The things we do in order not to act on the things we want.

PAGE 7

Mon, 20 Dec 2021 12:50:38 GMT

PAGE 7. Journey of life

On the first page I wrote about starting and going on a journey with the end in mind. A project like Strictly Come Dancing is the perfect example of having the end in mind. More or less, you know exactly what this journey means: a series of dance shows, weekly live broadcasted on tv with the series final at a date that will not be postponed. You clearly understand that there is no time to waste. So you start and try to learn as much as you can as fast as you can.

On this journey, you have clear checkpoints. Every week as you perform, you will get feedback from the judges on your performance. If you dance good enough and both the judges and the public reward you for that, you dance for at least one more week. That extra week allows you to incorporate the received feedback in your practice sessions and your next performance.

But most of our journeys have no fixed end date and also no week to week checkpoints. Certainly not the journey of our life. We do have an end in mind, at least I do: I will die! But I have no clue when that will be. It might be tomorrow, it also might be more than half a century away from me.

So how do you start on the journey of your life? When you put the question out like that, it becomes a very complicated one. Do you mean the journey of your entire life, the next five years or just living day by day. Today, tomorrow, the day after. This is one of the reasons why we don’t take immediate action on the things we want. Because there is no pressure, only the pressure we put on ourselves. And why would we? We can also start tomorrow, or the day after or even in 5 years from now.

I was born in 1972 and when I grew up, in general people were talking about their retirement as the moment that life begins. When I retire, I will travel around the world. When I retire, I will spend more time with friends. When I retire…, well, you fill in the blanks. This message always felt like you had to postpone the good things in life till you reach the age of retirement. Until that moment, you suck it up, you work hard and earn the money to live the life you want for now. So, as a result people feel the solution is early retirement. Because then they can start living the life that they want earlier and stop doing the things that they don’t like.

I never believed in this construct. Life is to be lived, every day. That includes work. My father is 84 and he still loves to work on the farm every day. Well, better to say: He’s obsessed with it. His work is his life. And I guess that’s also not what I envision. A healthy balance between work and life benefits both our career and our private life. It benefits not only ourselves but also the people around us.

My motto has always been: “If I think or feel that I am going to regret later in life not doing something, I will start doing it as soon as possible”. I changed my career from a dancer and finance professional into starting my own Interior Design firm. And now I’ve reinvented myself as a coach and maybe even as a writer. And I combine that with renovating our own country house. Because we really enjoy doing things with our hands and figure out how we can accomplish things that we didn’t know we were capable of doing. I don’t know what’s more to come. But I really believe that trying and failing is more fulfilling than not trying. Because only when you try, you will be able to achieve.

PAGE 6

Fri, 17 Dec 2021 15:59:50 GMT

PAGE 6. Rise to the occasion

A big part of optimizing your behavior so everybody in the team can shine is trust. Trusting ourselves and trusting others and being trusted by others. When there is trust, there is also room for mistakes and mistakes are key learning moments. Mistakes give us invaluable information that we wouldn’t have had without these mistakes.

Yes, mistakes may hurt, they may make you hugely uncomfortable and trigger all sorts of negative emotions. Like not being good enough, not being ready, not being… you fi ll in the blanks. But what mistakes really do is that if we learn from them, they make us better. And not a tiny bit better, no, they make us way better. And because we all learn and get better, we will shine.

Last weekend, I was watching the semi finals of BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing and those couples out there were shining. The concept of this tv dance show (it runs in many countries) is to team up professional dancers with celebrities. These celebrities have no (formal) dance experience. It’s up to the pro’s to teach and coach the celebrities, it’s up to the celebrities to go all in and do everything in their power to learn the dances and perform the routines the best they can.

The level of all the four semi-finalist performances this week was so high, never in the history of this program did the judges give so many perfect scores. And when you think you have seen it all, there is that one couple that takes the floor and out dances everyone who danced before.

