I don’t have a plan for my life

Feeling alive isn't just about the nice feelings. It's also about being present to what we don't like at all.

I don’t have a plan for my life.

Instead, I trust my intuitive sense of who I am becoming, what brings me closer and what actions distance me from it.

This reflects my fundamental belief that life is not a problem to be figured out, a challenge that requires a plan to solve, but an experience to be part of and engage with.

This attitude is terrifying and liberating in equal measure. It’s terrifying not to know where my life might take me — and, on occasions, it takes me to not-so-nice places.

Yet it’s liberating to be open to life’s experience instead of trying to force my life into the confines of how I think it “should” go. That’s where battles are won, and wars are lost: outwardly successful people who feel dead on the inside.

Full moon from my evening walk a couple of days ago

What does it mean to feel alive?

The expression “feeling alive” sounds very positive. It evokes a sense of vitality, movement, presence, joy, excitement, passion, learning, growth — all the good things.

But doesn’t being alive mean also experiencing all the things we don’t like — frustration, fear, boredom, loneliness, terror, jealousy, anger?

Feeling alive means feeling what is alive right now, regardless of how much I like it. Sometimes, I don’t like it at all.

This morning, I noticed something in my cat’s mouth that looked an awful lot like cancer when I googled it. The prognosis for this condition is poor. I won’t know until I take her to the vet. I really don’t like the feelings that this evokes in me.

Yet, this is part of being alive. I feel like a part of me is reorganising itself away from the dichotomy of “things I like vs. things I don’t” towards a dichotomy of “things that are real vs. things that aren’t”.

From this perspective, a discomfort that’s real is better, or more meaningful, than comfort that takes us away from the present moment. I don’t always find the strength to stay with the discomfort, but that’s clearly what life asks of me every day.

“A terrifying leap of faith”

Plans and goals are indispensable, yet if we attach too much to the sense of how things should be, we risk not giving ourselves a chance to discover who we could be without them and what it’s like to feel naked, face-to-face, with our actual life experience.

I believe Steve Jobs was alluding to this when he famously spoke in his Stanford commencement address about the dots that connect only when you look backwards. If we try to connect the dots looking forward, we’ll trade aliveness and possibility for the promise of safety, which will be a bad trade:

“The struggle is that it's often impossible to see that line as you place new dots. The complexity of the world obscures the connections.

Much of life, therefore, requires a terrifying leap of faith. A grounded belief that those dots will connect—somehow, someway.

And yet, as terrifying as it may be, they do. Time and again.

Always, always have faith in the dots.”

The dots tend to connect looking backwards, but they’re often an uncomfortable — even terrifying, in Jobs’ words — mess looking forward without any promises, especially without the promise that it would be a recipe for becoming like Steve Jobs—or anyone else but yourself.

Is it any wonder that the #1 regret of the dying that Bronnie Ware described in Top Five Regrets of the Dying, based on her work as a caregiver, is:

“I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”

Deep down, I believe each of us knows what’s really going on, what we need to be present to, and what the right thing to do is. That’s the attitude I do my best to bring into my coaching work.

When my clients come to me with plans that they want to execute more efficiently, what I’m more interested in is helping them to be present to these questions:

1. What is really going on?

2. How can you be present to it and honour it?

3. What will you do about it?

If we can honestly answer these questions and have the strength to be present to the feelings they evoke, we often discover that we may not need to hold on so tightly to our plans.

The reward is feeling more alive and living a meaningful life true to ourselves, not to our plans.

And that’s the best way to honour your one wild and precious life that I know of.

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PS Reply to this email if you’d like to attend a dinner in September in London for CEOs in transition: those thinking about stepping down, those in the process, and those figuring out their next steps.