Be Careful What You Wish For!

In planning today’s blog post, two quotes kept coming to mind:

Wherever you go, there you are.  Unknown, and,

Eighty percent of success is showing up.  Woody Allen

It seems to me that whilst each of these quotes are intertwined, there can be some very negative consequences of not considering the impact each has on the other.

Taking Woody Allen’s quote, you may be wondering who should turn up?  And of course, the answer is ‘me’, but I wonder if that would really be worthwhile if ‘you are everywhere you go’, and that is what I want to explore in today’s blog post.

Wouldn’t it be great to achieve the success we want overnight?  To wake up one morning and all our money worries had gone, our relationships with our families and friends were perfect, our abs were perfectly toned and the sun was always shining!  Unfortunately this perfect world doesn’t exist, although an approximation is achievable provided we ‘show up’ and do the work.

Let’s look at a couple of examples.

If we turn up at the door of a new relationship with all our baggage from previous unsuccessful relationships, what do you think the chances are of this new relationship lasting?

Moving on is often a difficult thing to do after a failed relationship, but why wouldn’t we want to give ourselves the best possible chance of finding happiness in the new relationship?  To do so of course would require a lot of work.  We would need to understand why the previous relationship failed and take responsibility for our part in that failure.  We would also need to learn new strategies so as not to repeat the same sabotaging behaviours in the new relationship.  As a bare minimum, we should at least put our baggage into storage!  If it turns out to be completely necessary to us, then we can get it back out, but in doing so, we really need to question why that’s necessary and what part it plays in the relationship.

As we can see, to go through this work will require a large degree of self analysis and introspection to identify what we want in a relationship, what we bring to the relationship and how it would work.  But failure to do the work, or as Woody Allen puts it, show up, would be a classic case of ‘wherever you go, there you are’ and we would be in danger of re-creating the same issues that caused earlier relationships to fail.

Great relationships are no different to any other type of goal we want to achieve.  To have a happy and loving relationship requires work.  It doesn’t just happen.  As with goals, we should have a vision of what we want to achieve, in other words, what does our happy relationship look like? And then we should show up (work) to ensure that it happens.

Moving on to another large feature of our lives: money.

What if we could put all our money worries behind us by becoming a millionaire lottery winner overnight?  Picture a brand new home, fantastic holidays, any car we desire and time to do anything we please!  But the problem with this picture is that little quote again…wherever you go, there you are.

If we win the lottery (or come by a large sum of money by other means, inheritance, for instance), it’s our circumstances that becomes the millionaire, not US.  The difference appears subtle, but in actuality it’s huge.  In becoming an overnight millionaire, we didn’t show up, we didn’t do the work, and consequently we don’t know how to live like a millionaire.  Clearly, if we don’t know how to live like a millionaire (which means holding on to our money as well as enjoying it), there’s an excellent chance that we will end up where we started.

I wish this were not true, but if you Google ‘lottery winner loses everything’ you will get more than 27 million results!

The truth is, we need to undertake the journey to become the person who needs to show up.  We can’t show up in our successful future wearing the personality we have today.  That will need to change, because today being a millionaire is something we know nothing about, and if we know nothing about the character traits and behaviours of millionaires, how will we know how to behave with our new-found wealth?

So I guess waking up into our perfect life might not be the best way forward.  In truth we must grow into the person we want to be…the kind of person who <fill the gap>, otherwise we will eventually find ourselves right back where we started.

This of course requires work; it requires us to show up.  We may think this is the difficult part, well maybe, but in undertaking the journey and growing into the kind of person we want to be, we will find that actually, it’s not as bad as it first seems, and compared to the alternative, it’s infinitely better.

Of course these are just two examples.  We all need to take the time to think of areas in our lives where we wish we had the answer or circumstances instantly and then go a step further and consider how making gradual changes in this area would improve our lives in some way.  In taking action to move forward, we will then become the person who <fill the gap> and have a much better chance of maintaining our new situation.

So my wish for myself and for everyone who reads this, is not for us to realise the perfect life of our dreams overnight, but instead to wish us all the fortitude to show up, so that wherever we are, we may be the person who….

Are there areas in your life where you are wishing for quick changes?  Is this reasonable?  Could you show up and make a difference?  I love to read your comments so please share your thoughts in the comment box!

 

Photo: David Fulmer