Life Skills Series - #1: Bending The Box

I'm starting this series of foundational Life Skills with an old friend of ours: the box. By 'the box' I mean all those times when you felt like life put you in a box, limited you, aborted your dreams, left you desolate, depressed, or suffering in any other way.

Here's how some of my own boxes looked like:

• being told from a young age that I won't be able to survive in life by pursuing my passions: writing, teaching, inspiring others, but rather that my only choice was to be a math guru in order to not starve
• spending 25+ years as part of mostly analytical, left-brain groups of people, while my heart, and my playful/spiritual nature screamed inside
• being a single parent while switching careers between 2 fields that apparently have nothing in common (ouch!)
• being shy and introverted (such a confining box!) while being drawn to connect deeply with others and speak with them, or in front of them
• completing a Ph.D. in applied math while working full time

The point is not to avoid the boxes - aka limitations - of our life. It is actually impossible to do it, since life is unpredictable, throwing at us change after change, box after box.

So then what is there to do? The skill that saves our life is: learning to bend the boxes, to fill them with ourselves until we transcend them.

Not fight them, but rather embrace them. Not push against, but grow out of them - almost like a plant in a pot, taking all it can take out of the pot and growing bigger and bigger, until it 'spills' over and spreads on other grounds.

So how do you bend a box? For instance, how do you change careers from math to coaching/writing/speaking while being a single parent? Well, you saturate the 'box' with as much coaching, writing, speaking as you can. You cut all unnecessary activities and focus on what you want. After a while, the 'box' can't hold up anymore: you become the happy full time coach, writer, and speaker.

And you thank the box for helping you grow - you may have never gotten where you are without it... Then on to the next box. :-)