You either have this in your life right now or you will have this; and likely over and over again. The GAP. In our lives we encounter continually increasing complexity, another way to say this is, year after year life ‘grows’ into something new. We gain new relationships, we land a new job, we start a new business, we buy a home or property, we have life happen and with life comes increasing complexity. Complexity becomes difficult if we don’t spend the energy (time, effort, money) toward gaining increasing skills and capacity to accept this complexity with ease. I’ve had the opportunity to say these words to 1000’s of people in 100’s of audiences and without fail, 99%+ of the people are in total agreement. There’s always a very small margin that their lives, because they just downsized, retired, left a relationship – something, their lives are less complex than the prior year. But for the vast majority of us, it’s increasing and frankly the increasing complexity, at least for me, is what keeps it interesting, I don’t like being bored and comfortable.
Now, as, over time, life becomes more complex our focus needs to be on outpacing that complexity with ‘capacity gains’ – basically, doing things that increase our capacity to manage the complexity with ease. These things can be basic like reading, exercise, nutrition, rest and they can be extreme like pushing yourself to limits you never thought possible physically and mentally so that when the complex (or had) shows up it’s just not all that hard any longer. Rather than an ‘or’ I prefer to combine the basic and the extreme in my own life to continually build me own capacity. The programs we have created at Boundless are all rooted in exactly what I have done for years to keep pace and most cases outpace this increase in capacity needed.
Worse, or better news depending on how you look at it, is that you may already be pretty good at ‘capacity increasing’ for yourself. But I’, betting that those around you (your team at work, maybe your spouse or life partners or maybe even just your friends) are not. So the cold truth is the GAP goes beyond just gap that develops between you and life but also between you and those IN your life. We all make choices each day, ever so small in most cases, that at the end of each year add up to either keeping pass with this complexity increase or not. So goes it for all those other as well.
You either have this GAP today. You may be feeling like you just cannot keep up with demands. OR you look around you and find that those you care about have fallen behind, through no fault of their own, and the GAP is continually widening. Good news is you can begin to close it, maybe never all the way but you can take action and lessen the impact of this ever widening GAP if you choose. Everything is a choice.
