Sleepwalking through your life? (are you ready for your next big opportunity)

It’s the idea that your next big opportunity is right in front of you and you can spot it if you see it with clarity.

‘Nothing is more expensive than a missed opportunity’. H Jackson Brown

How often do you take your opportunities? Our finite time, means we should be in fact taking them the minute they are presented to us. We live as though our time on this planet is infinite, this was highlighted this week with a conversation with a good friend of mine - Jo.

Jo is thankfully now a cancer survivor, still she went through a great deal of trauma when she received her original diagnosis, she has come to realise just how important opportunity actually is in her life. She explained this to me with all the feeling of a woman completely focused on now living her best life, she truly had passion and I became enthralled. I was caught up in understanding her truth and the journey she had undertaken.

I asked her how she had felt when she had heard about her diagnosis, she said it came as a shock. There was so much disruption and all of a sudden there were conversations around time or what felt like a lack of it.

She realised that time with those so close to her was in fact priceless, she questioned how much time she had left. Doctors couldn’t say and wouldn’t say. All of a sudden, time was not hers to take or have in ways that she had taken for granted just a few weeks earlier.  She was broken, exhausted from the overthinking and for the first time in her life, she decided to shred her diary.

Her diagnosis had given her life true meaning.

In the weeks that followed, Jo faced many challenges. She was preoccupied with so many thoughts that raced through her head. Aside from endless treatment options, she had people she wanted to see and conversations she wanted to have, places she wanted to go.

Time became scarce, hard to find. For the first time in her life, she had learned to say ‘no’ and say ‘yes’ to the things that really mattered.

It’s extreme I know but I wanted you to really ‘get’ how powerful our time and the opportunity to do something with it really is. Jo’s was the perfect experience to illustrate this. Luckily for Jo, her newfound experience has now taught her to go for everything she can with every fibre of her being. She truly understands the meaning of the term ‘opportunity.’

Jo’s story perfectly demonstrates the power of opportunity.

We can all take a moment to look back at our lives and see the magic that opportunity weaves through our lives taking us to this present time.

By that I mean a chance meeting with your future partner, a moment in space when you said ‘yes’ lets do this, a conversation that redefined and chartered your next chapter. If you think about it your past gives you some great clues about how the nuances and opportunistic meetings led to something more meaningful for you, whether this be in work or your personal life.

But what does opportunity look like?

Here’s the truth :

But herein lies the problem, given that 99% of people are sleepwalking through life, without a moments attention to where they are directing their lives.

Most people are sleepwalking. I meet shedload of people everyday who do the same thing everyday. Clues are in our daily habits, if you don’t enjoy getting out of bed and you spend all your time watching TV and going to bed late. Or if you are firefighting between work and home, this makes you anxious and you feel overwhelmed. Or is your emotional state tied to other people like your boss or work colleagues? Or perhaps you are stuck in the same pattern of behaviour that you feel you cannot control.

It’s one endless loop and you want to break free.

So given this state of mind, how are people going to even see their opportunities let alone take the steps to explore them?

and with so much sleepwalking going on, is there really another option?

And the answer to that is a big resounding YES - the power of opportunity is in fact everywhere, if you choose to look with clarity.

Plus why is it do you think that opportunities are missed? Surely its not just the distractions, well it’s also the fact that :

‘opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.’ Thomas Eddison

Meaning opportunities come camouflaged - they mould with daily life and sometimes it can be hard to see the wood from the trees.

So here are the steps you can take to spot your opportunities and see with clarity as you go through your daily life.

Step 1 Get out of your head.

~ challenge your beliefs about what you can and cant do, maybe you do complete on everything you start, maybe you can be a good leader, there’s always more to learn on pushing your potential.

~ challenge your ideas about how things should work, be open to change or a new way of doing things. Swap things up and say ‘yes’ to new opportunities that enable you to show yourself you can do things.

~ remove tasks and people that you dislike or those that do not truly support you, doing this enables more space for following through on opportunities that might require more of your self directed energy,

~ Get clear on what you really want to take action on, that way when the opportunity presents itself, you’ll be ready to take it on.

~ Commit to what you want and go for it and actively look for the opportunities that support this.

Step 2 Get out in the open

~ Build relationships in Starbucks, talk to someone while you are waiting in a coffee queue, or any queue for that matter and ask what they do. You don’t need a networking event to meet people and have conversations that can go somewhere.

~ Make an effort to connect with everyone you meet. Take great interest in what people have to say as you go about your day. Just by listening you have the ability to hear positive or negative language, inspiration or importantly more about who they are and what their story is. I am humbled by people all the time, everyone has a unique and incredible story to tell you about the struggles they have overcome and if you look beneath the bonnet of a human like you do a car, you will understand why people behave the way they do.  Effective listening and engagement helps you to spot opportunities that can make a difference to you.

~ Promote yourself with every email you send ~ You never know who might benefit from your skills, skills they never knew you had. It’s an easy way to put eyeballs on your skill set in a softer way.

~ Offer to help someone else, it’s the perfect way to appreciate life and you might learn something in the process. Opportunities everywhere and its up to us to get closer to them.

Final thoughts

Opportunity is the golden gate of life, we can take opportunities for personal and professional reasons. The opportunity to support a friend, the opportunity to give life to a child, the opportunity to help the homeless, the opportunity to build a business, the opportunity to save our planet….your options are infinite.

Decide on what you want, make a plan and then action the opportunity.

Remember that opportunities exist everywhere in daily conversations, a meet up with friends, a business event, a chance meeting on a train…it’s up to you to press the trigger to make it happen.

‘each day offers a new opportunity, you just have to grab it.’

In acknowledgment of the brilliant strive4higher community +  Eleen Zirks who enjoys her work and runs a Facebook group called moving abroad sisterhood. She’s a maestro for being able to offer the opportunity to learn to travel and live in other countries. Eleen is currently setting up an online course designed to help move people like you to other countries in the world if you would like the opportunity to do so. If this is something that interests you, the best way to contact Eleen is at hello@eleenonearth.com.