Still Going Strong

It is the fourth anniversary of the birth of Leave the Office. Although the blog did not first appear until November 2006, it was this date that I had the idea for it. I had the domain for a while, but didn’t know what to do with it. The term "Leave the Office" was something I came up with out of a desire to leave the office.

I came up with the idea of actually writing a blog about it whilst I was in Bangkok, trying to come up with ideas as to how I could make Thailand a more permanent fixture in my life. Well I have been living in Thailand for two and a half years now and I left the Office!

So this post is just a reminder that the path keeps unwinding and taking you somewhere. Forget about whether it’s where you want to be taken (or where you think you want to be taken) and instead look to see if there is something about the current stage of the journey that correlates to your desired path.

You will probably find something that does and then you can concentrate on that part, seeing as that is more likely to get you focused on what you want and more effective at making it happen. You know, it is often easy to think that we are being forced into a situation that we don’t want or that is taking us away from where we think we want to go, but the further I go, the more I see that it isn’t the case at all.

After coming up with this idea to leave the office and to write about it, the only thing I knew to make it possible and to build the foundation to make it a reality was to walk straight into a full-time job, in an office! But it proved to me that jumping into an office job was what I needed to do in order to leave it!

Food for thought.

There is a Purpose For Having a Heart’s Desire

Which is why everybody has at least one. Even if they don’t know exactly what it is right now. The capacity to have dreams and aspirations is part of a mechanism to stay challenged, in a state of growth and to expand the experience of living for everybody you come into contact with.

Looking at it like that with such high stakes you could argue that giving up your dreams and resigning to a life that you’d rather not have given the choice (a choice, which incidentally you do have) then this could be viewed as sinful. I think this is probably the true meaning of sin if you take away all religious connotations of the word.

To sin is to sell yourself short, so to speak; Not to honor your spirit, the part of you that decided to come here and have a go. Your dreams are what you are here to live by. It’s the code for your soul to adhere to and if you interrupt that, meaning allowing your ego, the part you created as the mask of your spirit since you came into this world then you are breaking that code.

Of course, this is not to make you out as the bad guy. How can it mean that? Who would knowingly destroy themselves at the the very essence of who they are? I believe nobody would, which is why it is important to have some awareness about what it is that tends to be the driver for what we do and how faithfully we follow our dreams or give them up.

That awareness will give rise to an understanding of who you are and in turn will make you more naturally inspired to create what you came here to create, no matter how small that may seem. Nothing is small in this universe, it’s all encompassing, which is why there is no limit to the number of attempts to succeed or the amount of time you think you have left.

You cannot give up on your dream. Even if you die before realizing it. It’s the dream that keeps you operating at a level that is healthy for your soul. You know, I think that the soul does not need the dream to be fulfilled, but instead requires simply the co-operation and partnership from you as a physical being to justify its existence on this earth.

Your dream is there to make a complete person out of you, whatever the outcome, so keep it strong in your heart.

How Do You Feel About Doing That?

I believe that it is essential to do what you know is really "You". I mean that if you are going to spend a large part of your life doing something, whether it’s a job, running a business or whatever it is you have chosen as your life’s work then it has to make you feel good or there is little point in doing it at all.

I believe this because of what I have learned from personal experience. For years I put up with feeling unfulfilled and constantly longed for something more. Nowadays I assess how something makes me feel and if it makes me feel in such a way that I determine is not how I want to be for the sake of my own well-being or is at the detriment of my family’s well-being then I make a quick decision to either change my approach to it or stop it.

It is sometimes a little scary because on some occasions it has meant cutting off a source of income, but no amount of income can compensate selling myself short in how I feel and it really does make a big difference how my family feels too, whether I am in good shape or not, which is paramount.

If you really take some time out in peace and quiet to ask yourself what it is that is truly "You", it’s pretty easy to know what it is, then you can take steps towards doing it. You may even find that you are already doing what is truly "You" and you just lost touch with what it is that makes it special for you.

In that case, it’s a simple reassessment of the approach you take.

Don’t Succumb to the Forces of Safety!

A little insight from recent experience. Once you make a significant change in the way you approach your life it is likely that you will face decisions along the way that will be based on going deeper into "the Rabbit Hole" or returning to something familiar and safe.

In my experience this happens with such regularity that it cannot be ignored, although it took me a few years to notice the patterns. The last big decision I made about pursuing my dream lifestyle was back in 2008 and the biggest decision before that was committing to a final 18months of work in a job that I no longer wanted to do, ever again.

