Written by: Marty Wightman, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Finding your joy in life is not easy. Life doesn’t come with a nice shiny map or instruction manual to follow, but you do have an inner compass. Your feelings. When you like something when you love something, when you are bored of something, or when you dislike something.
Life also doesn’t have a destination, and then you’ve completed it. It comes with pathways and places to stop and stay. And at Betterr Life Coaching, we believe in three vital things that can help you along your way.
The first one is called Interest, the second up is FLOW, and the third one is called Passion.
All of these combined will help you find your next pathway and perhaps somewhere to stop and stay for a while.
Interest
Interest is when your attention peaks, a bit like a meerkat when she spots something out in the wild, or when maybe you stop scrolling on your socials and watch some content.
Finding your interests is really easy, and all it takes is a simple log sheet. So, at the end of each day, all we need from you is probably 5 minutes tops to fill out your log sheet on what you did that day and score just how interested you were in that task. If you have an office job, checking your Outlook calendar is a great way to see what you did that day and give your meetings or time blocks some simple scores out of 10.
One of our clients at Betterr filled hers out religiously for three weeks, including her weekends, and it was brilliant! It meant we could literally, hour by hour, spot when she was having a great time or a lackluster time and relate it back to that activity. Sounds really simple, and it is.
When you learn what activities reliably engage you, you’re discovering and articulating something that can be very helpful in your life design work. Remember that designers have a bias toward action, which is just another way of saying that they pay a lot of attention to doing things and not just to thinking about things.
Logging when you are and aren’t interested and passionate will help you pay attention to what you’re doing and discover what’s working.
So before we go onto Passion, I want to talk to you about FLOW.
FLOW
FLOW was a concept coined by a very famous psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, back in the ’70s, and it was his way of describing that feeling when time flies by, when you are having fun when you’re totally in the zone with your headphones on, and bashing out the next chapter of your book, or you are buzzing off the walls when you are doing some brainstorming. Mine always comes at night and makes me a night owl by nature!
FLOW happens all the time, especially with people who have designed a pretty good life for themselves. Their work day whizzes past, their weekend is gone in seconds, and Christmas comes around faster and faster each year.
FLOW can happen during almost any physical or mental activity, and often when both are combined. FLOW is one key to a really rewarding and satisfying career and life.
At Betterr, we like to see our clients improve their levels of FLOW as quickly as they can. It’s what massively improves your Life Assessment Scores (you can find your Life Assessment Workbook at (www.BetterrCoach.com) if you haven’t already downloaded that from the Better homepage.
Next up is Passion.
Passion
Passion is your third biggest and best inner compass. They don’t call it Passion for anything!
And the thing about passion is it actually uses up a lot of energy. When you are so disinterested and sitting watching a webinar or speaker for a full day, you literally walk away feeling so tired, and that was a Passion score of zero!
However, you just had the best first date ever, the passion is off the roof, and your energy levels are high as a kite. That’s a passion score of 9 or even 10.
Passion comes from our brain and in fact, the brain takes 25% of our energy levels every day (https://www.brainfacts.org/brain-anatomy-and-function/anatomy/2019/how-much-energy-does-the-brain-use-020119) even though its only 2% of our body. So, the power of passion becomes all that more important.
We work mainly with our brains, long gone are the days of being a hunter or gatherer. You’ll find most of your tasks are using your brain rather than your physical body. It’s here we need to now start scoring the same tasks that you did in interest and now adding in the passion score.
Once you have a handle on where your energy goes every week, you can start redesigning your activities to maximize your passion. Remember, working with Betterr is about getting more out of your current life and not only about redesigning a whole new life.
If you can score high on Interest, score high on Passion, and be in FLOW, then happy days, people!
Most people are taught that work is always hard and that we have to suffer through it. On average, here in the UK, we work 100,000 hours in our life, and I spent 20,000 of them in a thankless previous career in advertising. I lived in London all through my 20s and 30 having the biggest party of my life. I believed that I could be out all night (Interest, FLOW, Passion – tick tick tick) and then work 12 hour days in advertising, selling pipe dreams to clients. No interest, no FLOW, no passion, but the money was brilliant, and I walked away at Partner level in one of the world’s most well-known advertising agencies. Why did I walk away? Because my joy wasn’t there. And well, I was in my 40s, so the ‘being out all night’ disappeared, especially when COVID came and smacked us all around the face.
