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Over at Awake at the Wheel this morning, writer Jonathan Fields has an excellent post on the topic of intentional living. He quotes Harold Whitman’s famous line, “Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

I couldn’t agree more.

In fact, chasing the desires of your heart is a huge component of my coaching philosophy. Living an Xtreme Life means pursuing the things that make you come alive and therefore enjoying life to its fullest, rather than wandering through each day without direction or purpose and ending up wondering why life isn’t more satisfying.

Sure, we all want more money, a better house, greater resources for our kids, but none of those things can give us the satisfaction that we crave deep down inside. There has been considerable research lately that supports the basic premise of Fields’ essay – that only by doing what we love can we find the satisfaction and enjoyment of life that we seek on a daily basis. Figure out what you love to do and then make decide how to make money doing it, not the other way around.

Jonathan asks his readers a question I often ask my coaching clients – what makes you come alive? What captivates you? What can make you forget about the world around you, can grab every ounce of your attention?

I did this exercise myself recently. I divided it into the activities I like to do and the subjects I love to get involved in. (Jonathan breaks them into activities/processes and topics/content – call it what you want.)

Here’s my list:

Activities: writing, creating, singing, music, dance, the outdoors, public speaking and teaching, coaching

Subjects: writing, faith, intentional living, coaching, animals (especially wolves), nature in general, myths and legends

So, what makes you come alive? What fires you up? And how you can incorporate more of that in your life?

Feel free to share you answers in the comments section…

Photo by VSQZ

In my last post I introduced the Wheel of Life, a quick but insightful exercise to help you discover just how satisfied you are with the various aspects of your life. If you haven’t read it, go ahead and do so now.

Okay, now we’re all on the same page. Today I want to talk about what you can do with your Wheel.

Maybe one or two of you are perfectly content and your wheel actually came out looking like a wheel. For the rest of us, our wheels are certainly NOT symmetrical (and probably resembled something Cro-Magnon Man might have come up with while trying to invent the wheel, but that’s for a different post.)

Now we’ve got to decide just what we want to do about it. Change is difficult to implement, not because there isn’t a desire to change, but because the process often seems so daunting that we never actually get started. We talk about making change. We plan to make change. We even dream of making a change. But in the end, we fail to take any concrete steps that actually can bring about change and so we fail. Often repeatedly. Before we know it, the very idea of change makes us tired and depressed.

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Photo by Neopixx

How satisfied are you with your life? Are you doing the things you want to do? Living the way you want to live? Are you happy with the way it is all turning out? Think about it for a minute. No, I mean really think about it. Go on, I’ll wait.

Done yet?

If you’re anything like me, you probably didn’t answer yes to all those questions. Heck, if you’re anything like me, you probably answered no to all of them. Very few of us live the lives we dreamed of living. We stumble through our days, trying to make ends meet, and feeling pressured every second along the way.

But if that’s the case, I have a question for you. In the words of Sean Connery from The Untouchables…What are you prepared to do?

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