When I started working for myself, I worked with a business coach. Not only did we work on what I wanted to achieve in my business but also want I wanted to achieve in my personal life. One thing I wanted to do was to go away more with my wife and kids. We always have the annual summer holiday but I wanted to have more experiences with my family. So we looked at what needed to be done to make that happen and it turned out, not very much. So now we go on 4 or 5 trips a year. They aren’t all long trips but they are important for us as a family.
While you are reading this, I am walking The Camino Way with my wife. We are on the last day of our walk for this year, covering 166 km in 6 days. The Camino Way is a 780 km walk from France to Santiago de Compostela and takes about 6 weeks to complete. We can’t take that much time off work to do it in one go, so we are walking it over a number of years. This is our second year and we will have walked the first 12 out of 33 stages.
We could have easily put it on our Bucket List and waited another 25 years to do it. Why? A Bucket List is a list of things you want to achieve before you die. I cannot say with certainty when that day will be? We all assume that we will live to a ripe old age but for lots of people that isn’t the case. Or I might have a bad knee by the time I reach retirement and 780 km over 6 weeks will just be too much. Or I may just not be interested in walking it anymore. Instead, we are doing it now, taking a 5/6 year period to complete the whole journey. It’s really enjoyable for my wife and I, giving us a great break away together as well as plenty of exercise!
Life isn’t about creating lists of things that you want to do but will put off for 10 or 20 years time. If there are things you want to do, look at what you need to do to make it happen. It may take a couple of years to get things in place but isn’t that better than a couple of decades?
No one ever looked back on life and regretted that they didn’t work hard enough or that they shared too many experiences with their family. Draw up a list of what you would love to do and beside it, what you need to do to make it happen soon.
Let me know what you would love to do but think that you can’t. I bet we can find a way of making it happen. Drop me an email at steven@bluewaterfp.ie