Copyright www.krisroller.com
Regularly repurpose to be happy.
Firstly, allow me to define some essential terms that go some way to describing the overarching components necessary to the ubiquitous, yet still very personal, search for a truly purposeful, meaningful, and ultimately successful-to-you life contents, contexts, and connections.
Creative Core
The source of your soul truth. Your insights, inspiration, ideas, intuition, and intentions spring forth from the depths of your Creative Core.
Real Work
Your most important Work in life and of the moment. Work, at our edge, beyond our comfort zone, rooted in giving, to and of ourselves, aligned with the deepest truths of our Why, How and What of the moment is Real Work. The insights, inspiration, ideas, intuition, intentions of your Creative Core are manifested and realised through your Real Work.
You Outlook
Is your vision of a future you. A you that is made more powerful through unlimited, unrestricted access to your Creative Core and multiple, interconnected channels of Real Work. Your You Outlook sits at the epicentre of a real-time creative feedback loop.
Real Work Centre
Is the grounded sweet spot through which your Creative Core, your You Outlook, and your Real Work align. You’re Real Work Centred when you feel on purpose, even if you have doubt, uncertainty, or fear.
Planning To Get
Attitude and state, in the moment are fully loaded with skewed intention to get, at some point in the future, that which we already have access to now, in the present. Access to our selves.
Planning To Give
Our attitude and state, in the moment, are fully loaded with aligned intention to give. Our present thoughts, behaviours, and actions inform and impact our present and future as well as others, positively.
Forced Feedback
Pay attention and intervene in the perpetual loop (micro to macro) of cause and effect in time to break its cycle to use the effects, perceived as negative, neutral, or positive, as Forced Feedback. This helps us change the repeating patterns of perception and behaviour that keep leading us to events that we experience as negative.
Limited You
Your You Outlook held back by limiting beliefs. A version of you that is limited in a specific area or at a certain time of life. ‘Today I’m unlimited. Tomorrow I’ll be limited with a limit to free myself from.’
Unlimited You
You Outlook is unhindered by limiting beliefs. A version of you that’s unlimited in a specific area or time of life. ‘Today I’m limited. Tomorrow I’ll be unlimited until I recognise and overcome my next limit.’
Secondly, I’ll explain how these parameters influence our unique life driven purpose, without which we’ll continue to struggle to live a consistently happy and content life individually and collectively.
Why Repurpose
In life, we have ‘loves’ and ‘interests’.
Our loves represent the past, whether that was last week, last year, or only a few moments ago. Our memories, experiences, and attachments anchor us in the familiar, and for the most part, allow us to feel safe and secure.
Interests, on the other hand, reflect our ideas and excitement about the future. They draw us forward, to learn and experience more of life both in the bigger picture and the detail.
We might say that we ‘feel’ our loves and that they are to some degree unexplainable. They relate very much to positive emotional experience.
Conversely, we ‘think’ our interests.
They are intellectual, more understandable and explainable. We often engage with our interests somewhat wantonly.
We can become attached to the promise of multiple positive outcomes that maintaining a broad range of interests purports to offer. The degree to which these internal and external factors overlap we have, feel and express passion.
However, experience tells us that even strongly held passions do not automatically inspire or lead to corresponding creative action.
Instead, without meaningful Whys our passion would have us continually trying to understand and make sense of the past.
We’d be relentlessly chasing our tail in a never-ending attempt to prepare for or take advantage of an unpredictable future coloured by our limited past that will most likely never see the light of day.
When we become conscious on a feeling and thinking level of the range of reasons we love something, or someone, whether they are internally (we feel better) or externally referenced (someone else feels better, so we feel better), we have a purpose or many purposes.
Similarly, when we interrogate the Whys hidden or otherwise behind our interests, we determine our potentials.
Why Exercise Template
Take a moment to note down some of your loves and interests adding a priority score out of 1–10 (1 being the highest priority) in brackets and adding the most meaningful Why to each.
You can have multiple loves, interests, Whys, purposes, passions, and potentials. Prioritising each possible combination is key to arriving at a shortlist of potential Real Work Whats.
