Don't forget to live your life.

Getting more Urgency and Agency in Life.

They say: "follow your passion," but what if you don't know your passion?

Then I say follow your pain and follow your energy. 

Ask yourself: 

• What pains me to see in the world, in our lives? 

• What makes me sad or angry?

• What would I like to change?

• What would need to happen for it to change?

• Can I see myself helping that change happen?

• If so, how?

Here's my pain. 

What saddens me is to watch many bright, talented, and simply good people either sleepwalk through life or stay stuck and watch it go by.

Some have dreams but never even try to turn them into goals, while others keep starting but can never follow through and take them to the finish line.

SENSE OF URGENCY

"Life is too short to waste time on things that don't matter." 

Anonymous

For whatever reason, I regret missed opportunities and unexamined life for them. 

Life is short, but it's long, but it's short.

OK, so maybe I do know the reason behind my time urgency: death was never an abstract concept to me. 

I started off by being strangled by my lifeline - the umbilical cord! 

I then watched my mom fight cancer. Twice. She lost the battle.

And then my dad survived a heart attack, only to die from cancer not long after.

I can still see my 93-year-old grandma telling me she couldn't believe how old she was and how quickly life passed. And that's from someone who lived a long and eventful life!

As if this wasn't enough, I added a couple of psychedelic-induced ego deaths to the mix, and that sealed the deal for me.

So yes, I have a strong grip on death. 

And if anything, it makes me feel more alive. 

With all that in mind, I love to try and live my best life, checking what is and isn't possible, mainly taking intentional actions and trying to fill it with as much awe as I can. 

SENSE OF AGENCY 

 "The brevity of life is not an excuse to do less; it's a reason to do more." - Unknown

There's a lot of stuff in life we have little control over: pure luck, our circumstances, our genetics.

It would be silly to focus on things we have no control over. 

So I want to focus on what we do have control over:

As humans, we have some degree of control over various aspects of our lives, and if we ‚only' make good use of that, we'd have much better odds of landing in the Winning in Life category. 

Here are some of the things that we can exercise a lot of control over:

• Actions: We have control over the actions we take and the behaviors we exhibit. While our emotions and circumstances may influence our actions, we ultimately have the power to decide how we behave. 

• Attitude: Our attitude towards life, situations, and people is something we can choose to control. We can choose to be optimistic, positive, and open-minded or negative, pessimistic, and closed-minded.

• Responses: We have control over how we respond to situations and people. We can stay reactive or we can become more creative and emergent.

• Communication: We have control over what we say and how we say it. That also means how we talk to ourselves - our inner narration.

• Goals: We have control over the goals we set for ourselves and the actions we take to achieve them. We can choose to set exciting and achievable goals.

• Environment: While we may not have complete control over our environment, we often underestimate our ability to shape it. We can choose to adapt and thrive in challenging situations or let them overwhelm us. And when we can't change it, we can choose to control our response to it.

• Health: We have some control over our physical and mental health through the choices we make regarding our diet, exercise, and lifestyle habits.

The sense of personal agency is about our belief or feeling that we have control over our actions and the outcomes that result from them. 

It involves a sense of responsibility and ownership over our lives, decisions, and experiences.

But how often do we exercise our control over these things? 

We often don't because even if we believe it's possible, we also know it's easier said than done.

Here, I investigate all the ways how to make that happen. 

How to decide what is and isn't important for us, how to set goals, and, more importantly, how to achieve them despite our human quirks. 

The Big Picture is the art of zooming out, taking a step back, checking where we are on our personal map, and what we would like to get. 

It deals with the Why behind our actions. This is a part where we get philosophical.

It's where our prefrontal cortex sits on its throne.

The Daily Grind is about zooming in and honing the How of what needs to get done in order to get us closer to where we want to be. This is often the uncharted territory of our limbic system, our unconscious mind, that can derail our conscious efforts toward change. 

The Daily Grind is about everything that falls into the "easier said than done'. 

This is a part where we get practical. 

Let's find out how to navigate life together!