What would you do?

I was invited to facilitate a school's strategic planning session recently. The participants were totally sweet, participative, positively oriented, and totally pragmatic. Too pragmatic perhaps. You cannot fault them, as their environment has conditioned them to think that there are certain fundamental issues to address and address those issues well they will.

In order to help them see beyond the current situation, to explore for a while in the near future, to take a step out of the present moment, and to open their minds to new possibilities; I asked them a critical question that was directed at me several years back.

The critical question was, "If time nor money were an object, what would you do?"

From time-to-time I asked myself this very same question. And if for a few days in a row I am not satisfied with my answers, I know its time to go to the drawing board. Sometimes, we can get a little caught up in the current situations, and also some of us may even be in a state of denial, "of course it is what I am doing!" However, just ask ourselves the follow-up question, and that is, if its what you are now doing, then are you happy? Can you rate your happiness a 8 or 9 or maybe even a 10, on a scale of 1 to 10? I discovered, if you can rate your happiness on that level, then you're alright. Just go back to work. But when you find yourself not comfortable with the level of happiness that you have appended, then its time to start asking more empowering questions, as its a sign that things are not as well as you want them to be. Don't brood over it, its perfectly alright if you are not yet happy. Its perfectly fine if you cannot give yourself a 9 or 10. Its perfectly okay that you may not be as happy as you want to be.

And the reason is because, there is still room for growth. There is room for improvement. There is room for excellence. There is room for expansion. There is room for acquiring new knowledge, skills, habits, competencies. There is room for accepting more challenges in your life. There is room for strengthening your strengths and acknowledging your enhancement hotspots. There is room for creating more opportunities.

Once you acknowledge this rather than beat yourself up and start asking disempowering or lousy questions or worse still start affirming negative beliefs about yourself, you'll be alright; for now that is.

When this happens, will it be more assuring to ask yourself what areas can I still improve upon so that I can be happier or would you rather be asking yourself, why is it that everyone seems to be getting on and moving up except me? If you are like me, I'll prefer to ask the former. Reason is obvious. The former allows you to gain a foothold, to plant a seed of possibilities in your mind, to stretch your imagination, to push you out of your comfort zone to make improvements in your life.

Its probably also a good idea to re-evaluate what you are doing and if what you are doing is making the best use of your time and money. Money, to me is just like oil. You need oil to push growth in an economy. You need oil to transport goods around. You need oil to get you to the other side of the world. You need oil to get your electricity. You need oil to get your automobile moving. You need oil even to sleep; well, at least to keep the air-conditioning or heater going. When there is a shortage of oil, growth becomes limited. With prices of oil going up, prices of related goods also start rising. With prices of goods rising, you are going to need an increase in your income as well so that you can, at the very least, still on par with your current lifestyle (even if its a frugal one). When you start asking for a raise, the cost of doing business for your employer goes up. When that goes up, your employer are going to start charging the clients more. However, if they are not able to raise their fees as they see fit, they are going to have to look at ways to trim costs. Maybe we will conserve energy. Something I read during the tech-bubble bust was, "due to recent cut-backs, the light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off". Just like this bumper sticker, perhaps we will cut down on other areas. Non-essentials. So your employer starts to go back to basics without the bells and whistles. Or maybe your employer decides that you should work longer hours just to keep your job as the increase in cost is eating into profit margins. As a whole, the economy will need to generate more income for everyone to keep up with the increase in oil prices. And in order to do that successfully, it will depends on whether the economy is heavily leveraged. If a lot of individuals are highly leveraged, in consumer spending and also in properties, then unless an increase in income happens, it will be difficult for them to keep up with their payments, or their homes. If the economy is not highly leveraged, then it is possible to get everyone to tighten their belts, and bite the bullet for the time being, until all is well or the cycle continues, viciously.

So, why is oil like money? You see, many people become slave to money. Working day and night for it. Doing anything possible and I mean ANYTHING, just to make a few more bucks. Some even do it at the expense of their health, integrity, or even their soul. When they adopt a mindset like that, do you think when they have made enough, if there is such a thing as enough for money, will their health, family, friends be there still? Maybe, maybe not. I'll bet on the latter. When you view money as a form of "energy", you then start to adopt a different perspective of things. Assuming that oil (it is not, but for the sake of our discussion I am making this bold assumption) or all collective form of energy is unlimited. As in, when all the oil wells dry up and peak production is reached; we will have alternative form of renewable energy such as wind. Therefore assuming that all collective form of energy (nuclear or otherwise) is unlimited, will you be willing to share or will you be keeping it all for yourself? By adopting a mindset of abundance, you not only allow the form of energy to flow through you, and not stop with you. Let's say suddenly you become pessimistic and start to keep barrels and barrels of oil in a warehouse in anticipation of an oil drought, and even when your neighbour or your best friend come asking you for some, as they are suffering from the lack of heat, and you unwillingly turn them away. Why, because you anticipate that you will need all the oil that you have to last you a lifetime. While it may be true, what you really need to focus on is not whether it will last you a lifetime. What you need to focus on is, if you are able to share your oil, will you also help others find ways to explore more oil fields; and as a result of that, they no longer need to bug you for oil and also, at the same time, now everyone has more oil!

So, my point here is, money is just a form of energy. What you really need to focus on is not whether you will have enough. But more importantly is whether in times of crisis, even if you need to cut back on your oil consumption; will you be able to afford it. Are you more heavily leveraged now than before? Are you able to use your time to equip yourself with the best resources available so that oil will always be there for you?