What if you didn't have to be a....

... best selling novelist, a 'thought leader' or a modern-day Alexander the Great?

I’ve been listening to the audio recordings I made at the Realisation Festival last Saturday and something within them planted a seed of an idea. Or watered a seed that was already in my brain. Perhaps it was that. Yes. I think it was that because now I think about it the same idea has been appearing in my life in different ways for a few months now ever since I started doing these programmes for Do Radio. But then last night watching an episode of the new series of The Bear (Season 4, Episode 6 or 7) the seed began to sprout and then to flower.

The relevant interviewee was Sarah Wilson, who is an author and modern day nomad. Like me she is exploring a life beyond attainment. Or perhaps a life beyond the aspiration of external validation to shore up her sense of self-worth. I will let you know when the episode airs that she is featured in but in it she talked about her ‘inner voice’ that guides her on her life journey. I asked what this inner voice said and she thought for a while and then shared that it told her to be of service and not be motivated by her ego. I have heard versions of this statement many times in my life before, but there was something about her saying it and it coming from her life experiences (some of which she shared on the episode but you can find more on her very successful Substack) that made it land differently. I don’t want to be unkind to the people I have heard saying a similar statement before, but now I think about it I think they may have been saying it as an aspiration rather than because they actually lived it. And Sarah is actually living it. Martin Shaw said a similar thing and like Sarah, when he said it it seemed to ‘go in’ to my brain in a different way too because, like her, I believe he is living it as well.

I am also reminded of what my wife Isobel said to me when I recently turned fifty. I was asking her what she thought being fifty would open up in my brain and she said ‘I think being in your fifties will help you realise that you are enough.’

This is one of the most profound and wonderful things anyone has ever said to me because it suggests that to her I am enough already, which is glorious in itself, but that I haven’t lived my life thus far believing it to be the case. This is definitely true. I have always felt I had to ‘be’ something in addition to being me in order to ‘be enough’. This is what I’ve spent my life chasing or looking for in different ways.

Last night watching The Bear, one of the characters tells the lead character (a chef who is forcing himself to change the menu in the restaurant every night in the pursuit of something not quite defined, which is driving him and the staff insane) that she would never tell him what to do or how to run the restaurant but that he is, in her words, ‘the shit’ and doesn’t need to prove himself to anybody. This seems to ‘go in’ and he starts listening more and he changes the menu.

At this point something fired in my brain and I had the thought ‘what if I didn’t have to be a bestselling novelist?’ This is the thing I seem to have settled on in the last few years as the aspiration I need to achieve to finally, once and for all, believe that I am ‘good enough’. Later I began to wonder what if I didn’t have to be a ‘thought leader’ too, which is what people say you have to position yourself as in the modern world to get the kind of work I do with entrepreneurs. And then I though ‘what if I didn’t have to be a modern version of Alexander the Great?’ who, in my mind, is the man all men are trying to live up to in their minds (whether they are conscious of it or not) because he seems to be the personification of what a true man ‘should’ be.

The interesting thing is that when I had each of these three thoughts, my body began to relax and I felt myself reaching a place of ease I have rarely experienced before. It was a feeling of profound relief. An exhale I have waited thirty years to release.

I am now asking myself these questions over and over again. What if I don’t have to ‘be’ any of those things? Dare I believe it? Have I the courage to let go of these external definitions once and for all? Can I just let them fall away? Is this what Sarah meant?

I have contacted her to arrange to speak again and I will find out. But in the meantime, I will enjoy seeing if I can truly let these definitions go. And not just let them go because I think that on some level letting go of them will be a sneaky way of hoodwinking the Universe into letting me attain them. That’s what I think I’ve been doing thus far when I think I’ve been letting them go. Now I truly have to let them go. I can feel this is right but it’s a habit I have indulged in for a long time. Will let you know how I get on.

.Thanks for reading and, as always, let me know what you think.

Dan