What Do You Love To Do - And Are you Doing It?

Posted on 11 January 2007

I have to confess that until recently I have probably not been reading as many books as I would like that aren’t connected with either life or business coaching. I was a voracious reader in my twenties and thirties of everything from Homer to Hemmingway and loved every minute of it. However, I started to read less and less as my work life balance started to slip and my spare time was spent worrying about how to hit my next quota or target rather than feeding my brain.   Then somebody recommend that I read Awaken ‘The Giant Within’ by Tony Robbins. I did actually buy the book and start to read it but was getting nowhere as there was always something more important to deal with. It always amuses me when people (and I was one of them) say they have no time to read but will sit and watch tv for 2 or 3 hours at a time. Why is that?   

Anyway, at the time I was spending upwards of 20 hours per week driving all over the UK and decided that I should put that time to good use and went and bought the audio book version and absolutely loved it. Needless to say the next 4 years or so resulted in me building up an impressive and expensive library of audio books based mainly around self-development and (I am almost embarrassed to admit) sales, and spending thousands of hours trying to learn more about not only myself, but what makes other people tick.   When I moved to the US I realized that I had neglected reading/listening to books for pleasure for some time. Actually that is not completely true because I do get pleasure out of books based around psychology, self-development and coaching, but I had got into the habit of believing that if I didn’t learn anything from the book then what was the point? Thus my forays into other fiction dried up.   

Then after resisting reading The Da Vinci Code because too many people had told me I simply must (there’s a rebel in all of us) I compromised and picked up Angels & Demons when off work for a few days. Of course I enjoyed it and from that moment decided to read more for relaxation. I joined audible.com so that I could download books to my Ipod and listen at the gym and have started to alternate between fact and fiction   This whole episode got me to thinking how many others things have I stopped doing that I enjoyed because there wasn’t enough time or it was too expensive, or I was tired, or it was too cold, or too hot, or looked a bit like rain etc. On evaluation there were really 2 main activities. I had only played golf once in 18 months even though I am surrounded by some great courses and love to play and I had stopped taking time out for myself to either meditate or do some form of self-hypnosis relaxation exercises.   

Now I schedule at least 30 minutes a day for myself to relax on my own and I arrange to get at least one round of golf in per week. The only way that I can consistently stick to this is to actually write it in my planner as an appointment otherwise these activities can easily fall victim to other things that maybe more urgent but are seldom more important    It may be worth asking yourself if there is anything you are sacrificing because things aren’t quite spot on. It’s no good waiting until you get that promotion, get that pay rise, the kids leave home, or any other multitude of excuses. You owe it to yourself to enjoy life and squeeze out of it whatever you can, and to do it now. Spend 10 minutes thinking about what it is you miss doing and if you haven’t time to spend 10 minutes pick the phone up and give me a call because you probably need a Life Coach ;-)

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