Use the Why Repurpose example below to get you started.
Love / Cooking (1)
Why = To help family and friends stay happy and healthy.
LOVES + WHYS = PURPOSES
Interest / Longevity Science (2)
Why = I want to go on giving for a long time to come!
INTERESTS + WHYS = POTENTIALS
Cooking + Longevity Science (1)
Why = To help people live longer healthier lives so they can enjoy their life while happily giving their gifts.
LOVES + INTERESTS = PASSIONS
Ideal Outcome
PURPOSE + POTENTIAL + PASSION = REAL WORK
Presence Balance
If we focus our time, energy, and attention on where our passions, purposes, and potentials overlap in our lives, we will find presence, balance, direction, integrity, growth, and candidate Real Work What’s.
Real Work Centre aligned, we’re Planning To Give. Through positive Forced Feedback we create and amplify an Unlimited You Outlook.
Unstable Non-Presence
The less aware and connected we are to our present moment Whys and the more disconnected our loves are from our interests, the more we remain ignorant of our passions, purposes, and potentials.
With little, if anything, holding the different aspects of our life together we become unstuck, unstable, out of balance, directionless, and purposeless. Instead of being lifted by our loves and interests, we are weighed down by them, conflicted and unable to discern that which is important to us and that which isn’t.
Future Hope
If we overemphasise our interests and in the process neglect our loves we are leaning more heavily toward the future.
We become detached, preoccupied, and distracted trying to pre-empt everything we can so that our expectations are met.
We live in the hope that we’ve done enough so that nothing ‘bad’ will happen, we won’t miss out, and everything works out for the best.
We are detached and Planning To Get ‘free’ of our emotional and creative reality of the moment.
Past Regret
If we overemphasise our loves and in the process neglect our interests, we are leaning more heavily toward the past.
We become needy and limited, trying to control everything and ensure it stays the same and conforms to our old and outdated attachments.
We live in regret because change is always inevitable and to the extent we avoid it nothing ‘good’ can happen to us.
We are attached to the status quo. Limited, always Planning To Get or keep hold of comfort and security by living in the past.
In both these states, our Real Work Centre is out of alignment. Through Forced Feedback our You Outlook is diminished and compounded negatively to become increasingly Limited.
Creative Pains
In any creative process, there is a level of pain, struggle, and momentary or long suffered limitation. I love the struggle more when I like what I’m creating on multiple levels and less when I don’t.
I have to be vigilant and pay close attention to my emotions during my creative process, no matter how short or drawn out it becomes.
I must ascertain whether there is really something wrong with me and my life that I need to change or I just don’t like an aspect of the project I’m absorbed in at the time. I’m prone to feel shitty about my life situation and very self-critical when I fall out of flow for too long.
Are these one and the same problem, co-existing at the same time?
I love architecture and feel that love in my process. However, on reflection, outside of that I don’t think I was interested enough in it.
I am feeling resistance as I write this. Is that the truth of it I wonder?
When I compare this to writing, I see similarities. But, in my current life context, I can decide what I write about and Why. I am in control of the content as it were. The master of my own destiny as they say.
Rare Overlap
There were only a few Real Work moments during my architectural career where my loves and interests overlapped. On these rare occasions, I was in a position to decide both what I design and Why.
When my love and interest overlap, I feel passionate about what I’m doing and can work all hours through the thick and the thin.
Often it’s as if the Why is self-generating and the creative process has a life of its own, untethered. I’m never certain where it will lead me.
I am present. I become excited about what the future may hold. I feel purposeful and happy. I start to imagine how my ideas and creativity can grow, expand, spread, and positively impact more people.
Opportunities open for me to continue doing what I love, and that which interests me the most, on a much grander scale.
Work Your Why and your You Outlook will become unlimited.
You’ll live a happier, more fulfilling, and enjoyable life.
It’s time to Repurpose Your Life. I’ll show you Why.
This is an edited extract from the ‘Work Your Why’ chapter of ‘Repurpose Your Life — Master The Seven Works : The Key to Creating Conscious Change and Working Your Why’ by Richard Conner.
