How Those 3 Darn Little Popsicle Sticks Up-ended My Life

Previously…“And after that…I was done. Done with the whole blogging thing. Done with the Bootcamp thing. And done with the relationship consulting thing. So done…I talked with Bernie about us selling Fort Wiggins. That’s when I knew I needed to see a therapist.”

It’s 3:00 am when my alarm goes off. I crawl out of bed, shower, get dress, kiss the wife, and head to the airport for a 6:05 am flight from Baltimore to ATL.
Being that I didn’t finish packing until 12:30 am, I’m about to kick-off a 3-day Blogalicious conference on 2 ½ hrs. of sleep. Great!
Anyway…I arrived in Atlanta at 8 am. Ubered to the Grand Hyatt just in time for the start of the conference at 9.
The opening keynote was Stacey Ferguson (@justicefergie), the founder of Blogalicious (shout out to all my #Blogalicious8 family). She was talking about how multi-interest multi-passion people can better manage their lives. BINGO! I’m in the right place! And this time, I’m not the dumbest person in the room.
During an exercise, Stacy asked us to write down our multiple interests and passions on a popsicle stick. Ok…done.
Then…she wanted us to group the popsicle sticks into categories and give each category a description.
I forget what else she wanted us to do after that because I was completely fixated…and jive blown …at what I wrote on my three little popsicle sticks. It was as if those popsicle sticks gave me a new purpose. Well…maybe not a new purpose. But definitely a more focused one.
See…before the conference, as I said in the previous article, I built my career, over the last 17 years, primarily helping couples fix their communication problems, trust issues, leadership problems, etc..
Don’t get me wrong…I don’t regret it at all. For, I’ve been created to do this work. And I love it.
But these three darn little popsicle sticks revealed very important interests and passions that were not reflected in my business. They were:

1. Connecting with people
2. Connecting people
3. Doing fun adventurous activities with friends

Here’s what I discerned…

Being an extroverted person, I get energy from connecting with people. Usually, this involves having great conversations with a group of friends or people I happen to meet. I also love dancing. So if I can find a great dance partner at a party, we’re gonna turn the party out (some of my new friends would be shocked how hard I go with the right music).
I also like to connect people by facilitating relationship introductions. I feel like it’s my honor to share what I know about him and what I know about her…and make the introduction to see what becomes of it.  That’s so exciting to me.
But what I absolutely enjoy the most is doing adventurous activities with a group of friends. For my birthday last year, I invited some friends to go camping and whitewater tubing with me. We were about 13 deep. Then we took over a local diner in West Virginia for lunch before we headed back to our tents at @KOAKampgrounds. I had a blast. They have no idea how fulfilling that was for me. Like seriously…if I was a millionaire and could do anything in the world for my birthday, I would want to do that.
Being able to do these three things makes me feel like I’m alive. Like all the hard work I do…on all fronts… is worth it.
But over the last three years, I felt like all I was doing was trafficking in issues and problems…problems and issue. And that imbalance had sucked the joy out of my life.
At least that’s how I explained it to my therapist. So she and I began to explore that line of thinking over the next several weeks.

What I came to realize is…

If I’m going to continue my business – my purpose – it has to be in a completely different way. I have to integrate connecting with people, connecting people, and doing fun adventurous activities with friends into my business. Or else it’s not worth it.
But how the heck am I going to do that? Do I have to change my entire business strategy? Who’s got time for that?
That’s when I knew I had to sit down with Bernie and explain to her why we need to up-end our lives just so we can pursue our purpose…mind you…a purpose we were already pursuing anyway! But first I had to figure out for myself what that is going to look like. And quite honestly, I have no clue.

(to be continued…)