Last week I was at an edition of “The Lab” led by Neil Baker (the next one is in February, see here), where a group participated in a wildly varied series of experiments where we were, to coin the phrase of the founder of the Lab, Steve Chapman (see Steve on an early edition of the WhatComesNextLive podcast here), being “comfortable with not knowing”.
One of the experiments was to write down our thoughts for “Got and Want” lists. Normally done as an individual exercise, it was fascinating to learn from doing this in groups. My key learnings were a) that humour can be a great way to access deeper thoughts and feelings, particularly within a group, and b) that for different people, different lists had deeper learnings.
This is a great exercise to do at the end of a year, or at any time when you are looking to gain clarity for yourselves on what really matters to you and also what doesn’t matter.
The four lists are:
- Got and Want
- Got and Don’t Want
- Don’t Got and Want
- Don’t Got and Don’t Want
To give personal examples and to illustrate flipping from humorous to serious with each one, here are some of the things on my lists:
- Got and Want.
- Light – My life as it is (I’m grateful)
- More Seriously – My loved ones to be contented with their lives, always.
- Got and Don’t Want.
- Light – I first wrote “stuff” as I am looking to practice “enough-ism” so am always looking to pare down the material things I own
- Serious – Cancer anxiety, as I do always have (very) low-grade worry about my cancer coming back, though I am now over half way through the three year post surgery monitoring period, after which they stop monitoring me as the odds will be even more in my favour.
- Don’t Got and Want.
- Light – I’d love to finish the winter having a power-to-weight ratio on the bike of 2.75 watt per kilo (currently just about 2.29). Hey, I like fitness targets.
- Serious – Honestly could not come up with anything I want at all that I don’t already have.
- Don’t Got and Don’t Want
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- Light – Too much money. I’m very fortunate to have enough in terms of a home to live in, income from working and some funds towards my retirement, so if I had too much money I’d have been doing something wrong (in my mind)
- Serious – Serious illness again
As you can see, I took value from taking the time to consider these lists, I hope they are of value to you.