Whilst much of the unrest we saw on ours streets recently was pure mindless violence and criminality I can’t help feeling that some of the young people who were swept along in such mindlessness have just never been challenged to stop and think. I mean really think. Many of them can’t see a future and many probably have never even really even stopped and thought long and hard about the futures they really want with an appreciation of what is truly available to them despite theire current position, situation and results. Many have also abdicated responsibility for their futures and seem to believe that its the job of the government, their parents, teachers or society. The fact is that regardless of our age, we all have to get off of our wheel and take responsibility.
This week I have written to Prime Minister and also the Headteachers of a number of secondary schools suggesting that in addition to the current academic curriculum we challenge and inspire our young people to think differently. Really differently. I wonder whether they are up for the challenge.

Here is a copy of the letter:

Welcome back!

I do hope you enjoyed a well deserved summer break and are refreshed and re-energised ready to start a brand new school year.

I am a former corporate executive who has substantial experience of getting results through people and I recently left the heady heights of the commercial world to pursue a passion of inspiring people to think differently both in and out of the work place. I call it personal leadership.

To this end I now run my own motivational seminars designed to inspire people to embrace a whole new perspective on the way they envision their futures and lead themselves personally. As the author of a personal development book (Hamster to Harmony – a copy of which I am enclosing as a gift) my seminars revolve around challenging people to reinvent themselves to rediscover life’s opportunities and possibilities. I call it ‘getting off the wheel’ and living your best life.

I have presented at a conference for Head Teachers, Consultants and Inspectors of Merton and also for a couple of primary schools in the borough where I held seminars for the teaching staff. I believe that now would be about the right time to influence and inspire students from secondary schools to take personal leadership of their own lives, although I appreciate that yourself and your team are doing this every single day.

Given the sad events of the recent rioting we all witnessed, understandably emotions are running extremely high across the country. Whilst the reaction of the public to such mindless criminality and violence is to be expected, it seems to me that we need to be seeking solutions rather than just expressing platitudes of dismay and scorn. I know that these individuals represent only a very small minority of our young people although the impact was substantial. Having been a school Governor and also currently a parent of a teenager I know that our schools are working exceptionally hard every single day to instil the moral values and sense of responsibility that our young people need to not only survive but to thrive in today’s society. I also believe that with limited time and resources schools need as much help and support as can be made available to them to achieve their goals.

Whilst I am not suggesting for a moment that any students from your school will have been involved in these recent events, I can’t help feeling that given the media coverage and exposure these events were given many of our young people across the country would have been disturbed at some level emotionally by the images we have seen on our T.V. screens as my son was.

I have a view that my seminars would be of enormous benefit to many of the young people in your school and whilst writing to you I am also contacting many other schools in the borough offering my services.

There was a piece of research done some time ago in the US which suggested that as human beings we each have somewhere in the region of 50,000 to 80,000 thoughts every single day. The research goes on to suggest that for most of us most of those thoughts are the same or similar thoughts each day. As if that is not bad enough it also suggests that somewhere around 80% of our repetitive thoughts are negative.

Now, I have no way of being able to validate such claims, however for arguments sake lets say they are not unreasonable as far as some of our young people are concerned. With that in mind I suspect that some of the young people could benefit enormously by someone helping them to change the way they think and break through their conditioning and habitual automatic thought patterns. I can’t even begin to imagine what some of them are thinking.

Some 25 years ago whilst starting out as a young manager I recall the words of a mentor which I will never forget. Whilst advising me on the intricacies of how to motivate a team he said, “The only people who need to be motivated are the people who can’t see a future”. Well you can imagine that as a young ambitious manager at the time I thought he was full of hot air. It didn’t take me too long at all to realise that he was absolutely right.

It is my belief that many of our teenagers need to be able to see a future, a future that only they themselves can take responsibility for and create. To do that someone has to break their current thought pattern and inspire them to think on a whole new level.

If you do get a chance to read this letter and are interested in my offer then please feel free to call me on 07769 900404 or via maurice@mauricedecastro.com.

I am also enclosing a copy of the testimonial from the organiser of the Head Teacher’s conference.

Knowing how busy Head Teachers are I have a feeling that you may not get a chance to read the book and if I’m right I would ask you to kindly give it to someone who you feel needs to ‘get off their wheel’ and think differently. We all know someone!

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours sincerely

Maurice De Castro

The reality is that we each live in a hugely exciting, rapidly evolving, extremely challenging and increasingly demanding world and whilst to some that may sound a little depressing there is always another way to look at it. If you take the ‘glass is half full’ perspective then there really has never been a greater time to be alive on planet earth. With life and the world around us just teeming to the brim with vastly colourful and enriching opportunities we are a very, very privileged generation. Compared to our Victorian, Tudor and Edwardian descendants the human race has never had it so good. Of course we could go back even further and I’m certain the further we went the more grateful we would feel today.

From the moment we take our first breath to the very moment we take our last we are on a constant quest for happiness, success, achievement, connection, and significance. That takes leadership, personal leadership of our own lives. Every single day revolves around the need to achieve some kind of result, even if that result may be to simply survive the day to rush home from work and watch your favourite soap opera whilst sipping a glass of wine.

The fact is though that for most of us life is about far more than survival, it’s about thriving and living life to the full with the very best that life has to offer across every aspect of our existence. Today, we are really no different to our ancestors we are just more aware, more focused and in many cases more pressured to achieve this thing that mankind has been searching for since the beginning of time – success. Success of course is relative and means different things to different people. Many describe it as the progressive realisation of a worthy ideal, and the interesting thing about success is that despite popular belief it is not isolated to our jobs or career.

Each of us are looking for success in our health, wealth, careers, romantic lives, social lives, with our families friends and communities and even with our personal, intellectual and spiritual growth.

This of course is where leadership has a key role to play. Whether we are the CEO or Chairman of a vast corporate empire or have no leadership responsibilities at all we still all have a life to lead and the fact is that however long we get to live life is always still very short. We only get once chance to get it right, as the saying goes ‘ life isn’t a dress rehearsal’ this time around is the real deal and it takes personal leadership to live a great life and get the most that we possibly can from each day.

Interestingly, leadership is one of the few subjects we don’t get taught whilst at school despite the fact that every aspect of our entire lives requires a high degree of personal leadership.

It seems clear to me that the one thing we all need to get good at is Leadership.

When my son and I returned to the car to travel home he gave me that disapproving teenage look which clearly suggested he wasn’t happy and that I had done something  very wrong. Of course I immediately asked him what the problem was only for him to tell me that he was disappointed with me for snapping at his grandmother and that he felt it unnecessary.

I  instantly felt very guilty and turned to him to say ’so what you are saying is that I need to try harder….’ to which he replied, ‘no dad, you just don’t get it, you don’t need to try harder, you just need to try’

Well this shiny bullet of wisdom pierced my consciousness so hard that I spent the rest of the day and indeed week thinking about the reprimand given to me by my 15 year old son.

Of course he was right, I didn’t need to try harder at all I just need to try. It seems to me that sometimes that’s all we need to do ‘try’.  Way, way before ever needing to think about trying harder  we just need to begin, we need to give it a go, we need to try.

How many of us give up on our dreams, our aspirations, our goals by not even trying. Whether that goal is to be a more patient and attentive son, father, husband, wife, daughter or mother or whether it’s to lose weight, change jobs, get the car, home, money, freedom, peace or harmony – when did we give up trying. Perhaps we may not even have started yet!

Sometimes we don’t need to try harder we just need to try.

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’.

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.