See You In 5.

Some time back, I wrote about idle competence. That nagging feeling or realisation that we are made of more, have more at our disposal, but for some reason, we are not doing or being more. It often feels like the way my dad’s Peugeot 504 used to get stuck on the way to shags during the school holidays in the rainy season. The more he revved the engine, the deeper the car dug into the mud. To add insult to injury, the back tyres would shower us with mud as we pushed the car from behind.

Life feels like that sometimes: the harder we try, the deeper we sink, and the people nearest to us bear the brunt of our ‘stuckness’, (is that an English word? hehe). As the transitions guy, I recognise the signs. It’s becoming clear that I’m at an ending and a new season (or version of it) is loading. The restlessness is familiar. The discomfort we feel when transitioning could be pointing us in the direction in which we should go next, but often we miss the signs because we are busy trying to numb the restlessness. Ignore the gentle nudge of transition at your own peril, folks.

So, how do we get unstuck? I get that question from many of my coaching clients. How do we move from this point to the next? Or, at a bare minimum, how do we get out of our current situation? It often feels like trying to climb out of a slippery pit; with every attempt we make, we slide right back to the bottom. It’s even more frustrating when we know where we want to go, but something holds us back, much like my father’s car in shags. We would often see the dry patch of the road not too far ahead, yet we struggled to get out of the mud trap.

How do we get out of our own muddy and sticky situations? Who or what will help push us out onto dry ground, where, and how will we gain some traction to move forward? I have been sitting with those questions for some time now. Every coach needs a coach, so I summoned my two peer coaches for a chat last week and shared my dilemma, hehe. Well, like any good coach, they listened to my venting in silence and offered no solutions. That was frustrating, though not surprising; they believed that I had the solutions to my issues but just couldn’t see them clearly.

Later that evening, one of them sent me something from Instagram that piqued my interest. It was the Odyssey Plan from the Stanford Life Design Lab. I’d never heard of it. It asks you to imagine your life five years from the present, across three completely different scenarios. The first scenario involves mapping out your life in five years, assuming you stay on your current path. If nothing changed between now and year five (March 2031) in your job, routine, and the general direction you are taking, how would that look? Reflect on that for a moment, folks. Would you like what you see and where you will be? After some thought, I’m certain that I wouldn’t like the place Lucas will be in five years from now. I think the idle competence would still be haunting me. Therefore, I have to do something. This brings us to the second scenario.

Here we are to design a life that’s totally different from the one we are living currently. What if we took a risk, or finally did that thing we have been procrastinating? What if we changed careers (or started seeing things differently), or even moved to a new place? (I’m thinking Nanyuki here, hehe). What would that look like? Where would that version of you end up in five years? Would you like what you see in your mind when you imagine it? That got me curious about the possibilities that lie out there. I feel I’d be doing more of the things I wish for now, like speaking and moderating events, doing book tours for my Transitions book, coaching high-impact leaders in Africa and of course, more photo safaris in the wild. That’s a picture I like.

Thirdly—and this is similar to a question we ask in our halftime coaching sessions—if time and money were not obstacles and you could do anything you wanted with your life, what would that be? People usually give me all sorts of answers. They begin with self-indulgent stuff like playing a lot of golf, going on a cruise, or travelling the world. While all that is good, a great life does not consist of self-indulgence alone. It’s about living not just successfully, but significantly. The aim is to spend one’s life touching other lives. Many midlife folks come to that realisation after several conversations on what a good life looks like, with the holidays and sherehes in between, of course. We still have to enjoy the journey, ama?

The Odyssey Plan asks us to consider building a future where money and other people’s opinions do not matter. If nothing was stopping you, folks, what life would you create? I have thought about this for some time, and some ideas are crystallising. What has brought me here will not get me there. We have to recognise when some formulas have served their time and are becoming obsolete. The ideas forming in my head have more to do with deeper collaboration. I’m reminded that in the second half of life, collaboration is the new competition. I like how John Maxwell emphasises this point by saying, “one is too small a number to achieve greatness”.

Folks, consider making this Odyssey Plan. What you discover may surprise you. Perhaps it’s time to change lanes or even get off your current highway, onto a new road heading towards your purpose. At this point, a coach can be a good co-driver to provoke your thinking as you drive. I highly recommend that. Ultimately, though, the decision lies with us to take charge of achieving the life we desire and deserve.

See you in five years, hehe! (Don’t worry; I’ll still be here next week; my birthday week – come with cake hehe)