In over your head?

If you're a person dreaming or juggling projects and desire to make them happen, how would you know if you're in over your head? How would you know whether you bit off more work or goals than you could realistically accomplish in the time you'd set out?  You may not realize it, but you take risks to change what you know or do. You may not have reflected much on this before.  Its helpful to re-orient yourself by reviewing whether it would be in your best interest to change your course of action.

1) Ask yourself key questions.  What do you like about where you are and what you do? What kinds of situations are indispensable?  Are you competent at your current tasks? If not, could you be taking steps to get there or would you be better off doing other things? Does anyone or any condition give you reason to feel threatened?

2) Get to the 'nitty-gritty'.  You need to get to the clinchers with honest answers.  Whether you step back to consider your life in general, career, relationships, leisure activities, emotional issues, transitions or other matters, you need to understand whether you focus time on the things that mean the most to you. Where you focus your energy is perceived as your priorities whether or not you believe this yourself on a conscious level. Aim to reduce your focus to a few priorities.

3)  Do you feel trapped?  If bills are piling up or many things in your life seem to be piling up or falling apart, perhaps its time to rethink how you organize your time.  Feeling stuck is a mindset you create when you realize you're unhappy about something and feel you have limited options.  You always have more choices that you believe.  You're in a trap if the more you do something, the more you feel you must continue.  Remind yourself that you can reach out to others for help.

4) Tap into your emotions.  If you feel anxiety or stress, or overwhelmed about what you have planned or what someone else has planned for you, then you may have reason to slow your pace or review differently what's ahead.  As you gain new insight into your values and beliefs, you'll gain a better sense of whether your life can be better than it is and what you wish to do next.

5) Know your motivation.  What are the real reasons why you feel in over your head? Are you results-oriented, impatient and unable to get what you want? Why is it that you're wrapped up in situations that cause you to feel uncomfortable? How might you invite them into your life? Once you figure out this angle, it will be easier to determine the step-by-step process to get out of it.

Tune into your signs

You dream your life is evolving at a rigorous pace, in what you convince yourself to be all the right directions, but how often do you really listen to yourself and your behavior? Do you know what you really want? This isn't simply a question of knowing how you really feel about your choices and relationships. Its a question of discovering things you may not have known about yourself. When you’re ready to learn, the signs are all accessible for you to sort through:

1) Read your physiology. Consider your autonomic nervous system. Notice how you react spontaneously to ideas and thoughts of your life circumstances. When does your mouth water? Why would you perspire? What can differences in your heart rate tell you? In which conditions would you get goose bumps? Do you experience adrenalin rushes? What about energy boosts? Are you affected by sympathetic ("fight or flight") or parasympathetic ("rest and digest”) instincts?

2) Read into your emotions. Your body responds to the way you think, feel and act. This is your mind-body connection. Anytime you feel stress, anxiety or worry, your body reveals signs that something isn’t right. If your blood pressure rises, you know restless sleep or you develop stomach ulcers, stress about some aspect of your life may be the root cause. Strained emotional health may weaken your body's immune system, making you more susceptible to colds and other infections during hard times.  How you react to your life determines how well you handle things. 

3) Identify your instincts. Your body senses whether a particular choice or set of circumstances, contribute to your happiness. To feel as though you work toward something that motivates and inspires you is incentive to keep on your track. Yet, if your mind is filled with doubt, negative thoughts, and questions slowing down to understand more is desirable. Don’t continue action you feel isn't good for you.

4) Isolate what’s missing. At times, what you don’t notice or tell yourself is precisely what you should be noticing or saying about your life. If your self-confidence is lacking, it would be difficult to convince other people to support your ideas or convince them, things are great.  Are you persuaded where you are is a good thing? If you don’t hear your mind, body and soul encouraging yourself to continue as you have been, you should recognize the implications for change.

Feel around in the darkness

As you dream of defining what success means to you in a given period of your life, you may be faced with tough decisions.  It may seem as though you feel around in the darkness for a switch to shed light on things.  Rather than be discouraged, remind yourself if everything was clear, the learning process wouldn't be as rewarding.  Your emotional process is a teacher.  Do you listen?

As you self-question about your priorities, you can grow to trust yourself and accept who you are. To begin to understand your personality will empower you to make better decisions for you.  If you get to a stage where you make decisions that ignore your perceived strengths and weaknesses, it would be time to reassess sources of meaning in your life and rethink the basis for your decisions.

1) Focus only on where you desire to change.  What's the point in defining components of success in areas of your life you don't desire to improve?  Learn to discern the key issues based on priorities you're struggling to sort out.  Narrow down your priorities to the most important ones.  Draft lists of tasks at hand, what you can or can't control. Gauges of success relate to what you can influence, in terms of things like your mindset, physical and mental health and well-being. 

