tremendously empowering. And downright farrrking scary.
You see, what I'd had a reminder of is that when we fully own ourselves – and every last bit of ourselves, not just the good bits but also the messy bits – we have the foundation to live a Stand Out life.
To be honest, I already knew this stuff. After working as a counsellor and psychologist for more than fifteen years, I knew rationally how this stuff worked. I'm a professional head-mechanic and I'm good at what I do – I'd given some damn good advice over the years. But we all know that theory and practice can be separate entities, and here presented the most difficult client I'd faced: me.
So I became my own patient, and I worked on me. I journalled, did yoga, had acupuncture, saw a therapist, got angry, cried, shouted and went quiet. But above all, I stayed patient and compassionate. Along the way, I noticed more and more people feeling how I had felt on that Friday afternoon. I became obsessed with how we can live extraordinary and outrageously fulfilled lives, even among the busyness of our world.
Among the quagmire of emotions, inner monologues, trials and tribulations, I was able to identify – based on a platform of science – the patterns that derail our success, and the twin pathways that can supercharge your magnificence. As I examined my own experiences against a mountain of books, journals and research papers, a foundation started to emerge; and as I correlated the commonalities faced by my clients, further patterns emerged and announced themselves. And these patterns made perfect sense in a sometimes senseless world.
Our pursuit together, as you read this book, is to Stand Out. You'll find that space where you can turn up as the best version of you. To really Stand Out. And, yep, I'm quite aware how intoxicating that sounds – and how terrifying it can make you feel at the same time.
This is a call to arms to fight for something better.
To play big instead of playing small. For reals.
To love harder – so damn hard it scares you.
To become the boss of busy, embrace self-expression and stop bowing to the pressure of urgency.
And we'll do it through the twin powers of progress and purpose.
This is your time, so let's get cracking, eh?
Love
Ali x
INTRODUCTION
Life sure is messy. And, honourably, the messier it gets, the more we try to organise it, control it and make it manageable – which itself is busy work. When we're in this frame of mind, we wake up in the morning, world rushing at us, throw a coffee over our worries and rip in – continually driven by a belief that life wouldn't be this messy if we were more organised, fitter, smarter; if we just had it all together.
So we pile up our to-do list higher than a teenage boy's dinner plate at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Paradoxically, this puts us under even more pressure, and feeling more overwhelmed with all the things we have to do. The pressure of trying to keep it together while we stem the tide of messy becomes too much. But don't you dare drop any of those balls you're juggling!
Get busier. Try harder. That's the answer. Or is it?
Let's take a little sneaky peek at the results: we're overloaded, tired, stressed, tired, busy, tired, exhausted … did I say tired? And the impact of this is being felt across the board. In her book The Sleep Revolution, Arianna Huffington (co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post) highlights that #tired has been used over 27 million times on Instagram, and if you type ‘why am I so …' into a Google search, the most common end to this sentence is ‘tired'. Globally, we're all desperate to find a way out of weary.
We need to face facts: we are stuffing up our lives by trying to work harder at working hard. This intent, seemingly noble on the surface, is a sure-fire way of losing your health, happiness and sanity. We need a different approach – one that doesn't cost us these essential components of our lives, and something that's more than just working harder.
OPEN 24/7
We live in a time where ‘open 24/7' has been sold to us as a convenience. And in a lot of ways it is. We now are able to go to the gym and pump weights at 2 am if we want to, bop down the aisles of the local supermarket to Richard Marx's greatest hits long after those pesky school kids have gone to bed, and scream into the pharmacy for an urgent order of fungal cream whenever we want (okay that last one is actually quite convenient). When we find ourselves on the couch, we can watch whatever we want, whenever we want, rather than viewing times being dictated to us by the networks. And who doesn't love a good binge-watch? Yep, you can watch zombies in varying states of decay on The Walking Dead to your heart's content – with no ad breaks – and scare the bejesus out of yourself for 10 hours straight if you so well please. Our world is like a giant remote control.
Play. Rewind. Fast forward. Play again. But the pause button? She's-a-broken.
This ease of convenience has crossed over into our connectivity and communications. The flexibility in how we interact, when we interact and who we interact with around the globe has fundamentally changed the way that we connect with each other, including random strangers who can be granted our time and attention at the expense of those in front of us. (C'mon, you've surely whiled away a couple of hours of your precious time in some sort of Facey-post ‘serve-volley-return', haven't you?)
So while this connectivity has brought us many bonuses, it has also come with a few downsides, and perhaps the most obvious downside is the intrusion on our time. While we have more demands within our day, the parameters haven't changed. We still have only 24 hours in a day, and 7 days in a week. You can't do anything that will give you bonus hours. If you waste a day, you don't have hours striped from you. You've got 24 hours, in 60-minute lots. That's your quota. Something has to take a hit and wear the cost of stretching this time too far. The collateral damage is a collective feeling of overwhelm in our society that means we are constantly running in a million different directions. The fight for your attention is real: the project, the mother-in-law, the chocolate cake sitting in the communal fridge at work. Couple this feeling with the relentless change environment that we are now facing, particularly in our places of work, and the result is higher exhaustion levels and shorter fuses. Within the corporate world, organisations no longer speak about five year plans – because they don't know what the lay of the land is going to be in five months' time, let alone five years. Change is absolutely relentless and individuals are merely holding on.
Phew! Have I cheered you up? #sorrynotsorry
Among this busyness we find that we snap quicker than we should, we disconnect from the people we love the most, and we get caught up doing what we think we should be doing, leaving what we want to be doing at the bottom of the pile – gathering dust because we keep adding to the pile. As a result, we end up consumed by fear, worry and guilt about postponing the things that really matter to us – and then trying to numb the despair we feel. Busy is the boss and we're its faithful servants, turning up full pelt whenever it snaps its fingers. Losing sleep, losing our mind, and losing connection to what we truly love. This, ultimately, has an impact on our health, our happiness and our sanity.
Is any of this resonating with you? If you're nodding your head like one of those dashboard bobble-head thingos, it's okay. You're not alone – and it doesn't have to stay like this.
BECOMING THE BOSS OF BUSY
As a psychologist I connect with people every day who are drowning in expectations. Before going into this any further, though, I first want you to check the mental picture you have going on in your head of a psych with a client. You might be thinking leather couches, inkblot butterflies or people incoherently babbling while being surrounded by empty Doritos packets. Well, nope. The people I work with are achieving amazing things. They're nailing projects, leading teams and workplaces into the future, and running families like ninja warriors – from the outside, there's not a straightjacket in sight. Their lives look normal; successful, complete, even. But inside it looks decidedly different – because on the inside, they're screaming for it all to stop. For someone to notice their desperation.
They are