Where are you going?

Last week my business coach asked me a very simple question that melted my brain

It was in a boardroom style meeting where we all discussed our successes, lessons and our wins for the month. I felt good about my pitch. My coach leaned over and simply asked – “Yeah… but where are you going?”

Sure, I’d had some success but I didn’t have a clear end goal in mind – I couldn’t answer my big clear vision and goals.  

Where was I going?

The hard truth is that for just over two years now, I’ve been forced to be completely reactive. My marriage ended, I needed to move, I travelled with one backpack and no plan in mind.
When I came back to Australia, I got stuck due to CV19 and then I lived in a city with one of the longest continuous lockdown in the world – 200+ days.
All of these things were out of my control.

But it also meant that I hadn’t taken an active role in the majority of my life for almost two years.

I had fallen into a trap that was so easy, it felt like breathing– I could sit back and let life happen to me and I could just respond with what was in front of me.

This question suddenly jerked me off auto-pilot and I spent a week with this question. I’ve found at times when I am posed with a question that I need answer to, to not force the issue but know that the universe delivers – and she absolutely did in this scenario.

This story is 100% true.
Somewhere between cooking a lasagne and painting a picture on a rainy Sunday afternoon, I was watching Bad Boys for Life. You know, the Will Smith/Martin Lawrence cop action movie trilogy?
I’m watching the third one.
There is a scene in the movie where a Will Smiths character is talking to the Captain. The Captain poses this fable to him.

A man is travelling on a dirt road high up in the mountains and out of nowhere a man riding a horse so fast that our traveller has to jump out of the way. He scrambles onto his feet, dusts himself off and screams after the guy on the horse
‘Hey, where the fuck are you going?’
‘I donnn’t knnnooowww…. Ask the horse!’

The horse in this story represents all of our fears and traumas who has complete control and has the rider going a million miles an hour and got the so lost that they can’t answer the simple question –
– where are you going?

You can watch the scene here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4bTmkMXziQ

This moment in a shoot ‘em up movie, made me burst into tears. This felt like true alignment and that I had a question posed to me that I could now answer.

My horse needed to be in control for awhile. In 2019, I couldn’t make big life decisions.
In 2020, a pandemic was well and truly dictating mine and everyone else’s lives.

In these times, it was okay for the horses to reins occasionally but it’s our responsibility to know when we needed to take control again.

And that is the story of how my business coach and Will Smith woke me up a little.

So dear reader, I’m posing you the question of the week – where are you going?