March 2nd, 2009 by admin

1. You increase your chances of living a longer, healthier, happier life

There have been numerous studies over many years that demonstrate consistently that people living their lives with clarity, meaning, purpose and passion increase their longevity. Of course it isn’t necessarily the length of a person’s life that counts, it’s the quality too, in fact quality is everything, isn’t it? If you get off your wheel from time to time to take stock and make the appropriate adjustments you can only enhance the quality and longevity of your life.

2. You get to take ownership of your own life

There really can be no better feeling than being the master of your own destiny. The key to a happy, successful and prosperous life always starts and always finishes with you taking 100% responsibility for you. That doesn’t mean that you part subcontract responsibility to your wife, husband, boss, friend, the government or your next door neighbour it’s about you taking complete charge of you. Just about the only real thing you have absolute domain over in this universe is your attitude and if you are not living consciously or you are living on autopilot you are hardly likely to be truly in control.

3. You get a change of scenery whenever you want

We all love a good holiday don’t we, a relaxing, refreshing energising break where just for a brief while the scenery is different. Well if you stay on the wheel day after day, week after week, year after year; guess what – the scenery never ever really changes. If you step off from time to time you get to make your own decisions about the scenery you want to see when you get back on. You get to choose which direction you steer your wheel in and how things are going to look for you.

4. Your life becomes fuller, richer and far more rewarding.

Just close your eyes for moment and picture that hamster in that cage running around and around and around that wheel every single day. Now just begin to imagine how you would begin to feel if that were you, if you were that hamster. Once you have made the decision that it will never be you (or no longer be you) think about all of the things you can and will get the opportunity to change each and every time you stop your wheel and step off for a moment.

5. You become a catalyst and magnet for change

Imagine the impact you will have on you friends, family and even colleagues when they notice that every now and then you have reinvented a small piece of you for the better. Just imagine the power you will have over your own life for not accepting things you are unhappy with and inspiring people to be the same through the visible changes in your behaviour. There is an old saying that energy and enthusiasm are highly infectious, so just imagine how you will automatically positively influence the lives of those closest to you just by being all that you can.

6. You become the creator of your own life, your own destiny.

Many of us spend more time in a year planning our two week summer holiday than we do planning our futures and the rest of our lives. Imagine what would happen if you put as much focus and energy regularly into the rest of your life as you do that holiday. Life becomes a blank canvass and you get to paint your own picture. As the artist Van Gogh once said “I dream my painting and then I paint my dream”. Well imagine trying to paint that canvass whilst you are running furiously on that wheel. Whether it’s a career painting, a relationship painting, a health painting or a having so many wonderful things painting, you need to get off the wheel to paint it. You really do.

7. You get to know you.

It was well over 2000 years ago that the Greek philosopher Socrates said “The unexamined life is not worth living”. Well when was the last time you took time out to examine you, to really understand and get to know you. To think about who you truly were outside of what you did for a living or what your name was or where you lived. When did you last examine what made you truly tick, how you truly felt, what you wanted more than anything in the world and what exactly you were and what you are capable of? Inscribed in the Temple of Apollo at Delphi are the famous words ‘Know thyself’ – how do you begin to ‘Know thyself’ until you get off the ‘wheel’

I don’t have all of the answers but I do have some extremely powerful ideas and suggestions that I believe you may wish to consider in ‘ Hamster to harmony’.

March 2nd, 2009 by admin

We have all heard the analogy of being like a hamster, expending vast amounts of time, effort and energy doing the same thing over and over again to always just end up achieving the same or very similar results. It’s a fact that the hamster spins endlessly on his wheel always arriving back exactly where he started. Sadly it’s also a fact that despite our vast intelligence and superiority over the hamster some of us humans also exhibit hamster like behaviour or at the very least feel like a bit like the hamster on occasions.

When most of us think about the hamster wheel in relation to ourselves we tend to associate it purely with work. Some of us see work as our only treadmill or ‘wheel’, where we go to work at the same time everyday, spend 7 ,8 or maybe even 10 or 12 hours doing pretty much the same thing every single day. It’s understandable how this can be perceived as a hamster ‘wheel’ especially when you consider what you may have to show for such exhaustive efforts after 5 or 10 years doing the same thing repeatedly. Often we can find that apart from a few more wrinkles, bags under the eyes and perhaps a receding hairline life doesn’t end up looking too much different from when you first got on the ‘wheel’ those 5 or 10 years back.

Well, whilst it is very true that work can be one of our ‘wheels’ I actually believe that the human challenge is much deeper than that. It’s not just about work. You may just as easily be on the relationship wheel, the health wheel, the negativity wheel, the boredom wheel, the lack of money wheel, the no time for yourself wheel, the low self esteem wheel, the fear wheel, the doubt wheel, the anxiety wheel or maybe just a wheel that is spinning so ridiculously fast you have no clue what’s really going on or what kind of wheel it is anyway. Conversely, it may not be going very fast at all, it may have been spinning painfully slowly and at the same pace for many, many years and you could just do with a faster more exciting ride. Whether it’s going to fast and spinning out of control or going so slow that its boring and depressing you to tears it just makes sense that you stop your wheel every once in a while and take a good look at what’s going on in your life. Sometimes you just need to stop your wheel to take a look at ‘you’.

The wheel represents living on ‘autopilot’, or if you prefer living semi- unconsciously where you know you are alive and you may even seem to be doing ok, but you just can’t help feeling that there should be more.

The ‘wheel’ isn’t just about work although that is a significant element. The ‘wheel’ is also vitally about every single area of your life. I highly recommend that every now and again you stop your ‘wheel’ and get off to take stock of where you have come from, where you are today and most importantly where you are heading across every single area of your life. If you get off for a moment, take a deep breath and a long hard look to only find you are exceptionally happy with every area of your life and are already living a life of harmony then that’s great you can just jump straight back on again. If on the other hand you are not entirely happy, then the really good news is that you can change and ‘Hamster to Harmony’ shows you how to do that.