Do you invest more in your car than your character?

Last week I introduced you to guest blogger Philippa of Green Sky.  Green Sky is is a new approach to hiring and being hired. It allows job seekers, contractors and self employed service providers to promote themselves in their own words.  Green Sky is New Zealand's only free recruitment service.  For further information about Green Sky please visit http://www.greensky.co.nz/

Today I have the pleasure of publishing the next installment in Philippa's series of blogs titled "Three lessons death taught me about life". 

Philippa Weaver

This is the second in a series of three Blogs subtitled “Three lessons death taught me about life”.

If there is one thing we all have in common, it’s that we are self-referencing. We are wired so that everything is ‘all about us’. So at my beautiful friend Rosie’s funeral a few weeks ago, I found myself wondering – Will I fill a whole cathedral? What will people say about me at my funeral? And yes sadly, I hope they choose a flattering photo (as if I’ll care!)

Funerals are the ultimate exercise in summarising. The hundreds of thousands of hours of our lives are summarised in a few speeches. A few adjectives. A few memories. Sobering isn’t it. The good thing is that we all get to choose the essence of this summary. The small choices we make every day about how we treat other people is what will be magnified at the end.

I believe we all have high aspirations about the type of person we wish to be. And yet, we live our lives immersed in the petty stuff. The stuff that ironically, we care very little about… at the end of the day. If I weighed how I have spent my time, thoughts, energy and focus on a set of scales, the irrelevancies would out-weigh the important by 1000 to 1. At least. How big my bum looked in that. Who said what to whom. I hope it all works out OK. I’m worried that… Why don’t they just… I wish I hadn’t…

I’ve never heard anyone say in a eulogy “I loved him because he drove a fabulous car”. Why people like us, why they love us, why they want to be in our lives, why they will weep at our funerals, is determined by one thing. How we make them feel. Did we show them that we cared about them? Did we see their beauty? Did we share ourselves? Did we make them laugh? Did we listen? Did we celebrate with them? Did we share what we had learned? Did we show up? Did we make them feel great about themselves?
Rosie was a very close friend. She was with me at the birth of my youngest daughter, Honey. She was also a colleague. And at her funeral were many people who had worked with her over the years. No one mentioned her job title. Or how much she earned. Or whether she had been promoted or not. They talked about how she made them feel.

We live in a world where money dictates so many of our decisions. Particularly, how we spend our time. And how we spend our time is determined by what we value. If you value your friendships, you will make time for them even though a busy week at work has blown your gaskets. If you value your children, you will turn your phone off and create time to hang out with them without distractions.

When you are confronted by how short life is, you’re forced to re-evaluate why we choose to spend so much of our lives working. So that we can drive a nice car? So that we can have a bigger TV? So we can get that promotion, so we can work more hours? When I was working in corporate, I had gotten that big promotion and I was driving that car. But I was at the office insane hours and I only saw my daughter Ginger early in the morning, at bath & bed time and on the weekends. I was missing out on what is the most important part of my life.

I am passionate about our need to figure out what we want our lives to be about and then tailoring our work and income generation around that. This is the heart of Green Sky – creating a way of working which respects us as individuals and allows us to manage work in a way that serves our lives.

I am really challenged by the correlation between how I choose to spend my time and how I choose to spend my money and what these choices reveal about my values. Three years ago, at the end of my corporate career, I was earning a great salary. And I spent all of that salary on… actually I don’t really know what I spent it on. On stuff. On what I thought I needed. Or wanted. Most of my choices were mindless. Not reckless, just with little attention to what I was really choosing. I guess it’s how we all live when we are on drift. When we haven’t sorted out what we value most. What we want our lives to be about. Who we want to become. How we want to be remembered.

As I said, the cool thing is that we get to choose how we are remembered, because we get to choose how we live our lives. Here’s what I’m going to do this week. Imagine my own funeral. Imagine the speeches. Imagine the adjectives. Imagine the memories. And then figure out how to make sure my life is focused on becoming the person I want to be remembered as.

Next Blog will be about that. Living your life backwards.