So, I put my preach into practice, and l knew I loved to coach my team, coach my London office on performance, and get the best out of them. I loved working out shortcuts for strategies for my clients. You’ve never seen so much FLOW if you got me in a room with my work wives and work husbands and a whiteboard and brainstorm our way to world dominations. I also helped out my community in London. What I mean by the community were those people that I have seen regularly that could benefit from my skills. So, my personal trainer, my dentist, and my hairdresser all got advertising plans from me in return for a free haircut. Even my Cornershop, who I saw every morning and evening, got help to get onto Uber Eats when lockdown came in because all the offices were shut, so the Cornershop had no footfall, but people still needed their Chunky KitKats delivered. All of this gave me joy.
Now, what makes work fun? It’s not what you might think. It’s not one unending office party. It’s not getting paid a lot of money. It’s not having unlimited paid vacations. Work is fun when you are actually leaning into your strengths and are deeply engaged and energized by what you’re doing.
The Vowel Tool
You most probably learned your vowels way back at school, and this tool is just as simple.
The vowels AEIOU stands for:
A. for Activities
E. for Environment
I. for Interaction
O. for Objects
U. for Users
Let me break this down for you. So, you’ve written down your interests and passions for a few weeks and gave them a score beside each task. Now it’s time to understand this a bit better.
You notice that you really have some areas of low interest, zero FLOW, and less passion than a second-hand mattress. There is something that always comes up on my own logging, and it’s my weekly expense sheet for the year-end tax assessment. I really hate doing it, but it has to be done. So, looking back at the AEIOU, I have:
Activities: Doing my tax return
Environment: On a Sunday morning, with half my attention reading the Sunday newspaper
Interaction: Just me and my dog, and she’s looking to go out for a walk
Objects: An excel spreadsheet that looks like a very complicated scientific equation!
Users: Just me and Kiki (my dog), both of us have limited knowledge of the tax system, and our Excel skills are pretty basic.
So, this task can take me over an hour on a Sunday, so 50+ hours a year. That could have been 50 hours of coaching or writing articles for Brainz. So, I have choices:
I could decide that this activity is not for me and outsource
I could decide to learn some nifty software that you see on your Facebook ads to make my expenses task easier
I could get my other business owner mates over and do it over some breakfast
I could have set a reward system so that every time I do my Sunday taxes, I get to buy anything I want from Amazon for under a tenner, and it has to be something I don’t need! You know, like a Good Luck Money Tree, which was my last purchase.
And finally, could I have got some help why didn’t I jump onto Fivver and get a whizz kid to pull together a killer excel that would just do nearly everything for me with Macros.
I hope you get the idea. Your interests and passions can now be examined even closer with the simple vowels we all learned at school.
Give it a try, see how you can start to improve those annoying tasks, and bring those scores up!
Key Takeaways for Figuring out Your Joy
Jot down the tasks you are doing over weekdays and even the weekends, try for one week at a time, and then get another two weeks’ worth
Spot what is giving you interest, getting you buzzing in the zone with FLOW, and what is peaking your passion
What surprises are you noticing?
Then add over the top the Vowel Tool (AEIOU), and then I think you’ll have learned just exactly where and how to create some more joy in your life.
For now, let’s get a Betterr Life, a Betterr Future. This time for real.
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Marty Wightman, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Marty qualified as a coach in 2007 when he set up his practice in London, UK. He holds a Masters's degree in Psychology, and he graduated from the University of East London. In addition to his academic qualifications, he is a member of the Association for Coaching, a Senior Member of the ACCPH, and trained by Stanford University Professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans in Life Design. Marty takes a cognitive-behavioral, rational emotive behavior, and solution-focused approach to psychological coaching and its application to life/personal, health, performance, business, and executive coaching.