Rose Ayling-Ellis and her professional dance partner Giovanni Pernice triggered my emotions of exhilaration. Their performance touched my heart at such a deep level, I’m still enjoying the sensation of it. All their hard work, their mistakes, their learnings and their build on trust paid off and Rose and Giovanni absolutely ‘Rose’ to the occasion.

If you read this you would probably think Rose must be a dancer too. Well, no she is an actress. One with great body awareness and a loving personality. But what makes it really special is that Rose is deaf. Take that in for a moment. She can’t hear the music like we can but still she manages to perform like her disability is not present.

When we talk about trust, dancing is a perfect metafoor. Trust yourself that what you have learned is good enough for today and what you learn tomorrow is good enough for that moment. Trust that when you follow your partner you will know what to do. And trust that your partner will do their part to be the best they can and lead you where needed.

PAGE 5

Fri, 10 Dec 2021 10:39:52 GMT

PAGE 5. It takes two to tango

It takes two to tango. An expression that the Oxford Languages translates as “both parties involved in a situation or argument are equally responsible for it”. For me, this also has an extra meaning. As part of my ballroom dancing career, I have danced the tango a zillion times. In practice, you also dance it alone. To get your steps and posture right, to learn specific techniques and body movements, to understand your interpretation of the music and so on.

Nevertheless, if you dance on a competitive level, the ultimate goal is to dance it together. And not just dance it, you perform it at the highest level you can. And that performance is an equal responsibility for both dancers. Only when you're melting together the excellence of both dancers, you will get a performance that is so exhilarating that it can touch your heart and make you cry.

What happens on the dance floor also happens in daily life and at work. As individuals we have to learn what we like,what our interpretation is for instance love and success is, how we can use our strengths in order to get the best out of what we do and who we are. We try, we learn, we practice, we fail and we stand up. We get blisters and feel exhausted because of the hurdles we have to endure. But in the end, only by bringing all of this together with the people we love or the people we work with, all of that learning suddenly has meaning.

Dancing is also the perfect example that a leader is not more important than a follower. Leaders inspire, followers take that inspiration and elevate it to the next level. Traditionally in dance, the man is the leader and the woman is the follower. But, the woman is the one to watch! She is wearing a nice dress, the make up, she has the softness that a man can’t show. When the woman is able to show that softness in harmony with the man, we know that the man is doing his job.

But we also see a different side in dance. Not only in equality dance, where two dancers of the same sex dance together, but also in the traditional dance form. Partners change their roles. The follower becomes the leader, the leader becomes the follower. It’s not about one being better than the other, it’s about how we can excel as a team. Leaders and followers together should always take in consideration how the team performs at their best. Therefore both leaders and followers have the responsibility to optimize their behavior so that everyone in the team can shine.

PAGE 4

Mon, 06 Dec 2021 16:34:44 GMT

PAGE 4. Deconstructing My Book #1

So let’s dive into the current working title of My Book #1: “The things we do in order not to act on the things we want”. We can deconstruct this sentence in several ways, however I choose to do it in 5 items. I will then relate it to some larger themes I want to write about and give a brief introduction on each part. Oh, and I’m going to do it backwards. Because I believe that the more we do the things that support the things we want, it will shine through in everything we do.

The things we want

FREEDOM OF CHOICE

Unfortunately this is not a given to everyone. There are still many countries in the world that don’t allow people to make their own choices. But if you live in a country where you can make choices yourself, there is great power in there. You can think about what it is that you truly want and value. In life, in business and all other areas that are important to you. The more we understand what we want, the easier it becomes to make those choices and take actions that will help us to live the life we love. At the same time, it’s a lifelong journey and what we want most certainly will change overtime. We need to stay aware if what we thought we wanted before is still aligned with what we want for now and for the future.

To act on

RESPONSIBILITY

With freedom of choice comes great responsibility. The fact that we make a choice for ourselves, doesn’t mean that that is the choice of everyone around us. It is up to ourselves to decide if we want to continue and take action. To realize the things we really want. Are we capable of fully accepting the consequences of our choices and taking responsibility for our actions?

