I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people lately around the topic of uncovering/ discovering/ deciding your “thing.” It’s partly about deciding what you love doing and partly about discovering what the world needs, and then it’s a lot about how you create a platform and share with people about your thing, so it overlaps with ideas around niching and branding and leadership. It’s central to any self-created venture.

I’m normally a fairly articulate person and for the last 10 years or so I’ve been in quite left-brain-directed jobs where analysis and giving words to ideas and concepts has been central to what I do. But I’ve been battling with verbally articulating what Agile Living is all about for what feels like ages… I guess it’s going on a year now. It’s been the most frustrating thing. I’ve been feeling like a pregnant woman that just can’t give birth and can’t sit down comfortably and get on with life either!

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Forgive me if explaining my box and ladder metaphor feels like I’m explaining a joke…

Metaphors have great value in that they allow us to make our own meaning, and they often provide visuals that carry much more meaning and convey it much more quickly than what we can squeeze into a more left-brained, tangible explanation of an idea. Feel free to keep whatever interpretation and rich connections you had made of my box and ladder story as Kyle did. What follows is my unpacking of what boxes and ladders mean to me and what boxes and ladders actually look like in our lives, so that you can find your hard corners and stiffnesses that are keeping you stuck.

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Note: This is a guest post from Kyle Durand from The Entrepreneurial Advocate
Most mornings I wake up and start my day with an adventure. This adventure usually has something to do with darting through the woods, cycling over the mountains or swimming in the lake near my home. I am often asked during the course of the day about my morning workout, and a recurring question is, “How far did you go?” This is a question I often can’t answer with objective data, because I generally don’t keep track of distance, time or any specific numbers during my morning adventures. Instead of data, I focus on enjoying the journey and improving the quality and richness of my experiences. The principles of enjoying the process of whatever I am doing and keeping an open mind to new possibilities and experiences are the fundamental guides for the other parts of my life, as well.

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If you’re reading this in your reader and can’t see the illustrations, then

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A big, warm welcome to those of you who are coming over from Zen Habits where my guest post, The Secret to Making Life Decisions With Too Many Options was featured. Shedding the extra emotional and mental baggage and “living lean” is central to Agile Living, so I write a lot about stuff related to clearing your mind, discovering and focusing on what’s most important to you, letting go of untrue painful thoughts, and changing your thinking to support creating and being what you love.

What’s Agile Living all about?

The essence of agile living is about developing the skills and thinking styles to move, learn and change easily and elegantly in response to our high-change world, and to creatively improvise and use whatever resources you have within you and around you right now to create more of what you love in the world.

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This post is part of a series of posts on how to problem-solve and negotiate change the agile way, rather than using traditional goal-setting and productivity techniques. The posts in the series so far are:

• How to use your whole mind to problem-solve and negotiate change.
• Kicking off the problem-solving process: The problem with problems
• A Step-by-Step Process For Ring-Fencing And Unraveling a Messy Problem

As I showed in the first article, there are 4 steps to solving a problem and negotiating change, and we’re now at the second level, highlighted in red, where, having pin-pointed the specific problem, we’re ready to ask, “What do I want instead?”

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