Start From Where You Are, Now Go and Be Great

Image by Ulrike Leone from Pixabay 

I had a dream the other night that the swim coach I had back in my teens had come back to visit all those he had worked with who had shown promise and been dedicated to achieving success in their sport.  Dreams being what they are, I did not know anyone else at the table, but suffice to say we were all middle aged and out of kilter with life’s big dreams.

Owen Flanigan was a charismatic and committed coach; I can still picture him tracking me alongside the pool, whistling loudly enough through his teeth to catch my attention over the sounds of my breathing and the water rushing in my ears, and moving his hands in a motion that meant “kick your legs harder!” Although Mr F (as we affectionately called him) died 24 years ago, he is still with me when I take a swim - especially when I’m doing freestyle and allowing my legs to just languish.

In my dream I pictured the group of us he had come to visit dressed in work garb that seemed to signify a degree of career success, one man adorned a pin striped suit. Yet the men had paunches and everyone was more than a little worn down by life. Mr F was taking us back to a time when we were full of youthful exuberance and dreams for our future, less encumbered by voices of self doubt and loathing.

Back in those days the voices were not in my head, of course, they tended to emanate from the mouths of adults (and mean kids) in the world around me. For example, I hit a wall in terms of progress in the pool and listened to others debate why that might be. As I would swim I could feel my body lose energy as I took on the thoughts that I might have plateaued because of growth and teenage hormones; something that felt outside my control.

When I started to become more consciously aware of the voices and judgements in my head a good few years back, it quickly became obvious they were the voices I’d heard in my home, school playground, the pool and other influential places.

I suspect even those people out there who are not consciously aware of the voices and thought patterns in their own head, which seem to form the majority of people at this point, cannot fail to understand this principle when they become parents. Like the many other stories I’ve heard along a similar vein, I have often opened my mouth (especially in frustration) and heard my mother or father’s voice come out.

So this group I saw in my dreams seemed to be encumbered with what those voices had drawn to them in terms of life experience. Chip Conley, in a podcast on the topic of lifelong learning. talks about his observation of the path of life in a similar sense to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, in that when we are young it’s all about having our basic survival needs met, then it becomes about accumulating and success and then it becomes about editing and meaning.

Editing means getting rid of the old thought patterns, which Christie Marie Sheldon gives some excellent tips on flushing out in this video. She talks about observing the “I can’t have/do/say/be X” statements in our heads in particular and asking instead “what would it take to make X happen?”

Chip Conley runs a Modern Elder Academy to address this education gap in our midlife, which I thought sounded intriguing, and seeks to address the same awareness gap among other things. He commented that participants tend to notice for the first time how many identities or mindsets they are wearing in their lives.

Coming back to my dream, it was a perfectly timed reminder that – however encumbered I’ve become with unhelpful thought patterns in the intervening years since I trained with Mr F, and however successful or unsuccessful I’ve been at becoming aware of them and integrating the fractured parts of me in my life – I can always start from right here.

I’m grateful to have had people like Mr F in my life; people who believed in me when I was younger gave me strength as an adult when I struggled to believe in myself. If I hadn’t experienced that, I still fervently believe in the words of Belinda Alexander “We are still here, so there is something we have to do”.

The sheer magnificence of our design and that of nature tells me that no single life is an accident; we
each have something we are here to do. In order to do it, there is perhaps the need to become untethered from our worries and doubts and that starts from where you are, now go and be great. And when great feels like too much, just be grate-ful instead.

If you enjoyed reading this, you may enjoy Be Magnificent: How to Create Something Out of Nothing and Be Thankful, I’d also highly recommend listening to the links in the article. To be the first to receive these posts, you can also opt to subscribe to my blog