Gifts, Passions, Service (GPS)

I was lucky enough to see Afdhel Aziz speak recently. He had a great story, which was basically that he was killing it in corporate life and in marketing, but found his work devoid of meaning. I don’t know whether I’m killing it, but there’s not much meaning in my work either.

What I really loved was his actionable framework for making changes. Spend a week, six months or however long it takes to understand your GPS: Gifts, Passions, Service. Here’s a link to a video – he talks about GPS towards the end. Summarised, it looks something like this:

What are your gifts? What do you excel at? What do others say when you ask them?

What are your real passions? What would you do all day if there was nothing whatsoever to stop you?

How can you be of service to others? How can you help? Where can you help?

So, as a first stab, here’s my GPS:

Gifts:
From team: Thoughtful, Empathetic, Collaborative, Creative, Calm, Caring
Others: good with people
Me: active listening

Passions:
Ocean and water (being in it as source of inspiration, joy, mindfulness, revelation; keeping it clean and full of life)
Mental health (looking after my own for me and others around me; the role of mindfulness, meditation, sleep, nutrition; mental health in the workplace)
The environment more broadly (protection, awareness, local action)
Movement (not spending all day sitting at a desk and on the couch – surfing, weights, swimming, yoga)
New forms of society and living (reject consumerism, find new ways for democracy to work and flourish, moving away from corporate degradation of democracy)
Awareness, self-actualisation, spirituality
Arts, especially music and literature
Family and friendships

Service: who can I be in service to / where can I be of service
My family especially my kids
In my club
By picking up rubbish
By talking about mental health in the workplace and my own experience

It’s a good journey to be on.

One year ago, I stopped drinking

I posted this on the Stop Drinking subreddit at Reddit last week. Thought I put it up here too; who knows, someone might find it useful one day…

TL;DR – One year and two days ago, aged 43, I woke up on a Monday morning and for the first time ever, I asked someone for help to stop drinking. Two days later, I made a ‘sort of’ decision to stop drinking. I haven’t had a drink since then and while it has been anything but easy, it is the best decision I have ever made and I hope I never go back. Thanks for everyone on here who is asking for, receiving and giving help. IWNDWYT.

The long version – 1,000 words, it could be worse!

I’m a 44-year-old Englishman and I’ve called Australia home for the past 13 years. I have an amazing wife and two incredible daughters. I have always loved alcohol. I mean, really loved it. I remember seeing adults drink it and wanting it when I was 8 and then getting properly, out of my mind drunk for the first time when I was 12. That passion for booze only slightly abated in my late teens when I started to get a real taste of the downside, although the downside never stopped me. By my late teens, for every positive impact that it had – the ability to get me out of my shell and into the world – it had an equal negative impact. Drinking stopped me feeling small and scared while I was doing it and it opened doors to experiences I might not have had otherwise, but the next day I would feel reality creep back in. Over the years, that felt like a whole variety of mental side effects – but mostly manifested in panic attacks that, at their worst, felt like nervous breakdowns; and depression, which was never diagnosed or officially medicated because I knew deep down there was no point while I was still drinking. I drank, the next day I felt depressed, so I drank, which made me depressed. There’s been plenty of drugs along the way, most things really, but they were always other people’s drugs. I stopped doing them easily. Not so the alcohol.

For whatever reason, I functioned. I got through university, I worked and traveled in my twenties, then moved to Australia when I was 31 and started working for the tech firm that I still work for now. Somehow I’ve built a career there over 13 years and it’s looked after me and my family. I’m grateful, although I hope that change is on its way there too, when the time is right.

In that whole time – getting drunk aged 12, up until I threw in the towel a year ago – I stayed dedicated to alcohol. Through each phase of my life – uni, work, travel, work, marriage, kids – despite the desperation I would so frequently feel as a direct result of drinking – I stayed with it, pretty much daily for the past 20 years. But in my mid-thirties, I started to fantasise that I’d give up when I was 40. It didn’t happen, but the seed was planted. The progressive nature of alcohol addiction meant that alcohol played more and more of an important role in my life. In the end, it was all I thought about. I didn’t drink in the mornings (aside from running into the pub now and again in the late morning to stop a panic attack), I had no DUIs, I didn’t lose my job, I didn’t lose my family. But suddenly, that all felt very close. And the prospect of losing it all, just for alcohol, did not sit well with me. That’s an understatement – I wanted to die.

And when I wanted to die because I couldn’t live with alcohol and I couldn’t live without it, I asked for help. My mate from school, 10 years sober, told me to go to an AA meeting. I did and I haven’t had a drink since.

