Have you ever wondered how much time you spend sitting in your car at intersections waiting for traffic lights to change to green? Sometimes it seems like the wait is forever and when it finally does change you may have to snap out of your momentary trance to push the accelerator and continue ahead on the same road you were traveling. You continue through light after light going mile after mile in the same direction.
Our lives and our work resemble in some ways the routine of waiting at the intersection for the light to change green. We spend month after month and year after year tradingtime for money and the longer we sit waiting for the light to change the more we realize we are running out of time and in some cases money too.
We subconsciously continue through the next intersection of our lives when the light changes never really thinking that maybe we should have turned to go a new direction. We begin to understand as the miles click off behind us that the road we are going downis probably not going to take us where we eventually want to end up.
The cliché is often repeated but so very true; the definition of insanity is doing thesame things over and over again expecting different results. It is not that the road we have chosen is necessarily the wrong one but rather the danger is it has become the familiar one. Familiarity sometimes keeps us in our comfort zone and that is not always good.
Then one day sitting at that intersection in our mind an opportunity comes along that screams at you to turn when the light changes to green. That voice in the back of your head tells you “Don’t continue on this same road, turn right now and go in a new direction entirely”.It is precisely at this moment that the decision to dynamically changeyour life in a profound way will be made or ignored.
You may not know entirely where the road you turn on will ultimately end up but you absolutely know where the one you have been on does. It may be new for you, uncomfortable and unsure, but deep down you know that if you don’t turn at one of thesecrossroads you are destined to continue on cruise control in the same direction you’vebeen going where eventually time and money both will run out.
This is the emotional transition that many good, hard working people must make in order to move from the mindset of making a living with their job to having a life where there are options beyond a clock and a corporate employer. Some will make that turn on a leapof faith so hungry to create something new and dynamic in their lives that the uncertaintywill simply be a speed bump on the way. Many will conveniently choose to continue on the road they have been on hoping there is enough money left at the end of the month.
You are sitting at that intersection and the light is about to change. What are you going to do this time? Would you be open to a new direction with a dynamic upside?
