What are the most important things to you in your life?

What things do you do that would make you appear to be lying about what’s important to you?

I asked myself these two questions and it was all sorts of uncomfortable. I had to admit to myself that I had been lying 🤥 not just to myself but to other people too.

It’s so easy to do. This ongoing conversation and the tricks my brain pulls to give me permission to do something at 6pm that I swore I would never do again at 10pm yesterday.

It’s like, no wonder I didn’t trust myself to take on bigger projects, I would never know which me was running the show. This exercise taught me to stop listening to my thoughts 💭 so much and look at what I am actually doing.

If someone read this blog, if someone listened to this podcast, if someone saw this behaviour in isolation, no side narrative, would they be able to list those things that are important to you?

The answer I got back was yes a lot but it was no far more often than I expected. More than anything else I’ve done it helped to create a lot of clarity and detach from a lot of behaviours and raise my game in many areas.

To be honest I think during moments of the day we all have this clarity around the stuff we do and produce but unless it’s on paper 🧻 the brain quickly produces one of our pre-prepared excuses.

Sorry shouldn’t put that on you... one of MY pre-prepared excuses. Even when it is on paper there’s still a risk. I had to actively start talking about it too. Keeping the genie out of the bottle so to speak.

Then I had to see where my life and environments still supported that behaviour. I remember having a conversation with a client in the Uk about 8 years ago. I suddenly had the realisation that financial health was still a type of health and overlapped with physical a lot, far more than I’d admitted to myself before.

As I wrote in my notebook at the time I had been lying about money in all sorts of ways. By the end of the day I was putting money into savings before I paid any other bills and set it up to automate so the cleverer part of my brain couldn’t convince me to invest it in coffee, booze and one click purchases. 🥃 ☕️ 📚

We all need cheer leaders, people who believe in us and we all need to treat ourselves with kindness and love, I’m not discounting that. But I can’t help but think that a huge amount of our inner turmoil is created by the disconnect between what we think and say and what we actually do.

I think we might all benefit from putting pen to paper and calling ourselves out on our own crap once in a while.

At least I have.