Since embarking on my amazing adventure in an exotic land, which I often forget is just day to day life now, there have been days where my focus has been pulled back to what is safe and familiar, like getting a regular job to pay bills, so I will feel secure. However, jobs are not the most abundant thing where I live, due to local economics and policy. Good thing too because there has been little temptation to succumb to the dark side of the daily drudge!

Recently though, temptations (if you can call them that) did appear and hooked me in because of their surface appearance. I recently took a job doing something that I thought was a dream come true. It was in line with my passions and interests, which are music and recording and in a place that a job of that nature is almost unheard of. I was quite impressed at my manifesting abilities and saw it as a sign of great steps in the direction I want to go; namely to do what I love for a living, when I choose to do it.

However there was one catch. It turned out to not be a dream job, it took up nearly all the time I have, more hours than any job I’ve had to do back in the UK, not much money and no easy way to apply enough energy on the things I want to develop and achieve of my own. It was not long before I realized that I was walking straight back into the office. Not simply in a physical sense, but mentally. I was getting stressed, angry and found myself complaining about everything, even though I was getting my bills paid!

OK, game over. Time to nip it in the bud. If there is one great thing I learned over the last month or so, it’s that being able to pay your bills doesn’t have anything to do with being happy and I want my daughter to have happy dad and my wife to have a happy husband. It’s as simple as that, so there’s no need to over-analyze it.

I just wanted to share this because I think it carried such fundamental truth as to what is really important in life and it’s important to know what purpose you have for all the money you want in your life because it is not the money that make you happy, it’s what you do with it.

I’m back on track and more certain than ever that my destiny, financial and otherwise, is in my own hands. Not in the hands of any employer.

Which direction are you moving in?

When I first set out to change my lifestyle, my dream was to leave the office. The irony was at the time that I was not working and so after setting an intention I jumped straight into the very thing I wanted to leave behind: An office job!

Of course that may sound a bit crazy and totally in the opposite direction of what where I wanted to go, but it was in perfect alignment to my vision and this is the point I want to highlight because it is important, it will help you understand any situation you may find yourself in that seems like a setback or a distraction from the life of your dreams.

The life of your dreams is now. It is not in the future. If you hold it in the future it will remain there, forever untouchable and unattainable and you will spend your whole life longing instead of living. This installment of my story explains the reason why I did what I did and why it was necessary and how, by holding the feeling of living the life of my dreams – NOW, I kept it all together to get to where I wanted to be.

Boy@Heart is Where it’s at!

If you have been here before and enjoyed the articles here, you may have gathered by now that I am a recording artist and a musician. In fact I have developed over the last couple of years to point where I can call myself a singer/songwriter.

Recently I decided that I wanted to focus more energy in this area, which of course means having to organize my other project, like Leave the Office. However, seeing as LTO is still very relevant to the manifesto I have with my music, it is a project that I will continue with although if you are interested in my work over at www.boyatheart.com you will probably find more going on over there because I am putting a great deal of effort in developing my video-production skills and making the whole experience more of a multi-media one.

After a short while deliberating whether of not to apply the video approach to all my websites I decided not to. I am still evolving in terms of video and I figure the best way to develop that is to focus on a particular style. Seeing as I am more naturally adept at music, that is where I am going to focus my video content.

Leave the Office was my first website and it remains one of my proudest moments. I think it is a great name. I’ll be putting something special into the Leave the Office story as soon as I am inspired with something it deserves. Until then I’ll keep waffling here and there about personal growth, the journey of life and how it really is everyone’s best interests to pursue a life where we are doing what we love and being who we came here to be.

If you want to find out a whole lot more about the guy behind Leave the Office then I welcome you to connect with me at the Boy@Heart website. It’s going great over there and moving along nicely. If you like great music that fires you up then it’s definitely the place to be, especially with my running project Musical Pick-Me-Ups

So get on over there, watch the current video Don’t be Afraid of Your Shadow and fill in the form if you want to be a VIP subscriber.

What was the first thing you thought this morning when you woke up? I want you to think very hard about this because it’s what I believe to be one of the key factors in determining whether or not you are experiencing a good day, week, month, year…… life!

This morning I found myself cursing at my alarm clock. This is important to mention… I found myself cursing. I was cursing before I was even fully awake and didn’t fully realize the importance of such a thing until about half-way through today, when I decided to write this post. I then began to see the evidence of my unconscious, automatic behaviour at work determining my day’s mood.

