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How Old Are You?

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were? Satchel Paige

This is no regular question, and it got me thinking. You might be a lot younger OR older than you think…

When someone asks you how old you are, the natural thought or answer that comes to you is a number. This number is always the number of birthdays you had since your inception – the day you were born – also called your calendar age. The older I get, the more I realise the insignificance of this number. Since I started school, I was younger than my peers. My parents decided to send me to school before my 6th birthday – possibly because I was driving them crazy at home, but I choose to believe that they thought I was too clever NOT to be in school at the time. This resulted in me competing against the previous grades when it came to sports throughout my twelve years at school. I went to university younger than my peers, started my teaching career younger than my peers, and when I entered the corporate world I was appointed as the youngest staff trainer ever in the company. Today at the calendar age of 54, in most conversations I find myself, I still “feel” the youngest… all too regularly turning out to be the oldest.

Stop Spending Start Investing

When someone mentions this topic to you, the natural assumption would be that she’s referring to money. But that is only one fifth of the truth. According to the late Bill Gibson – CEO of KBI (Knowledge Brokers International), we all have 5 personal resources available to us if we want to make a difference:

Time
Money
Abilities (Knowledge and Skills)
Energy, and
Our name (Our Personal Brand)

Changing Your Mind Is Not Enough

So you, like everyone else on the face of the earth, want your life to matter. You want to be a leader who impacts the people who follow you in a positive way. You hope that one day when someone asks one of the team members who the manager was that positively impacted her life the most, to think of you. You want your children one day to raise their children to become adults who are happy, fulfilled, successful, and give you as their parents the credit. How amazing the thought or even more the experience of hearing your child say:” My mom was my best friend, who gave me the best advice.” “If I can be a dad to my kids like the father I had, I would be grateful.” But yet, we are all too aware of the many things we say, and do, that contradicts the person we want to be. We are sometimes caught up in past failures, or memories of mistakes we made… feelings of failure as a result of other people’s opinions of us. And without realising it, we subconsciously create realities for ourselves that progressively look like the person we don’t want to be. But how do we turn this process around? The key is awareness. If we think of becoming more effective as human beings, we need to understand how the human body, mind and spirit work. Why we do, think and say the things we shouldn’t, and even don’t want to.

Doubt Everything you Assume!

So after several dates, questions and experiences together, you decide to pop the big question:” Will you marry me?” you ask her in a soft voice, as you open the little black box, going down on your left knee, and looking deep into her beautiful green eyes. At first she stands in disbelief, and then it hits her... the man of her dreams, her perfect fit has just proposed.

The reason why he asked, and she said yes is based on the expectation that things will work out. This expectation is based on the assumption that everyone will do what they said they will do, we understand what we are doing, and therefor things will work out. The fact of the matter is that they don’t. I read somewhere this true statement:” Never doubt yourself, but doubt everything you assume? This sounds a bit negative, I know, but the message for me is - manage your expectations by firstly recognising that they are without exception based on certain assumptions.

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