When was the last time you swung as high as you could?  Explored beyond what you believed was possible? In today’s episode, we talk about why exploring beyond your limits is one key to a life fully lived.

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On This Episode

Random Riffs – From the “Shouldn’t This Be Obvious?” Archives
Feature Segment – Let’s Explore Beyond What’s Possible

Today’s Quote

I am in the business of exploring crazy possibilities.  –John Lithgow

Random Riffs – From the “Shouldn’t This Be Obvious?” Archives

The headline from an article in the Tufts Health & Nutrition Newsletter said this:  “Weight Loss:  No Quick Fixes”.

Shouldn’t this be Well, DUH?!?!?  Doesn’t everyone know this by now?

Apparently not, because Tufts thought it was necessary to write a full-page article about how crash diets don’t work.

Listen to hear me riff on THAT topic.

Bottom line?  There aren’t any quick fixes.  Crash diets don’t work.  And neither does exercise alone.  It takes changing your approach to food and then staying active.

Feature Segment – Let’s Explore Beyond What’s Possible

We are in our tenth and final segment of our Life 2.x series.  Where we explored what it takes to start and live the next chapter of your life, and experiment as you go.  See the end of this post for links to the other nine episodes.

On this segment we’re talking about what it takes to live a life that is fully alive.  Two of the primary human emotional needs are for certainty or stability and surprise or variety.  A good life includes both.  And a life fully alive also includes growth and impact.

How do we live fully alive?  How do we grow and impact others?  By exploring beyond what’s possible.  By imagining something and then acting on it, even if we fail.  A lot.  We’ve talked in previous episodes about experimenting as we go.  That’s why we’re using the term “explore beyond what’s possible”.  We can’t always do it at first.  Maybe even ever.  The thing is, by trying we still win.  We grow and learn from failure.  Or change our approach and end up somewhere we couldn’t have imagined before.

You were created by an imaginative God.  You are created to imagine and create too.  By hiding your light and stopping your creativity, you’re stifling a huge part of yourself.  When did you stop exploring?  When did I?  I know how much I explored when I was a kid. And somewhere along the way I stopped.  Sort of.  It was always lurking in the background, and popped out every so often.

One reason we stop exploring is that there’s a tension between how we were created and how our society’s constructed.  Society is set up for compliance.  The status quo.  We don’t want to be rejected by the tribe.  It’s scary.  Can even cause death.  Yet even though the culture thinks it likes the status quo better, we as a group need variety.  That’s how we progress.

Not only that, but your imagination is going to do what it does – imagine, whether you want it to or not.  If don’t learn to use it well, it will go rogue.  It will imagine all kinds of worst-case scenarios.  It will keep you not only in the status quo, but frozen in fear.  I’ve seen this in my own life.  Times when I used my imagination for good, and times when I used it to keep myself stuck.

Third, technology is disrupting every industry, if it hasn’t already done so.  The status quo won’t get us from here to wherever and whatever’s next.

Life goes by so quickly.  My childhood feels like only a few years ago, and yet it was much longer ago than that.  Disruption is happening, and technology is accelerating the pace of that disruption.  Do you want to live fully alive and get out ahead of the disruption? Or follow the crowd and end up among the disrupted?

I’m looking for a few people who are willing to live in the world of technology and help make the world more human.  More alive.  Want to join me?  We can be the compassionate disruptors.  If you’re interested, send an email to kathleen@kathleenannthompson.com.

You can live fully alive until the day you die.  You can explore beyond what’s possible—and make it possible.  Let’s do this together.  And feel free to leave a comment.

Links to the previous Life 2.x episodes:

Episode 076 – Why Start With Joy
Episode 077 – How to Live With Joy
Episode 078 – How to Measure Your Life
Episode 079 – What Steals Joy
Episode 080 – The Birth of Hope
Episode 081 – 3 Road-signs to Follow Instead of Passion
Episode 082 – What to Do When Tested
Episode 083 – Why SMART Goals Aren't Always Smart
Episode 084 – Want a High Quality Life?  Make Quality Decisions