Six Months To Live?

What if you had six months to live?

Life might look different eh?

What if we all put a stick of dynamite under the box most of us have agreed to live in?

What if you had the courage like my friend Alexis to give it all up?

What if rather than pretend everything is “fine” we got super honest and told the truth, admitted we were hungry for more, gave ourselves permission to cut the chord of comfort, complacency, and mediocrity to love deeper, bigger, and tell the whole truth of who we really are?

What if, like my friend Alex, you said “screw the conventional track” and just took a giant step into the unknown? What if, like my bro Dan, you quit a very stable job with good benefits to search and go after work that was much closer to your soul’s calling? What if, like my friend Patrice, you took a sabbatical from a growing entrepreneur business because you weren’t feeling it? And, what if you went the other way and took a high paying job in another country just for six months so you could afford to support your family like my other friend Dan did?

I have countless other examples of clients and friends taking bigger risks from leaving relationships that no longer serve, to starting businesses in the face of massive uncertainty.

What would YOUR life look like if you took bigger risks? What is at stake?

I’m here to help you get very honest about what you really want. Then, once you uncork that, I’m here to help you go for it.

If you are so inspired, here are 4 key ingredients to consider the change.

Truth

As Michael Jackson says, start with the man (or woman) in the mirror. Tell the full truth with yourself. Are you really satisfied with your life? If you know there’s more, what could you be doing about it? What else would you need to leap?

Community

If you make radical shifts in your life and you are alone, more power to you and good luck.

If on the other hand, you want to be “held” through the process and get serious support, no matter how bad it gets, the safest choice is in a supportive community.  We need the mirroring of honest brothers and sisters reminding us to stay true to ourselves and calling us out when we fall asleep or veer off on someone else’s track.

Mentors & Guides

Repeat: If you make radical shifts in your life and you are alone, more power to you and good luck.

Having mentors and guides help us see ourselves more clearly is another way. I feel lost, scared, and confused a lot lately and having a guide I can reach out to and talk openly with on a regular basis is crucial.

Context

Putting our life into a context that makes sense to us can make all the difference.

Sadly, somewhere along the way, most folks fell asleep in their lives and became discouraged from asking the big, meaningful questions. The context of most people’s lives is one they didn’t necessarily choose. The American Dream is the context many of us were raised into, and for most of us that dream is crumbling.

Fortunately a lot of us are getting smarter and realizing we can choose differently.

What if you created your own new, fresh context?

One idea? Knowing your life was shorter than you had planned.

Would that change your perspective?

Have you seen 127 hours yet? If so, you’ll get what I’m talking about here. As with any good nail-biting survival story, the hero faces death directly and as a result has a profound wake up call.

I was speaking to a deep elder in my local community Tom Daly the other day and he woke me up to death. Tom and his wife Jude, lead “One -year-to-live” groups. I have heard of this before and I love the idea.

Until recently, death is something I normally don’t relate to much.  In the United States, the more privilege you have, the less you have to pay attention. In this culture not many folks are very in touch with their mortality.

I live in the Boulder bubble. I could easily fall asleep. Yet, I’m a seeker, a person on a mission to wake up and relax into the truth of existence. That requires relating to death and impermanence on a regular basis and being very honest how and where I spend my time.

In the past, I would do my best to relate to death as much as possible although I didn’t know it at the time. That’s why I have liked extreme sports and serious adventure so much. Especially when I was feeling depressed and shut down in my 20’s. Being out in the wilderness, climbing with no ropes and hitchhiking across Alaska and Central America had me feeling more alive.

For a lot of men (and perhaps women), when they have an intimate relationship with death, they feel more alive. The closer to death you are, the more alive you can feel. Ask any combat soldier. Or any super extreme athlete, mountaineer, sailor, etc. Let’s face it, the way most Americans live is, well, boring.

So, since most of us are not risking our lives in what we do each day, perhaps we could play a game where we had to relate to death more frequently as a way of us feeling more alive and on target.

What if facing an imminent death was your context?

You ever notice how when some folks are diagnosed with cancer or another terrible illness that often their attitude on life changes?

Because when the context changes, many inspired people begin to see things differently and start to make serious changes in how they approach life. They quit their lame job, they take bigger risks, they get clear on what they want and go after it, and they perhaps they even open their heart more.

I think if we all really knew we had six months or a year to live, most of us would make some serious course corrections to our lives.

So, what would be like for you to play a game where you imagine you had six months to live?

Play a New Game

Because when we change the game, we change. And, when we practice with other folks, we strengthen a muscle to do the real thing in the game of our life.

By playing this game, it might light a fire under your pants to do what you’ve always wanted to do. You might start to take a few more risks. You might be willing to put yourself out there and make some mistakes. You might express your love more. You might end that relationship. On and on.

If you want to experiment, go super deep, and have a blast doing it, come join Rick Snyder and I as we spend six months together living more truthfully, honestly, and courageously.

You’ll have the context, the framework, the community, the accountability, and massive support to go for it.

Here’s the link:

http://mensleadershiptraining.com

Six months. Sixteen other men. Serious transformation and a massive dose of laughter.