What is your life trying to tell you? Change before you SNAP!
“What Could You Accomplish If You Kicked Your Box to the Curb?” Leadership & Professional Development Keynotes and Workshops
Living in your box—or even “just” bargaining with it—is dangerous. Sometimes your box slowly sucks the life out of you through disengagement, powerlessness, and hopelessness. Other times, being boxed-in causes you to engage in destructive decisions and behaviors that send you heading straight for the edge of a cliff (and a fiery crash at the bottom). Either way, when your box is calling the shots life will send you wake up calls saying, This isn’t the path you should be on! Wake the hell up and turn around while you still can!
I can predict with a very high degree of certainty that you’ll want to ignore life’s wake-up calls. After all, change forces us toward the unfamiliar and the unknown. It’s usually disruptive and difficult. Sometimes it’s downright painful. And it’s always stressful and risky. (Ummm…aren’t those all of the things you were trying to avoid by living in your box in the first place? Of course they are!)
So I get it. I understand why you’d want to smash your phone, pull the covers over your head, and keep living your less than happy, sometimes crappy, numbed-out life. I did just that for over 24 years. Life sent me many wake-up calls in the form of unhealthy relationships, nights I couldn’t remember because I was blackout drunk, and a grinding sense of unhappiness I couldn’t shake. I refused to acknowledge every single alarm…
…Until I got a wake-up call so loud that ignoring it was more painful than answering. When Rick called off our engagement because of my drinking, I knew I had gone too far. The best thing to happen to me in decades was slipping out of my reach. Was I at rock bottom? I don’t know. I sometimes think we can ride our boxes all the way to our deaths. (And thank goodness, I’m still here to tell you my story.) But I was in enough pain to know that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life living with this particular regret. It was time to face what I had been avoiding and do the hard work of changing and rebuilding my life.
My point is, turning off your alarm will not cause any of your problems to disappear. So SNAP yourself before life snaps you!