I’m not going to say that I couldn’t have got sober without AA. There’s so many aspects to my recovery and AA is one of them. I’ll post about AA some other time, but I will say I am extremely grateful for it and it has played a massive role. I have a group of friends that I can hang with and talk to that are experiencing what I’m experiencing. Here’s what else has got me through so far:

• Daily meditation – ideally as soon as I wake up, because now I don’t drink my brain has a tendency to throw up a lot of not very useful thoughts first thing in the morning!
• Mindfulness, which keeps me grounded through the day
• Recovery-related reading, audiobooks and podcasts. The two most important books for me have been Recovery by Russell Brand and This Naked Mind: Control Alcohol by Annie Grace. They come at it from opposite angles, but I have found a way for both to work for me
• Talking to and spending time with other people with alcohol issues. And also with the people that were already in my life – with just a few exceptions, most of those people are still in my life and my relationships with them are better
• Engaging with real life and sitting with the problems that come up everyday, instead of trying to drown them with a drink
• Psychology. I found a great therapist through my doctor and for the first time could actually let go of some childhood trauma
• Coming here, /stopdrinking, which I only discovered around 3 months ago but is another place I can go to check-in, see other people hit milestones, offer help or just hit a realisation that something has to change. It’s awesome
• Getting fit. I needed an upside to not drinking which I’ve found by getting active. Highlights: 1.5km ocean swims three times a week (I could barely manage 2 lengths in pool a year ago), surfing better, finding my way around the gym, discovering yoga
• Gratitude lists daily and journaling. Writing it all down has really helped.

Today..today I know, that however hard this is, it’s how I’m supposed to be living. Before, I knew I shouldn’t be drinking and that knowledge undermined everything in my life. Now, I can have minutes, hours and days where I know that everything is as it should be. Thanks, if you read this far. IWNDWYT!

PS, I saw this Tom Waits quote up here on /SD, it looks like this is the original post. It’s just perfect and says much more than I could ever say about sobriety and why I stopped drinking:

 “I always wanted to be mystified by it all – and rather fascinated with life itself. I think maybe when you drink, you’re probably robbing yourself of that genuine experience, even though it appears what you’re doing is getting more of it. You’re getting less of it. And it takes a while, when you’ve had a rock on the hose like that for so long. It takes a while for the hose to be a hose again, you know, and for things to start flowing.” Here’s a link to the interview.

Progress

It’s slow. But I’m meeting two people this week who have left the company I work at to do different things. As long as I’m taking action every day, then I’m happy as I’m moving in the right direction. Baby steps. Come on!

Action is king

I’ve learned a lot in sobriety. One of the things I’ve learned is that it’s one thing to know, think and say stuff, but it’s something else entirely to take action. The first thing I learned – and I didn’t know it at the time I took this action – is that you can’t fix yourself. I had to ask for help. I had to take an action and say to someone, I can’t drink like this anymore, the pain outweighs any perceived benefit. So I asked my mate who’d quit drinking 10 years ago and he gave me the advice I needed to make a change.

I’ve made that change. I’ve quit drinking. Not long ago – coming up to one year – but it’s enough to know that it was the correct change for me to make and that if I maintain that mindset and focus on the literally countless benefits of not drinking, I can continue to not drink – which is itself an action given that I’d spent the previous 25+ years drinking almost every day.

So to make changes to my career – even though I do not know what I want to do next – I need to take a number of smaller actions. Here’s my initial list so that I can continue to make progress:

Action 1. Write about the journey. I haven’t found that much online that resonates – probably because what we do with our lives is so personal to us. Only we know what we are supposed to do. Only we can make changes. But I will write about it – perhaps it will help me, perhaps it will help someone else.
Action 2. Speak to others who have made changes (I have a list of these people but won’t publish them here).
Action 3. List out carbon neutral useful jobs. Ref ‘No is not enough’ by Naomi Klein
Action 4. List out all the things I would like to do, regardless of experience, money or whether practical. Include rock star. What would I love.
Action 5. Look at something like the desire map and write what I actually want to feel while working. Include the things outside of my comfort zone.
Action 6. If there are skills that I don’t have, list them. If there are practicalities that look impossible to overcome, list them. How might I overcome these. Do I need formal degrees and training? How else can I approach knowledge gaps?
Action 6. List what I hate about corporate life.
Action 7. What are the psychological blockers. What stories do I tell myself that prevent me making change. That I’m worthless. That my only value is my income. That I’m my dad. That I will fail and everything will fall away. Feel the fear and go with it. Listen to the voice you will fail like every other time and counter it with measured and practical wisdom.

 

 

I’m back, nothing and something has changed

I’ve been on a journey and I’m back. I know the 15 users in Russia who viewed my previous posts in 2012 will be relieved!

I started this blog because I wanted to get away from the corporate bullshit. Lately, more than a little ironically, I’ve been thinking, ‘I should write a blog about escaping corporate life and doing something meaningful’. Then I signed in to WordPress and found that I’d already done that. This was my blog! I vaguely remembered starting it, but I had no idea that I’d actually posted quite a few times. I’d blocked it from my memory. I went back to the middle ground and basically fucking carried on working for the exact same corporation for another 9 years.

Then I scan to my first post on my blog. It reads,

I’ve set up a few blogs, a few times. Is this one gonna stay? I hope so.
For posterity, here’s what I wrote the last time I set up a blog:
“Today I decided to do something different
June 4, 2009

I drove home, the usual way, on auto pilot. Drove dangerously at times, rushed amber lights even though I had nothing really to get home for (normally I would, but X is out tonight and so the only thing that awaits is emails and whatevers in the fridge). I stopped at the beach and stood on the sea wall, letting the air fill my lungs and scanning the incoming waves for potential for tomorrow morning. The beach is half washed away by the recent storms and the rocks are showing through. I’ve only been here three years, but it’s definitely getting worse.