Not

PERSPECTIVE

One little magical word: “NOT”. This might sound very insignificant, but it's changing the entire narrative. When we choose to skip this word, the title of this book gets a whole new perspective: “The things we do in order to act on the things we want”. Isn’t that great. Just extracting one single, simple word and everything changes. I wish life and business was as easy as that. Unfortunately it isn’t, but it is up to us how we approach it and deal with it.

In order

CONSEQUENCES

Every choice we make and action we take will have consequences. Not only for ourselves, but also for other people, the environment and society. If we take action to accomplish our goals, it also might mean that we can’t get something else. It’s not always “and, and”, often it is “either, or”. When we don’t understand the impact of our choices and are not willing to accept the consequences, some of us start to fight and blame others for the consequences. But it is us who made those choices and took those actions in the first place.

The things we do

ACTIONS

This is how we behave. A multitude of actions we perform as an individual. Day in, day out. Whether we are aware of these actions or not. Do they come automatically or do we have to think about them? We have to understand that in order to get what we want, we need to be intentional about our actions. This is the journey, with an end goal in mind, that comes with the freedom to choose what we really want.

PAGE 3

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 13:56:26 GMT

PAGE 3. Actions have consequences

Besides everything we feel from starting things, there are all sorts of consequences in order to make progress. To follow-up on “saying I want A and taking action on doing A”, you have to take new actions. And that might not always be easy to do.

Let me put a couple of my challenges of starting writing this book in a broader perspective. But let me be very clear. This book is not going to be a Biography of my process of writing a book, publishing it page by page. This book is about you. About how you can do the things you really want and care for. How you can start your journey and overcome your obstacles along the way.

Limited options

The moment I started writing my first page, I decided to publish page by page. That was not planned. So I had to figure out how to do that. And there wasn’t much time as I promised to publish the page the same day of the writing. With only a short amount of time, you don’t have time to find new and novel solutions. You want to pick from what you know.

Quick decision making

The great thing about limited options is that making choices is way easier. The more options you have, the harder it becomes to make a choice and the more time it takes. I decided that it had to be a website. I was looking for a website name but then figured out: I still have a domain name that is waiting for me to activate. It wouldn’t have come up “inspiredbyfrank.com” if it wasn’t already there.

Consequences of my choices

In this case, I can deal with the consequences of that website choice later. It’s not life changing, it’s not going to matter. There is nothing I can’t change at a later stage. It is not impacting anyone else but me. In cases where there are consequences that also impact others or could possibly change your life, I wouldn’t recommend making that choice in the blink of an eye.

Perfectionism

The actual realisation of that website would normally take me days, not to say months. It’s good to care for the quality of what we want to accomplish and doing things right. But when perfectionism takes over, it will hold us away from actually doing the right things. In this case, the right thing was to get this simple website up and running, post my first page and share the content with the world. As a side project, I will change the site along with writing the book and maybe, maybe, it will all be finished at the same time.

The inner critic

The inner critic comes in many forms. Fear of failure is one of those, self-doubt another and there are so many more. Am I good enough, what will other people think of me, I can only do this when…. We have to understand that our inner critic will always be around. It’s not getting rid of this inner critic, it’s taking action regardless of that. Living and coping with the voices in our head or the devil on our shoulder is how we are strengthening our muscles of growth and progress.

There is so much more to tell you around the topic of "actions have consequences". It will be an underlying theme within the book. Here it's just on the surface but I promise we will dive deeper into that and I will also see what kind of research I can use to give it more body and context.

PAGE 2

Wed, 01 Dec 2021 06:30:43 GMT

PAGE 2. Energy creates energy

So I mana ged. I wrote and published my first page of the book yesterday and I must say it feels like being on a high. I never used drugs but I feel wonderful and crazy at the same time. Is that the feeling of drugs? I think this is so much better than an artificial high, awesome!

