Love—Above All Things, Love
I had an amazing thing happen to me last week. None other than August Bradley reached out to me and invited me to be a mentor for the second iteration of his Notion Life Design course.
If you've been following me for a few months, you'll probably have heard my mentioning August. I talked about his system on my podcast Quoth the Camser when I first discovered him and was about to start the course. That was in October / November last year and it has turned out to be the single most life-changing system I've ever used. I've tried many different things to help me with goal setting and management; this is the first time I've stuck with a system for longer than six months and it's helping me so much.
The biggest game-changer for me was the concept of guiding principles and working out how to design my life to align with these principles.
Guiding Principles
Guiding principles are the things that we value most in life. For me, the obvious one is sobriety, because, without that, I have nothing. Or so I thought. I've recently concluded that sobriety is actually a step down from being a guiding principle. That may sound strange for anyone who has found sobriety through AA, as we're taught in the rooms that sobriety must come above all things. But no, as the penniless writer in Moulin Rouge put it, "Love—above all things, love."
So, you see? Love is my guiding principle—love of my wife, my kids, my friends, myself. If I align my life in that way, then sobriety becomes much easier to hold onto.
I've been getting to know myself spiritually since I found my way into the rooms of AA in 2005. Discovering August Bradley's system has been like a levelling up for me, a way of laying everything out in a systematic way so that the problems become much clearer.
Learning how to be more spiritual using software? I know, right?
Right now, the biggest issue that I would like to change is diet. I can see it as plain as day in my daily tracker, where I have a box labelled 'Keto'. I haven't ticked that box in weeks, if not months. I know that this is a mindset issue that I can resolve by seeing it not as a willpower issue but rather as a mindset issue.
One of the features of the Notion system is Mindset and Identity Sculpting. Sounds a bit woo, doesn't it? Affirmations and all that. I thought so, too, but I'm coming to believe that it's a way of getting me closer to becoming the person I want to be.
I also get to see progress in my YouTube creation, my fitness and my reading. Small wins like that are incredibly motivating.
Then there's my guitar practice. I've been struggling with motivation and progress, but now I've learned how to use the Notion system to make that work too.
Systems, huh? Who knew!
Interested?
If you'd like to learn how to use this system in your own life, the next cohort starts on 25 August. Take a look and see what you think. It could just change your life, too!
