Margie Warrell - Stop Playing Safe

Finding your ‘reason for being’ takes deep reflection and serious soul searching — something many of us are masters at avoiding. As John W Gardner, who ran Carnegie Corporation for many years, once said, ‘Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves.’

In the hurly-burly of life, we run the risk of missing out on life itself. It's why gifting yourself with time out to become truly present to this finite and fragile gift we call life, what you want to do with it, and why that matters at a soul-deep level, is an investment that pays life’s richest dividends. Only once you connect to a purpose that eclipses your fear can you summon the courage to honour your gifts and heed the siren call of your spirit.

This may sound deep, but I didn’t write this book to help you live a more successful, shallow life. That said, I also didn’t write it to convince you to change career, quit your job or start a side hustle (though perhaps you will). Rather, I wrote it to help you get clear about what you want to do , who you want to be and what brave actions you must take to live your highest purpose; to do more of what lights you up and less of what doesn't. And on the days when life feels like a grind — as it did many times for my dad getting up before dawn each morning, or enduring long droughts with little income — to press on in the sure knowledge that it's not what we get by living our lives in ways that honour our deepest values and noblest intentions, but it is who we become in the process.

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, ‘He who has a why can endure any how.’ A quick web search will yield hundreds of methods for discovering your why; your ‘reason for being’. But let's face it, neither an app nor a guru can give you the answers that reside within you. That said, the right questions can help you uncover your why. And there are compelling reasons why you must.

President Kennedy once wrote that ‘Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction’. In fact, effort and courage can land you in all sorts of trouble if not anchored to core values, principles and purpose.

Living and leading from why provides a compass for navigating your life. As shown in figure 1, only when you are clear about why what you do matters can you muster the courage to be who you must be to figure out what needs to be done to achieve what you want and change what you don't. Only then can you have what you yearn for most in life. Which, at the deepest level, is peace.

Figure 1: begin with why

Now indulge me for a moment and just lay aside any doubts or cynicism on your mental bookshelf for a moment. In the space that opens up, give yourself permission to sit with the possibility that there are things that you — and only you — can do that will never be done if you don't do them (or at least not in the same way you would). Consider for a moment that it's not been a lack of opportunity that's held you back but a lack of clarity about what you truly want your life to stand for. Until now .

The truth is that most of us humans live in a restricted circle of our full potential. Even using conservative estimates, neurobiologists estimate that the human brain has approximately 100 trillion neuron junctions which, in layman language, means that our possible mental states exceed the total number of atoms in the universe. That's a lot of potential left under the bed.

Unleashing it requires focusing your inner ‘laser beam’ with a reason to set your alarm before sunrise (except if you live in Alaska), roll up your sleeves, and take a brave leap of faith in the moments it matters most. There will be many. Only then will you be able to resist succumbing to pride's ever-tempting pull that confines so many to lives of immaculate mediocrity. Only then will you build your ‘courage muscles’ for the bigger, albeit sometimes messy, life you have it within you to live.

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.