Building Your Future is like Building a Brand New House

I came to this realisation the other day when thinking about what it is that I want for my future. What I want my future to look like. I can see the end result, all the bells and whistles and trimmings of the tangible, materialistic things I want to evolve, the feelings the experiences, the emotions, the friendships, relationships, connections, all the pretty things. And I kind of got to thinking that designing your future is pretty similar to building your house. It's a process. It takes time, patience, thought, persistence and effort.

It kind of helps that my partner and I are in the process of building our new house and perhaps that's where the correlation between the two took seed. There is so much that goes into planning a new house, it can be overwhelming. Just like planning your future. You start to think about what you want, what you want to do, who you want to be and all the beautiful things you want to have and then the overwhelm sets in. Well, where do I start and will I be good enough and do I deserve this and insert self-sabotaging story here.

The key to building and any future we are creating is to have a solid foundation. The aesthetics come along later.  If we don't have a solid foundation, a base, a platform to stabilise the building, then sooner or later our building will fall over.  It's only a question of when. When I think of how this relates to building your future, it means that you have a good grasp on who you are, what you stand for, what you won't stand for, what your core values are, what your beliefs about the world are,  what your core needs are, what your non-negotiables are. All the things that relate to the core of YOU!

Once you have a good grasp on who you are, then you can start to focus on the construction of your future. Take yourself out to completion, what does your end "building" look, feel and sound like? What gets you excited, motivated, fired up? What do you stand for? What will you no longer tolerate? What's your ideal average day like? Who are you spending your time with? How have you grown and stretched? What are you learning and how are you fuelling your brain? What have you done to have constant and never ending improvement in your life? What do you do for creativity? How do you express yourself? What is important in your world?

Begin with the end in mind. From there you can come back to your foundation and start to put in the framework. What goals are you reaching for in the next 90, 180 days, 1 year, 2 years and 5 years? Follow the process of beginning with the end in mind. See it, feel it, hear it. Notice what's going on around you when you have these things in your life. Write them down or draw them or speak into your iphone and record it. Whatever it takes. Capture it. Capture the emotion, the visuals, the sounds. Hold that tight. Make it come alive. Let it be bold and vivid. Wild. This is what will form the framework of your house of life!


Once you have your framework ie goals sorted, then it's time to think about your medium. What are the bricks you need to lay? What structure do you need to put into place to help you achieve your desired goals? What do you need to do every day? How does your ideal average day of the future relate to your ideal day now?  What do you need to start doing? What do you need to keep doing? What do you need to finish doing as it's no longer serving you and your purpose?

The windows of your house are your dreams and your vision. You can look out and see what's ahead of you. Keep dreaming. Always. Each and every day. Even on the days you feel like there's no hope and you can't see the forest for the trees. Keep your dream alive. Look at it. Listen to it. Feel it. Constantly remind yourself why it is you are doing what you are doing. Create beautiful vision boards to remind yourself of your future. Look at them often and dream!

The door is your way in and your way out. In relation to your house, it's the exit and entry strategy. How long are you going to continue with your plan? What time frame have you set? What's your strategy? How will you know when you've arrived?

The roof is what holds it all together. It encases the building. It protects the inside. It keeps the rain out. Nothing beats the sound of rain on a tin roof! A tiled roof just doesn't cut it! Your roof is your affirmations, the things you tell yourself. Your own words of encouragement and empowerment to you. The words with impact. Guts. Strength. The ones that bring out your inner courage. The ones that help you get out of bed on the days you just want to stay in there and hide from reality. The ones that give yourself that kick up the backside on the days you need it. The ones that say "hey you did a great job today". The ones that say "you are whole and complete". The ones that say "I love you for who you are and who you are becoming".

Your house has reached the lock-up stage. It's secure. It's tight. It's sturdy.Foundation, frames, bricks, roof, windows and doors. You may even have a key to the front door now so you can pop in to see what's happening on the inside..... Except when you go inside, it's an empty shell. It's time then to put in the walls, some paint, some tiles, some carpet, some colour.  What effort do you need to put in? What's your action plan?  What's your plan for constant and never-ending improvement? What are your daily, weekly, monthly action steps? What positive and empowering emotions are you choosing for yourself every day? How are you educating yourself? How are you going to colour your future? What colour scheme are you going to use? Is it time for the beige to go and to let a more vibrant side shine through? Is it a focus on self or business or relationships or health or family or education or fun? Or an emulsion of all, each with their own special part to play. Interweaving and intertwining.

Then comes the best part! The decorating. Choosing the furniture, the art, the colour scheme to bring your building alive. The perfect opportunity to let your personal touches shine through. In building your future, this relates to who you spend your time with, who you model, how are you growing and contributing, what kinds of conversations are you having? How are you educating yourself? What's the next step? How are you bringing fun into your days? What new things are you trying? What boundaries are you pushing with yourself? What limits are you breaking?

As you step back now and admire the beautiful home you've constructed, you feel proud of what you've accomplished.  A dream that's become reality. All because you got very clear and very specific about what you want, who you are, who you stand for and what you believe in.You love your new home and can't wait to move in and enjoy your creation.

Diffusing the Drama Cycle

At some point in our lives we've all been in a drama cycle. You may even have friends who come with their own "drama queen" tags. You know the ones that every time you see them, something huge has happened and this person did such and such to so and so and now his wife found out about it and they can't believe that this happened. You know the ones right? And the more often they share the story the more outrageous it becomes? We all know of someone who thrives on drama.