My best friend and life partner made a really great comment. He said: “Energy creates energy”. And that is what it is. When we start with something we are truly excited about, a couple of things might happen to you.

The feeling of being invincible

First, you feel that you can conquer the world. As snow disappears from the sun, suddenly the things that were withholding you from getting in action will make place for some fresh and new life. The life that was hidden from you appears right in front of you and it is up to you to enjoy it.

People having an opinion

And as I am writing this, I hear you say: yeah yeah, you’re on a cloud. Go f*** yourself. It will not last. Of course you are (partly) right. I am on a cloud, it might not last forever, I will face huge challenges. But that’s life. Facing challenges, finding solutions for those challenges and facing new ones. It’s up to you though if and how you want to face these challenges. I rather do that on a high, with my lows in between, than just cruising and feeling sorry afterwards for not having tried.

A feeling of accomplishment

Instead of finding relevant (or irrelevant) excuses, you take action. And as energy creates energy, action creates more action. In my example: I started writing, I decided to publish, I created a website (it’s definitely not perfect, we’ll talk about that later), I posted my first page and here I am writing my second. And I have no idea what is going to come, but that’s alright. Because I have started and I can celebrate my first little accomplishments. And like a snowball that rolls from a mountain, it will turn bigger and into something more.

Overcoming fear step by step

I’m not good enough. I can only start when. I don’t know what I can expect when I start. What if I fail? There can be so many noises in our head that it will keep us paralyzed. To get in action mode, we need to take one step at a time. And then another step. And another one. Now you have already made three steps and look how far you have already come. It doesn’t mean your fear is now gone, but you can see that even with fear, you can make progress.

A sense of purpose

This is a big one for me. I will come back to purpose later as there is too much to write about this.

I know this list of feelings that might happen to you is absolutely endless. I hope to hear from you during this journey what things happen to you when you start something you really want. Keep in touch!

PAGE 1

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 13:02:04 GMT

PAGE 1. Introduction

April 6 2021 I decided that I wanted to write a book. My first book. Today, November 30, 2021, I’m actually writing my first lines. So, am I a writer now? And will that make a difference to finish my first book? Well, let me tell you this. If you don’t start, you cannot finish.

This book is not about finishing. It’s about starting and going on a journey with the end in mind.

I will take you with me on that journey. Posting page by page of unfiltered, unedited content with probably many spelling and grammar mistakes, will be the base of my book. Will all the pages make it in the final book. I guess not, I’m actually almost sure it will not. But in the meantime, I think there is value in the things I write. At least there is value to me. And I love to inspire people, so if you like to be inspired, read with me. Page by page, day by day.

So who are you? Why are you reading this. When my mentor coach asked me “who do you want to read this book” I first thought of CEO’s of large companies. Because I thought I wanted to teach them a lesson. That they should put their company’s purpose into practice and not only use purpose as a marketing tool. That they should really put a lot of effort into getting from WHY to HOW.

But the thing is, I am writing this book for everyone who finds it hard to do what they stand for. For everyone who often says A but is doing B. Just because it's more convenient. Or because they have no clue how to act upon the things they really want to accomplish. Or maybe just because they don't even think about the things they really want to do and feel utterly miserable about it. Whoever you are, come and join me on this journey and let’s see where this journey will take us.

Let me tell you a little bit about me. My name is Frank and I am Dutch. I grew up on a farm where my two brothers loved to help my dad out on the farm and play soccer. Me on the other end, I hated the smell that was all around. After two years of playing soccer (forced), I started playing tennis. And finally, only when I was 14 years old, I could go ballroom dancing. Like some little Billy Elliot. Later in this book I will get back to this ballroom dancing as it has made an incredible impact on my life.

So now I have a new challenge to overcome. I want to publish my pages the same day as I write them. I have no clue yet in what way, so that’s what I’m now going to do. Thanks for reading and I hope you will join me for the second page soon.