The ball of wool.

I tend to use this blogging thing as a way of checking in with myself every so often and almost venting things that are on my mind out onto a page. I don't write for an audience but if someone reads a post and can connect with it in some way then great. 

Writing, for me, is quite a therapeutic process which allows me to untangle the spaghetti junction of thoughts that can reside in my heads.

I'm a very visual person and sometimes visualising a concept or a problem is the only way I'll properly understand or solve it. It took me a long time to figure out a way to visualise what's going on in my head most of the time but I settled on a big tangled up ball of different coloured threads of wool. Each thread represents a train of thought, a problem, a job I need to do. My brain isn't the most organised of places hence why they're all tangled up. My challenge is to pick a single thread and focus on untangling it until it's free from the big, jumbled up ball of other colours. Mentally laying this thread out straight on a table means that I've resolved an issue, completed a task or figured something out to the point that I can move on to the untangling of the next thread.

Developing a concept like this and beginning to understand how your brain works is great but it's only half the battle. The consistent application of a concept like this is where the benefits lie but I'm still struggling massively with this consistency. I'm still finding it hard not to be distracted by the other coloured threads at times and focussing on one thing without being tempted to move on to another has proven quite difficult.

Unless you keep tabs on the amount of threads in your ball of wool (or whatever interpretation or visualisation that best suits you), the chances are that the number of problems, worries or things you have to do will simply multiply and multiply to the point that you won't even know which thread to start with. This can be paralysing. I know only too well how this feeling can stop you in your tracks, generate massive quantities of self doubt and leave you feeling almost powerless to change your situation. I reached a pretty low point a number of weeks ago when I couldn't even focus on the ball of wool. I didn't know where to start, what thread to tackle first, I was paralysed by fear. What did I do? I ordered a pint in one of my favourite pubs, sat down and started typing until I'd made some sense of why I felt the way I did. It was therapy of sorts.

What I did decide that day was that this was the lowest I was gonna allow myself get. I decided that this was a turning point and as clichéd as this sounds, I decided that I was gonna take a shit situation and turn it into an opportunity.

The next few weeks were consumed by a lot of reflection, trying to decide if I was indeed doing the right things, if I was on the right path and if I'm doing the things I want to and should be doing. It took a book called 'Grit - The Power of Passion and Perseverence' (Thanks Mo!) and a late-night cup of coffee to figure out that indeed I was on the right path. I'd always been aware of the idea of having a high-level concept for a business, a mission statement or a manifesto. I was less aware of the importance of having one for yourself.

A manifesto helps you define what you want your overall purpose to be, towards which all of your actions and decisions should lead. It's probably best to define one for work and one for your personal life although many aspects will probably overlap. So it was with the back of an envelope and a Starbucks coffee that I defined my high-level concept, my manifesto, my reason for doing what I'm doing. And it made perfect sense. It's been there in my life all along but I never quite realised it.

It's now my job to make sure all my decisions point in that particular direction and finally I understand the true motivations behind unraveling all these threads.

I'm not going to share my manifesto with people either. Instead, I'm going to show them.