Wow… What happened?

I am making some changes around here. In time I will probably tidy up the design of this blog, but the main change will be me. Leave The Office initially came about because of my desire to literally leave my office life behind. Anyone who has followed this blog at any time may already know that from the original idea my writing developed into a kind of personal growth account.

Well I think any personal writing counts as personal growth, unless one always says the same thing all the time and I feel that in trying to keep things "inspiring" or "profound" I am indeed finding myself with less to say because I feel like I need to come up with better words on any given day and sometimes even find myself writing something, which I have, in a round-about way said before and then I end up not posting anything for a few weeks, so…

I’m going to write what I like, when I like from now on. This is a personal blog, which I will contribute to when I feel I have something worth reading, to write. No more worrying about how many people are visiting to read or if my rankings are slipping or not. No more wondering if my traffic has increased from last month. I still believe I can provide some inspiration to certain people by just putting down my own thoughts and insights and I do know that I will have success stories to tell along the way, which will inspire. If I didn’t believe that then it would be a pretty meaningless existence wouldn’t you say?

So I guess my intention is to lay off the worry of not having posted for a few weeks and just enjoy what I do, when I do it. I started about four other blogs after this one and I just haven’t been able to keep them all going. One is enough! Websites are ok, but several blogs is a different story.

I just hope I’m doing the right thing….. I am aren’t I?… Yes I do believe I am. I’ll be focusing my attention on my music production and my website PowerBook Studio… It’s about time.

Now, off to play my guitar.

What with Christmas being not-too-far away I thought it would be a good idea to write down a thought I had today, mainly because I thought it was a good practice for myself.

In keeping with the theme of personal growth and goals it will not be too long before the obligatory New Year’s Resolutions are being made and forgotten soon thereafter and one of the most common ones will be the resolution to lose weight, especially after all the overindulgence of rich food over the festive period. Of course I could write for hours about how and why these good intentions always lose steam after a couple of weeks; how and why we tend to be pulled back into our regular ways and can’t keep up the "good" work etc…. but that is not what this post is about.

How about an exercise in prevention for once rather than a feeling of guilt, followed by a resolute move to improve, followed by another bout of guilt after those good intentions have been trashed before they even got going?

I have noticed my waistline becoming a little bigger than I desire it to be. I am starting to feel uncomfortable with things this way and I am also concerned about my blood sugar levels, which is why I have taken the time to get a blood test (results next week) and lay off sugar at least until I get the all clear.

Why do so many of us stuff ourselves to the point of bursting over the holidays and then try to embark on a mountain-climbing task to undo all of that damage? What if the diet came before Christmas? The intention could be that if I were to lose the required weight before all the "goodies" arrived at the table then I may feel less inclined to eat so much if I was aware that the price to pay for it was to completely waste all those weeks of hard work prior.

A few days before my 30th birthday I came down with Pleuracy. I was a fairly heavy smoker at the time and I physically was unable to smoke for 2 weeks. After the 2 weeks I realized that I didn’t miss the cigarettes all that much, so I just contiued to not smoke. That was how I gave up smoking and I can’t tell you howgreat it made me feel inside. I figure that a similar approach to losing all that Christmas weight may just work.

If you spent the time from now until the holidays losing weight and keeping trim and healthy then aren’t you less likely to just throw away all that work for the sake of eating too much just because it’s so easy to do.

I think it’s worth a try, so I’m going to continue on the low to no-sugar trail regardless of what my blood test results are and maybe I’ll have a little treat at Christmas, but I may not even feel like it by then, prefering instead the feeling of being healthy, fitting into my jeans without any over-hang to the taste and bloated feeling of too many sweets and mince pies etc.

If anybody feels motivated to do the same then please contact me. Knowing that others are doing the same thing at the same time will help keep our intentions focused.

This post is something I wrote down in my notebook a few days ago when I was feeling a little sad about returning to the UK from Thailand.

What I realize today is that I have been aimlessly looking for something or somebody to provide me with a solution for "having it all", being happy etc… This is not what I am truly searching for. I felt something today which, from now on I will always refer to as The Feeling.

What I am really searching for, deep down is the power, strength, confidence, however you want to describe it to embark on the path of what I truly want to do. I have known for sure for about a year what I want to do with my life and now I realize that I have known this for about 17 years although never getting close enough to know it to the point of realizing it, if that makes any sense at all.

The first step or rather in reality, the next step I need to take is more tangible to me than I have ever felt before and thus the decision to take it is that much easier. What’s enlightening about this is that fact that it only seems closer now than it ever was, but in truth it was always as close as this. The difference now is that I, inside am closer to it.

The decision to live and work in a far-off land, doing something new with a huge drop in salary along with all the uncertainties that come with it will never be any less easy or difficult to take no matter how long I wait. There is no such thing as "The right time", not really. Who is ever ready for a life changing experience when we almost always spend all of our time trying to keep our lives as familiar as they already are?

The fact is that I will have to be somebody who I don’t recognize exactly as "Rob". That’s the scariest part of all, but the paradox is that it is the biggest illusion of them all. In actuality I am a different "Rob" everyday of my life, if I were to really wake up to myself.

It doesn’t matter how much more time I spend saving money before I "dive in". I can see it is a stalling tactic, run by my natural impulse to stay in the safety zone. How much money is enough before I set off to create the life I want? The truth is that even if I had ten times the amount of money saved as I do right now I would still have to go through the process of taking on a new career and having to adapt to my new surroundings, fall down, pick myself up. I don’t need an abundance of money or a lack of it to do that. In fact I have to do that no matter what the parameters.

This is how today I got "The Feeling". It has never been any more or less easy or difficult since I first decided I wanted to live somewhere else, except of course as I get older my mind gets more and more adept at creating the illusion that it’s more difficult to do.

So, I urge anyone who has any "big" decision to make or who has a grand idea for themselves. Don’t think too long and hard about making the decision. Not because life’s too short, which it is, but because it will never get any easier to make that decision. You can only make a decision now, not in the future and statistically speaking, the most successful people are those that make decisions quickly and change their minds slowly and seldomly.

I’m ready.