the “jump seat”.
The middle seat next to me was empty, and in the window seat was Mark, another US Air employee. Mark and I spoke at length, and he spoke with the flight attendant across from us, but I did not. Not until that question.
With an unanticipated wisdom, she replied, “Not really. I think it’s a guy thing.”
Clarifying, I added, “I’m not talking about the stereotypical convertible sports car, younger woman thing, I mean when you journey through life and arrive at the place you worked your whole life for, and suddenly realize it’s not where you want to be?”
What she said next really surprised me, “That’s because we don’t know who we are.”
Bingo!