Somehow, I need to make what I do during the day, what pays my rent, closer to stopping the beach wash away. It might not be that. But it needs to be something else. If I spend another day, another week, another month in the office, I’ll go nuts. I have to see what else is out there. I’m 34 years old and I should be in control of my life.”

Oh my fucking God. I wrote this in July 2009. I was 34!!!! Now I am 43. I have changed nothing!! This should be enough to make me jump off a building. It’s not though, because a couple of major things have actually changed – since then I’ve fathered two beautiful children (although, I guess, anyone can do that) and I’ve quit drinking (anyone can do that too, but most people don’t, and there was no fucking way I was going to do that aged 34).

Here’s what I know: I quit drinking, so I can change anything, including the trajectory of how I spend my time and earn my money.

Things must change, and I like going surfing.

Everything is linked. My growing interest in ecology, sustainability and the belief that as humans we are better to do nothing unless it directly benefits those around us and the planet ties in nicely with the fact that I’d prefer to go surfing than do any work. Today is Monday and the day on which I question everything. The answer is always the same – I hate working for a big corporate, as a result I am rubbish at it and I just want to leave as soon as possible. Then I do the maths and I decide I have to stay here another six months. Blah blah blah.

As a result I turn to radical ecological thought on the internet. I just discovered Dark Mountain – this is from their doom laiden manifesto: “there is an underlying darkness at the root of everything we have built. Outside the cities, beyond the blurring edges of our civilisation, at the mercy of the machine but not under its control, lies something that neither Marx nor Conrad, Caesar nor Hume, Thatcher nor Lenin ever really understood. Something that Western civilisation – which has set the terms for global civilisation – was never capable of understanding, because to understand it would be to undermine, fatally, the myth of that civilisation. Something upon which that thin crust of lava is balanced; which feeds the machine and all the people who run it, and which they have all trained themselves not to see.” There’s a happy ending to the manifesto though: “The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.”

Phew. I’ll get through another Monday then and behind the scenes I’ll work on my alternative career.

Love this blog post – you only need $40k to be happy

OK so it was published in 2004, it was US dollars, so that number may have gone up a bit by 2010 – maybe it’s AUD 60-70k now. Whatever – it validates my thinking. I recently bitched and moaned and said to my boss that I was thinking of leaving. It wasn’t an idle threat, I meant it and still do. Now there’s talk of a 40% payrise, a promotion, all the rest of it. It’s going to make the choice to leave more difficult, but I think this is part of the challenge I’m facing by escaping corporate life. And I know deep down I’m leaving and that I need to do something else, and that maybe I need to take some time off too. But I also know that I’m going to have to take a big pay cut but really, does that matter? – I’ve got everything I need, I just have to be able to pay my half of the mortgage and have enough for when we have kids. So it’s all good and I’m making progress.

Back to the land and sea

I think I’ve found a phrase for my philosophy and my next work endeavour: back to the land and sea. I think it has a nice ring to it.

Do less and life is better

The more I read, the more I find people thinking in like-minded ways. It started with Tom Hodgkinson’s “How to be free” and the latest thing I’ve found is the slow food manifesto, reproduced below from http://www.slowfood.com/about_us/eng/manifesto.lasso.

It all amounts to the same thing – the more feverish our ambition, the more we do, the greater the impact on our environment. It’s better to chill – to hang with friends, to read good books, to meditate, to eat good, slow local food and to go surfing.

Anyway, here’s the Slow Food Manifesto:

The Slow Food international movement officially began when delegates from 15 countries endorsed this manifesto, written by founding member Folco Portinari, on December 10, 1989.

Our century, which began and has developed under the insignia of industrial civilization, first invented the machine and then took it as its life model.

We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods.

To be worthy of the name, Homo Sapiens should rid himself of speed before it reduces him to a species in danger of extinction.

A firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of Fast Life.

May suitable doses of guaranteed sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment preserve us from the contagion of the multitude who mistake frenzy for efficiency.

Our defense should begin at the table with Slow Food.
Let us rediscover the flavors and savors of regional cooking and banish the degrading effects of Fast Food.

In the name of productivity, Fast Life has changed our way of being and threatens our environment and our landscapes. So Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.

That is what real culture is all about: developing taste rather than demeaning it. And what better way to set about this than an international exchange of experiences, knowledge, projects?

Slow Food guarantees a better future.

Slow Food is an idea that needs plenty of qualified supporters who can help turn this (slow) motion into an international movement, with the little snail as its symbol.

Is D-Day here?

Almost passively, I have arrived at a potential crossroads. I have two choices: either I ask for more leave, even though I’m already 8 days overdrawn, and go on the surf trip, or I quit my job, go on the surf trip and come back to a brave new world of voluntary unemployment and contemplation of what’s next (obviously not going on the trip is not an option!).

I want to walk away from corporate employment, I really do.

The question is though  – do I have the balls?

If anyone was reading this I’d say, “watch this space”.