Years ago, I believed that my “real life” went on hold when my responsibilities took over. For instance, when I traveled for work, my “life” was paused while I fulfilled my work duty. This limiting mindset, the lenses through which I interpreted my life, informed my narrow experience of my life. Everything was in a container. Open this container when I “Work,” this container when I “Play.” This old mindset prevailed when traveling for work; I believed that I was away from my “real life,” The trip was a necessary interruption, but inconveniently pausing my experience of living my life.
I now believe that I choose to live my life regardless of where I find myself in context and geography. It is all one beautifully integrated creation of my Work Life Play.
In today’s episode, another from the archives a few years back, I started running small experiments, fully living my life as I desired wherever I found myself, despite the context and limitations. The big unlock was that my life no longer needed to go on hold.
This episode was previously recorded in 2017. Released today for our enjoyment 🙂
Keep going-
Aaron
Aaron:
I am in Scottsdale, Arizona. It's 6:01 AM
SIRI:
"You are on the fastest route, you will arrive at 6:22 AM."
Aaron:
She's telling me how to get to the airport. I got up early this morning on a quick overnight business trip. And my flight leaves about 7:30 AM and decided that it would be a good idea to get up and go see some thing. I had remembered that Frank Lloyd Wright's winter home was located here in North Scottsdale, which is like 15 minutes from my hotel. So it was super easy and it was closed, but I decided to poke around a little bit. There was some cleaning people there and eventually a security guard poked his head out. So I thought it was time to probably go, but I thought I would use it as another story to share with you. For those of you that do business travel to whatever sliver of time I can come up with, I will try and scout something different and new.
Aaron:
So if you find yourself on an airplane or in a car and doing lots of travel, I promise you, there are some side trips, there are some side discoveries that are worth hunting out and the best place to start is just having a nose for it. And that starts, as I've said before, about just having a belief that there's, there's something cool. And for me, what the effect of that is, is it used to feel like that business travel required me to put my real life on hold and that I had to go do the business part of my life and my real life wasn't being lived, because it was always waiting for me back home to pick up and start again. And the shift and the discovery I made was that I could actually still live my real life on the road, away from home while, you know, I'm may not be in my home territory, but Hey, I can still be adventurous, even if it means, you know, for 15 minutes or an hour here or there.
Aaron:
And it's made a big, big difference in how I feel about my business life, because it's no longer segmented to, well, this is when I work and this is when I play, but it's that weaving of the intersections in, in enabling for all those lines that used to be containers to blur. And so now there can be an ebb and a flow and there can be work and play all at the same time. You know, most people just do the thing I did forever, which is you go to the meeting and you go to the dinner, you'd go to the hotel. You go to the trade show, you go to the, fill in whatever the blank is, do the duty. And that's the limit of what happens when you're on business travel. And I've just found that that's just wasn't good enough for me. And that wasn't it put my life on, hold in such a way.
Aaron:
And it was gone so much. I wasn't able to live my real life. Often enough back at home. I had to find new ways of fully engaging who I am and how I roll even out in whatever town. So one of my favorites of the last, I guess, decade and a half is dragging my running shoes around. You've heard me talk about that before. Also that really helps just having equipment ready and prepped. So in my bag right now, I've got my running shoes, my headlamp, a little my, when my favorite pieces of gear I've gotten slashed years is Patagonia. Patagonia. Houdini jacket is the name of it. And it's a super lightweight windbreaker basically is what it is with a hood on. And I drag it everywhere. It's nice enough to wear maybe not out to a nice dinner, but it looks nice and it doesn't look like a piece of tech gear so much, or at least since I'm from Colorado, I don't think it does.
Aaron:
And you know, make sure that's in my bag so that I'm staged and ready for anything that presents itself. I hope that you will kind of lift your head up open up Google maps, scan 10 to 15, 20 mile radius around where you're going to be. And just find out what's there. Maybe there's a goofy museum. You can go check out my daughter and I, this last weekend, we found the world's largest rocking chair, which I've passed this thing. I don't know, you know, 150 times it never stopped. So we pulled over and checked out the world's largest rocking chair and she's just goofy. And then there was another one that I've never stopped at two that was this bug museum. And it was like tropical insects. It happened to be closed, but it has, it's like roadside. I don't even know ginormous, you know, beetle something from a 1950s horror movie or something to look like the fights Godzilla. So he took a picture of that and all of it, when I go back to, what are we trying to do is at the end of the day, I'm trying to rewire my brain and rewire my life for the beliefs that I I have, which this can go really well. This could be really cool. This doesn't have to be all, all work and no play, which makes Jack a dull boy and really mean Aaron, a dull boy.
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