I heard a song on the radio this morning that really struck home. You might have heard it: 100 Years by the band Five For Fighting.
“I’m 15 for a moment, caught between 10 and 20 . . .”
The singer is fifteen, then twenty-two, then thirty-three. Then “the sea is high” and he’s forty-five. “Another blink of an eye, sixty-seven is gone.” Then he’s “ninety-nine for a moment, dying for just another moment.” One hundred years of life, captured in a four minute song.A fifteen year old hearing that song might not be struck by the poignant truth, but if you’re like me (farther down that road of life), it hurts a little to hear it. “Time flies” isn’t just a cliché. I can still remember what I felt the day my wife and I brought our first child home. And now I go by the name “Grandpa.”
It’s New Year’s Eve, another holiday to mark the rapid passage of time. Is your life all you dreamed it would be? Have you accomplished your goals? Have you cherished your family, lived out your dreams, made every moment of your decades count?
If not, you might be turning to the shelves of self growth products out there – books, videos and CD’s designed to help you change yourself and your life. But have you gotten the results you hoped for? The advice in these materials is often valid (if redundant), but too often people don’t see the results they hope for. Why? Some reasons:
- Although they are temporarily inspired by the advice in self growth products, they don’t know how to use it to make a lasting change.
- They don’t have the tools to translate general advice to their specific situation.
- They don’t recognize key moments and how pivotal they are in defining the future.
- They don’t understand that the change in their life doesn’t depend on external circumstances, but on how they process those circumstances.
- They haven’t been taught to distinguish between reality (knowable facts) and meaning (understanding of the reality as filtered through their core beliefs).
In my next blog, I’ll tell you how you can overcome some of these hurdles so you can make the lasting changes to fill your life with the abundance and love you’ve been craving.
Whether you’re twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-five, sixty-seven, or even ninety-nine, it’s not too late to Live Big. How did Thoreau put it? “I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately, I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Life is too short – too precious – to live any other way.
Roger K. Allen, Ph.D. is an expert in personal transformation, leadership, and teams. His tools and methods have helped hundreds of businesses and tens of thousands of people transform the ways they work and live. To learn more, visit www.rogerkallen.com.
