The #1 Reason Why Every Moment Counts

How living life in the moment with gratitude makes you a more effective leader for your team.

Being a leader in business means you often have to carry the burdens of stress, fear and responsibility on your shoulders every single day, and you often end up taking all that weight home with you too.

It seeps into your personal interactions at home with your partner…the kids…your neighbors…

And pretty soon you find you can’t even escape for a few hours of blissful sleep because you’re worrying about what’s going to happen tomorrow, next week or the rest of the year.

That’s what adults tend to do, spend a lot of time worrying about the future, and what’s coming next…

And that fear can sometimes make you blind to all the good stuff that’s happening around you affecting important decisions you’re making with your team and business.

Because you’re living in a perpetual state of unhappiness.

I want you to know that to be an effective leader for your team, and your family all you have to do is ONE simple thing…

Remember being a kid?

Kids don’t spend a lot of time worrying about the future…near or far.

All they are focused on is… when’s playtime? Is it time for ice cream yet?

They live mostly in the PRESENT.

Concepts of the past and future are very fleeting for children.

One minute they are crying because they fell down and scraped their knee…then mere hours later they are back to running around, laughing and chasing the same ball that caused them to fall in the first place.

That’s the wonderful thing that children have, the ability to live in the moment and with that comes a sense of freedom and gratitude.

Somewhere on the journey to adulthood, we forget how to do that but the memory of those exceptional moments of happiness can still be recalled.

I’d like to share one of mine with you right now.

When I was eight years old, I was in the backseat of my parents’ old car, filled with excitement and hope.

We were on our way back from my grandmother’s house, and I was watching the BMWs and Mercedes zoom by at 180 kmh, while our car could only go about 80.

I was filled with a mixture of admiration, joy and curiosity whenever we shared our highway with people from West Berlin.

For some background, you should know that Berlin was divided by a wall from 1961 onwards, which was known as the Iron Curtain. It was like a separation of two realities.

So if you lived in West Berlin and wanted to visit your family or friends in West Germany, you had to cross East Germany and were mandated to not divert from the highway.

You might say, “What’s the big deal? Just cross one border, and that’s it”…but this was no ordinary border.

If you drove off the main highway or had any type of contact with an East German citizen, you could be detained, and the East German you contacted would be interrogated in a secret prison.

Your lives would be at risk, with both of you in a place nobody could find you.

So with all of this in mind, why was I filled with excitement?

Well, I thought maybe today was the day we would stop at my favourite place, the petrol station.

As an eight-year-old, for me it wasn’t only a petrol station, it was access to happiness and joy, even if it was only for a few moments.

I would walk into the shop and admire all of the remote-controlled buggies, toys and all the things we in East Germany couldn’t buy, because they simply weren’t available or allowed.

Have you ever wanted something so bad but didn’t have the means to get it right there and then? That was how I felt every time I visited that petrol station…

Because even if we wanted to buy a Coca Cola, a pair of Levi’s or a Kinder Surprise, we needed West German currency, but didn’t have it.

That one place represented my greatest fear and immense joy, because I would always think, this time, I might get lucky…maybe this time I won’t leave empty handed.

So my heart jumped with joy when my Dad said, “Okay I will buy you an ice cream today!”

It’s such a vivid memory, I can recall exactly how it looked and tasted. The inside had vanilla with nuts, and it was covered in chocolate.

I was living true happiness at that exact moment. I was PRESENT and GRATEFUL.

Grateful to my Dad who bought me the ice cream and thankful for that chance to taste something so delicious despite the fact the situation we were all living in was less than an ideal world.

Two days later, we went through a hole in the Berlin Wall. A massive block had been broken out, and we lined up with everyone else.

As we walked into a new world on the other side of Berlin, a beggar on the side of the road said to me, “Here, take these twenty West Deutschmarks, and buy yourself something nice to wear”. We were overwhelmed by the generosity.

This was truly the best thing that happened to me. Now, as I’m older and looking back at my life, I understand this meant we were free to travel and give our opinion without fear of being thrown into jail.

I was free to choose who I wanted to be and able to make every moment count.

I could not have summarised it better than Bronnie Ware in her book The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying:

“Life doesn’t owe us anything.
We only owe ourselves, to make the most of the life we are living,
of the time we have left, and to live in gratitude”.

Today, I look at my life with gratitude and remembering those moments of joy among chaos as a child has helped me become the effective business leader I am today.

I’ve adopted this approach in my interactions with others both personally and professionally and I invite you to do the same.

Living in the moment and finding the positives in all situations no matter what challenges you might face will help you become a more effective leader for your team.

As a coach who embraces the ontological approach, I focus exactly on people’s way of BEING.

Once your ways of BEING shift, your behaviour, habits and results follow and the extraordinary becomes suddenly possible.

So, what could your life look like, if you would act from BEING grateful and free?

What would be possible for you, your teams and your business?

Would you like to find that out right now?

It’s time to start making the most out of every moment you live to BE YOUR BEST and I’m here to help guide you every step of the way.

Click the link to book a 1:1 Strategy Call with me to find out what is possible for you and receive a clarity map based on your specific goals, hopes and dreams. Or join the 60 min Group Masterclass to discover what is possible for you and your business here.

Yes! I want to BECOME MY BEST