Audio track of the video below (06:34 min)
Read the content here:
Hello and a warm welcome to Peter’s Heartbeads, a series of really simple life hacks brought to you by Midlife-Chance, the support network around midlife crisis.
My name is Peter, and in this video, I’m going to talk a little bit about distractions.
It’s so long ago that I recorded the last of my heartbeat videos. And what happened? Honestly, I was a bit discouraged and pretty much distracted by many different things. And believe me, I’m the king of distractions since my childhood. I was always distracted. Like here now, wonderful leave, or when I should concentrate on my mathematics, there was a fly coming or beautiful cloud. That’s how I was. That’s how I partly still am. But seriously, let’s talk a bit about these distractions.
Many times I thought about making this video, and many times I got distracted. You all might know these situations where you have the plan to do something, something that actually really matters to you. You want to start, and then suddenly you find yourself answering an email, scrolling through social media, or reading this message that just came in. On top of that comes important tasks that we always have to do: solving issues at work, paying bills, taking care of relationships, or like what I’m doing now, preparing preparing for my next step in life.
And this was me in the last time. Running my own company needs constant attention. I have to deal with appointments, deadlines, decisions, employees, and my brain is constantly pulled in different directions. I get distracted. Basically, distracted from my dream. And my dream is really to get my Internet platform, Midlife-Chance, going so that many people all over the world can find help and give help. Like a real social media. But when I started, sometimes always life got in the way. Or was it maybe be myself who got in the way. I guess so. It was during a shamanic drum journey that I received a clear message. My eyes were closed and I enjoyed the constant beat of the drum, and suddenly a squirrel showed up. It was darting around in a tree, playful, full of energy, and really enjoying itself. And then the squirrel looked at me and shouted, joyfully singing, Distractions, distractions, distractions. Then I saw it. The squirrel was right. The squirrel showed me a part of myself, and I needed to act on that. So what can we do? The big thing is awareness. In these times that we live in, we can’t get rid of distractions, but we can recognize them as we move through our days, as we move through our days in a conscious way.
So we can recognize the distractions, step back, take a deep breath, and change our focus to what really matters. So since this experience with the Squirrel, I practice to move my focus to my dreams, to the things that make me feel alive and not just busy. And some days I manage, some days I don’t, and that’s okay.
On top of that, whenever I get really busy, I ask myself before I do something, I ask myself, Is this really what you want? Is this really necessary? Does that bring you closer to your dream? These questions help me a lot to focus to narrow down my activities because we have limited energy. So we need to choose wisely what to spend our energy on. There will always be things that we need to take care of. But what counts most is once we get distracted, that we, as fast as possible, come back to what truly matters in our lives. So good luck on your journey. And I hope to see you soon.