I thought I was being clever this morning. Having the awareness that I was in a bad mood. I started telling myself that I wasn’t being very present and that the reason for this was because I didn’t get much sleep and I had to attend my shift at work instead of doing what I really wanted, which was to continue work on my latest musical project, but later, as I sat at work pondering the mornings passing’s, I realized that it all came down to that point when I awoke. On an unconscious level I chose to be grouchy today, no matter what, how or why! I had therefore configured my outlook to focus on all the things that I didn’t want today and as we all know, focusing on what you don’t want is a non-starter if you like feeling good about life…

There is no logical, rational reason for my tetchiness today. Any explanation for any feeling is simply laying blame to external causes of which there are none. To take responsibility I can say that I chose to be negative before I woke up and had already cemented that intention before I was awake enough to realize what I had done. Of course, I could so easily have not realized it at all and continued to find outside excuses for my feelings, meaning I would have been attaching false meanings to everyone and everything around me. For that realization I am truly grateful!

Do you realize what this means? Most of us, most of the time are doing our world a terrible injustice in not acknowledging the truth, instead projecting our own version of it back onto the world. That’s a lot of different truths by the way, no wonder there is conflict a lot of the time!

I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with this, its just that if you can spot it, like I did today and accept it then you have taken a big step in your own personal growth. It will make a difference when you know you can choose to have a great day; not necessarily blissful and happy and smiley every day, but great in that you are present to all that life has to give you, both supportive & challenging and you can make a difference.

Sometimes I sit down and just write. I’ll write anything and everything that pops into my head. Sometimes so many things are queued up waiting for my writing hand to catch up that some thoughts that come out disappear and get forgotten before I put pen to paper.

I have been trying lately to do this as often as possible. In fact I think it will serve me well to practice this every day as I think anyone who wishes to grow should do. This very post is a result of such activity today, edited of course into a context of some sort. Leave The Office is already documenting my personal growth whether I intended it to or not, but now it is much more of a conscious process and therefore I hope I can use it to benefit anyone else who is wanting to grow more consciously and achieve the life of their dreams.

So, on the subject of dreams I’ll ask the question what are dreams made of? The idea of this question is to envoke some deep thinking into what really lights you up. Everybody has different dreams to each other, but I am not asking about the content of your dream, but the fabric of it.

Our dreams are what drive us to do certain things when we are present to them and aware that our actions, determined by our thinking create what we experience in our lives. Everything in your life starts with you. The more you are in touch with your dreams and what it is you wish to become and experience in your life, the more likely you are to realize that dream. The details become as real as anything in the physical world, right now and by having such defined and refined details to focus on you will be aware enough to notice and act upon any opportunity that comes your way that will move you towards your dream.

What does this mean? Well if you are dreaming about being rich or successful, but have not put any details in that mental image then what is there to focus on? Most likely the point of focus will be that you are not rich or successful and any event or opportunity that arises that could help you toward your true dream will go unnoticed, or at best seen as an unimportant or even undesirable event.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I sat in front of my log stove, feeling the warmth and watching the flames dancing around with total abandon, without a care about who was watching them and after a while there was nothing between myself and the fire. I felt it’s energy and I understood it. I was the fire. It’s very difficult to put into words without sounding all new-age and spirtiual, but I know how firmly I have my feet on the ground and I don’t feel strange conveying that experience.

It felt like I was in a world where I was already living the life of my dreams. If the voices of doubt about your dream from outside or even your own "outside" negative voice is loud enough it will stop you dead in your tracks and your dream takes a sucker punch. Those flames did not have that problem. They have no ears to any judgements and therefore live exceptional lives, the life of their choosing. This is just like people who live amazing lives.

I now strongly believe my dream is possible, which is progress from a number of months ago, but whilst I believe it is possible, I need to work on weakening the belief that it is difficult.

Leave The Office is about breaking out of the "I don’t want" or the "I can’t" way of thinking into the "How can I" and "I will".

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.

Where is the line between having a burning desire that you never lose sight of, always stay focused on and go through whatever you have to go through to get it and an unhealthy obsession that consumes your life, leaving you looking back over the years wishing you had actually experienced life?

I don’t know the answer exactly, which is why I ask this question. I have a few ideas about how it could be viewed, but I think this is a critical question because so many people ask everyday. "Am I on the right path in life?".

I suppose you could say that an unhealthy obsession is something that you allow to become so. For example if you had a desire to be or do something that took years of pursuit and so much of your energy, which you then decided to give up on you could say that it became an unhealthy waste of energy the moment you decided to give up. Therefore until that point it was still a burning desire and a clear vision, which as we all know is the main ingredient to achieving your desires. The result of such a situation could then cause you to spend the rest of your life regretting the time you spent trying and wondering what could have been if you had not given up. That I can see would definitely be an unhealthy obsession and a waste of energy.