Your Business and the Next Big Thing

There’s a myth floating around in our culture.

The myth looks like this: by 35 years of age, 40 at the latest, you should have already completed all the important things you are ever going to do.  You should have gotten married or otherwise paired up, had kids, bought a house, and gotten settled into your career, the one that will keep you employed until retirement.

After you’ve completed all these BIG THINGS, you’re basically done.  From that point on, it’s simply a matter of maintaining the status quo until the inevitable slide into retirement, followed by, preferably later rather than sooner, death.

Not a very inspiring picture, is it?

Now, there’s nothing wrong with those things I listed (well, except death!) – at least some of them are what many people want in their lives.  And that’s great, as long as you choose them.

What’s missing in that myth is all kinds of minute-to-minute conscious decisions.  Decisions that may lead some people to make very different choices in their lives.

And the myth doesn’t allow for us to make some really big changes after the age of 35, after you’re supposedly done making big changes. It doesn’t allow for you to make changes for no reason other than it is where we are now led on our soul’s journey.

We’re now blessed with an ever-lengthening life span.  We don’t keel over at the age of 28 from the ravages of life on the savannah, chasing mastodons, or eking out a living gathering nuts and berries.

So what are we going to do with this time that is given to us?  Get the BIG THINGS and then spend the rest of our lives watching other people get their big things on TV?

I know we all have more in us.  I know we all have the capacity to grow, to expand our awareness of ourselves and of life for the whole of our lives.

How do I know that? I have lived it.

A number of years ago, I started to feel restless. It started as a niggling awareness, and grew over several years. I became more and more aware that something had to change. I just wasn’t sure what it was.

I’ve always loved to travel. So I started to spend a few weeks, then a month, then two months, in one of my favorite places on earth, Santa Fe, New Mexico. I wanted to get to know that place in a way that visiting hadn’t allowed. And my business kept right on going (in an earlier blog, I let you know how to do it yourself).

After doing this for several years, I started to entertain the idea of being on the road more often. Maybe even full time!

Now that required a shift in thinking. That shift changed everything. I eventually sold my house and most of my belongings and went on the road. Business thrived, and so did I.

In the course of that experience, I made another shift. I shifted my perceptions about work.

I’d been asked many times over the years, how did you start your business? How did you grow it? Clients would pull me aside when I went into offices for meetings (not quite the, “psst, can I ask you something?” approach, but sometimes with a clandestine air). So I ended up coaching them.

What a delight! What a pleasure to help people open up to their own possibilities of growth, expansion, and income!

I was deeply honored to be asked, and to be the bridge to transformation of their work, their business, and their life. I still am.

This all came after 14 years in business, with a great big-city house in a beautiful lakeside neighborhood and a settled life. And I chose to give it all up, for something BIGGER.

Not bigger in the sense of acquisition of stuff, but bigger in terms of who I could be in the world.

I’m living my dream life. And still creating it as I go.

And so can you.

That niggling restlessness? It was creativity calling, wanting to be expressed. I chose to recreate my whole life. You don’t have to make changes on that scale, unless that’s what’s calling you. What you can do is to listen to the possibilities that are calling you.

The exciting part of the possibility of more within you is that when you choose to follow it, then this growth, this expanding awareness of yourself and of life then leads you to do BIG THINGS all your life, whatever those are for you.

What BIG THING is calling to you right now?  Even if it’s still just a niggling something in the back of your mind, you can decide to call it forward.  You can decide to step up to it.

And you can decide to do your next BIG THING.

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So what do you think about this article?

Are you having the same experience I had, a restlessness?

What do you think might be calling you right now?

Leave a comment and let me know.