I will let you in on a secret though, once you know the 3 key elements required for drama to happen and you understand that you can diffuse it by not playing your usual role, life will take on a much more even keel. I remember at my coaching training Joe Pane was telling us his wife fulfills her need for drama at 4.30pm on a weekday afternoon on Channel 10. I had a little giggle to myself, because I knew the show he was talking about. However at the time, drama was playing a big role in my life and I had been completely unaware of the impact it was having. Now my need is filled at 7pm on channel 7 on a weeknight - I can't help myself, it's something I've watched since I was a kid.

The thing was, I never realised I was addicted to drama until I heard Joe talking about it. Suddenly everything made sense. He talked about the 3 roles being the victim, the agressor and the rescuer. I will now add a 4th role, which is that of the observer - the one who watches from a distance but doesn't get involved.

The realisation that I was continually playing the role of the rescuer in my family's drama was like being hit in the face with one big, cold, wet, smelly fish. During my lifetime I thought drama was normal and natural. That I was put on this earth to be the saviour. I could fix things and make things right again. I could get everyone to make peace. Or not!

Yes there is healthy drama, like watching a movie, because you're in the passive role of the observer. Unhealthy drama is when you're drawn into the web of someone else's warped reality. You may have heard Tony Robbins talking about the 6 core needs. People who have a high need for significance and/or uncertainty quite often create drama. However drama is meeting this need in an unresourceful way. It definitely isn't sustainable and takes a lot of hard work!

Once you become aware of a pattern, you have the opportunity to change what's been happening. A chance to break the cycle. To move forward. To stretch. To continue forward on your journey of becoming all you were created to be. Knowing the pattern and doing nothing about it, doesn't give you any reason to whinge and complain. Yet so many people do! Change is simple, easy and can happen in an instant. For some reason though we've been conditioned to believe that change is painful, difficult and should be avoided at all costs.

So, I've now come up with 3 simple steps to diffuse drama in your life for once and for all, if you choose :)


1. Recognise when you're being drawn into drama
- learn to recognise the warning signs (the stories, the he said/she said)
- learn to listen but not necessarily give your opinion (most of the time the other person just wants to be heard)

2. Find something else to fulfill your need for significance/uncertainty in a resourceful way
- Do things that take you out of your comfort zone regularly (take up a new hobby, try a new sport etc)
- Validate others and their importance to you and your life
- Volunteer your time to an organisation that could use an extra hand

3. Hang out with like-minded people
- Find people who are on your wavelength, who are centred, grounded and are able to have meaningful conversations
- Learn to spend time on your own and to enjoy your own company

And I will leave you with this quote below:

When did you last check in with your auto-pilot?

Take a moment to think about what happens when you see someone you haven't met before. What runs through your head? What thoughts do you have? Are they positive? Are they negative? What do labels do you use? I know it may be challenging because it all happens so quickly and quite often unconsciously.

What tends to happen when we see someone we don't know is that we start a process unconsciously to work out if they're like us or not. This usually starts by labelling. You know the ones "she's hot, she looks nice, she seems happy,"etc etc and the opposite ones "I would never wear that",  "I can't believe her skirt is that short", "Did she even look in the mirror before she left the house",  "She's stuck up". The list goes on. How do we make these decisions, judgements or labels I hear you ask?

This process literally happens in a nano-second. Our unconscious mind operates on auto pilot. It goes about making choices and decisions without us even being consciously aware. Ever been driving somewhere, arrived at your destination and then wondered how you even got there? You were more than likely operating on auto pilot.

So what happens when we see someone we don't know? Our brain goes into autopilot again. The unconscious mind is constantly searching for evidence of what we already know. So it's constantly filtering in the things that are "like"what we have experienced before. I'm not sure if you're aware or not, but every minute we have millions of bits of information coming at us from thoughts running through our minds, feeling a breeze, noticing a sound, listening to a conversation, hearing the rumble of our stomach, the list goes on. It is physically impossible for us to notice every single piece of information coming our way, so we use filters to filter in around 135 bits of information that our unconscious deems to be "relevant"in accordance to past experiences. These 135 bits are then filtered down into 5 - 7 chunks or pieces of information that we actually recall and are subsequently categorised in our brains. So there's a lot that's not taken in once you do the math. The rest of the information gets deleted, distorted or generalised based on what our brains are focussing on.

If you've ever hard the saying "what you focus on is what you get, to the exclusion of everything else", then you'll realise what's been going on upstairs for you. Change your focus, you change your results.

The point I wanted to make in writing this post was more about the unconscious process that is humming away before we've even met someone.  The fact that this whole process happens in a heartbeat and with our unconscious mind always deleting, distorting, generalising and then categorising, what hope do we have when meeting someone to meet them with a completely open mind? You can't really pause your brain and tell it to hold tight while you make your own decision! Well, you probably can if you make the choice to be open. To teach your brain to focus on appreciation, love, likeness, acceptance, gratitude, abundance rather than what's it's been used to for however many years.

We are creatures of habit and quite often the habits we've adopted we have no idea of how they came to be. Just envisage your life if you could steer your own ship and have even greater control over your thoughts. What world of endless possibilities would open up for you right now?