Читать книгу Stop Playing Safe - Margie Warrell - Страница 14

The multiple crises of the COVID-19 pandemic jolted most of us out of our comfort zone, shaking up our lives in ways we could never have predicted, much less planned for. Yet when the world you know falls apart and you're compelled to piece it back together in a whole new way, it can pull back the curtain on what truly matters to you.

If you are not feeling ‘on fire’ in your life (or are bona fide languishing), then step back from your busy doing to re-evaluate who you are being in the storybook of your own life. As you do, ask yourself: is this a story you'd want to read one day? Is how you're showing up for life aligned with how you want to measure your life?

About a year after we got married, my husband Andrew and I decided to pursue our shared vision of living and working internationally. At the time we were both working for multinational organisations in Melbourne, Australia. Over a bottle of wine one evening we came up with a playful competition: who could land us the first overseas assignment.

We had images of us enjoying the high life as a young married couple in New York, London, Paris, or maybe somewhere more exotic … Shanghai, Hong Kong, Rome … Berlin, maybe?

A few months later Andrew arrived home one evening excited but also a little nervous. He thought he'd landed us an opportunity … ‘But it's not where we were thinking,’ he said with some apprehension.

My mind started racing. Rio? Mexico City? Delhi? Kuala Lumpur?

Nope. Port Moresby.

Papua New Guinea. Mecca for cultural anthropologists since some of PNG's 600 indigenous tribes (speaking 850 languages!) had only just encountered modern civilisation.

Truth was, Port Moresby, the not-very-sophisticated capital of PNG, wasn't on my top 500 list. But we were ready for adventure and, not wanting to spend our lives in the one city (or country), we signed up.

While many people thought we were crazy — at the time it was one of the most dangerous countries in the world outside a war zone — we saw it as an adventure.

So off we went and I traded my ‘upwardly mobile’ career at a top consulting firm to work for a small PNG-based marketing company. It was an interesting role and I found myself doing everything from directing television commercials to running market research for global brands selling everything from beer to instant noodles.

It would be easy to fill a book with intrepid tales from our time in PNG, which still had remote tribes practising cannibalism at the time. But while it was filled with some off-the-beaten-track adventures (like climbing Mount Wilhelm, the tallest peak in Oceania at 4509 metres) and scary moments (like evacuating political coups amid tear gas and being held up at gunpoint), one of the most profound experiences I had was discovering my gift for helping others to, in the simplest language, ‘get out of their own way’ and be braver.

Yet while ‘helping people be braver’ was very rewarding, I had a limited ‘toolbox’ beyond my own hard-won wisdom, so I returned to study, enrolling in distance postgrad studies in Psychology. At the time, I'd never heard of coaching. I didn't even know there were people who spoke on stages and were paid for it. I just knew that helping people uncover their fears and take more courageous action was something that lit me up and came naturally.

By the time I left PNG, seven months pregnant with our first child, Lachlan, I was on my way to living a far more purpose-centred life than I had been when I landed there nearly three years earlier. Sure, adventure travel was still important, but pursuing work that drew on my talents and served others in a meaningful way had become even more so.

Did finding a deeper sense of purpose in my life permanently eradicate all my fears? Hardly! Time and time again my fears — of not having what it takes, of failing, or looking foolish, of being rejected or exposed as inadequate or having people think I'm ‘up myself’ or ‘too ambitious’ — have risen up and tempted me to play small and safe. But my passion for my work has helped me rise above those fears — to be brave in those moments when I felt anything but. Helping others be braver, to live their own purpose and fulfil their unique potential, became the new metric for which I wanted to measure my life.