2) Stay true to sources of meaning in your life.  If you're unsure of where to focus, tell yourself you're not meant to master everything.  Learn to step back and identify what you desire separate from what other people desire for you.  The guidance of others can be reassuring and useful, but its essential to learn to listen to yourself.  This will separate you from other people's priorities.

3) Recognize the value of short and longer-term.  Your sense of progress will mean different things depending on where you are in health, relationships and job hierarchies, among your perceived options.  To take a job in order to earn money to make the rent is a kind of success, but that may be a means to an end rather than the end you work toward in the bigger picture.

4) Connect with aspirations.  In all likelihood, your evolving concept of success will relate more to your hopes than those things that cause discomfort in your life.  However, if you haven't yet isolated your primary hopes, or they seem to be changing, the root causes of your uneasy feelings is a hint about where to go next.  Facing fears will help you uncover a new route to fulfillment.

5) Give yourself time. It's up to you to determine when to recognize certain things about yourself and your circumstances.  When you're ready to let yourself feel, ready to be patient to see how certain events unfold, ready to recognize options you hadn't considered before, your view of success will change with you.  This doesn't relate to human measurements of time so much as your level of comfort about new kinds of self-discovery.  Success is a state of mind and results.

The Grander Experience

You may have dreamed up stories about how cabbies got into their "line of work." If you ask them, you would hear any number of stories, from an indecipherable grunt to friendly chatter, to why immigrant professionals moonlight as drivers as a way to support their families, especially when they're unable to obtain professional licenses they had had earned in their home countries.

Consider the story of the businessman who had flown to a state capital just to call on one client. Time was ticking. The man simply planned a fast turnaround trip from and back to the airport. A shiny cab pulled up. The driver rushed to open the passenger door and ensured the passenger was comfortably seated. As the driver entered the front, he drew the passenger's attention to the neatly folded Wall Street Journal. The driver also gave the passenger a choice among music, climate control and a beverage. The business traveler was noticably taken aback and assumed the taxi driver had a story. The passenger sensed this was no ordinary cab.

As it turned out, the driver had lived a partial career in Corporate America. He said, " I got tired of thinking my best would never be good enough, fast enough, or appreciated enough. I decided to find my niche where I could feel proud of being the best I could be. I knew I would never be a rocket scientist, but I love driving cars, being of service and feeling like I have done a full day's work and done it well."

The driver went on to explain that he took a hard look at himself, his talents and skills. This led him to consider becoming a professional taxi driver. He desired to surpass his passengers' expectations.

The professional taxi driver role appealed because the man was a people person with a high standard of treatment.  He recognized clients value those who go further for them. He loved to get-to-know his way around the city and discover places in his own proverbial backyard he hadn't ever seen before. He was also so self-directed that he even dabbled a bit in match-making for his regular clients. The more he explored his business potential, the more he realized that being his own boss offered him freedoms he hadn't thought possible.

Did he receive tips? Definitely! The grander the experience seemed, the more fulfilled he became.  His invited clients to call him by his first name, like family. Each person has the power to define a grander, more fulfilling experience. What will you choose for yourself from this moment?

Delaney & Haley: Challenges create our tomorrows

Struggling artists often have tales to tell, which help explain how they survive the tough times.  You may even ask struggling artists "how are things?" Some of those people will admit, "why change, when we feel good about ourselves and seem convinced everything seems to be going so well? Stand back and recognize which skills they develop which strengthen their resolve.  Learn to sense that those challenges we face define who we are and ultimately create our tomorrows.

Consider Joe Delaney, a veteran painter from Knoxville, Tennessee.  In his early painting days, he often lacked food money.  Yet, somehow, he developed clever strategies to get by.  He’d visit a neighborhood butcher who would offer him big bones with morsels of meat.  The nearby grocer donated wilted vegetables. That’s all Joe needed to make down-home soup to focus again on his painting.  Whenever he felt he needed stuff, he developed a knack for getting it.  This nurtured his incredible persistence in other areas of his life including, promoting his work.

Then why not recall a handsome young singer who ran a struggling restaurant? It was said that if a customer ordered steak, this singer would dash to a supermarket across the street to buy one. In fact, the kitchen fridge was rarely filled longer than the time it took customers to order and get served their meals. This restauranteur was Harry Belafonte. His singing career reminds us that making sacrifices and living creatively enables anyone to keep working at realizing dreams.  He sang as he cooked and clients began to return to his restaurant for more than the food. 

And who could forget the difficult life of a writer? Alex Haley is one author who reminds us a big difference exists between saying you'll be a writer and dedicating yourself to writing.  He left the coast guard to set himself up in a room with a typewriter.  It took a while before he was able to support himself. During his toughest times, he was offered a chance to get back into the coast guard which would've enabled him to write part-time.  But, he turned that down.  In his mind, that woul'dve been a cop-out.  He was dedicated to writing full-time. He accepted flack from people who thought he was better than that.  Almost 17 years after leaving the coast guard, Haley published Roots.  His life is a testament to the value of courage and persistence and other desirable qualities it takes to stay the course.