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 Time Management Success

Most of our lives resemble an old TV game show called “Beat The Clock”: we unconsciously hold our breath as we dash from home to office to gym to grocery store, never pausing until life hands us The Big One: a crisis that throws us into reevaluation, catalyzing dramatic change.

It might be a positive transition, such as getting married or receiving a degree — the Chinese character for “crisis” also means “opportunity”. It may be an illness or emotional awakening. Anything can act as the clarion call to our deeper selves. If you’re starting to notice some strange symptoms of disharmony in your life, congratulations! You may be right on time for a major life shift.

Does this seem paradoxical? Consider that learning to embrace paradox — to become comfortable with a “both/and” way of being rather than the “either/or” choices we’re used to — is one of the keys to greater clarity and satisfaction, not only in your work as a reverse mortgage professional, but in your life as a whole.

The compressed, stifling lives we lead don’t embody time as the ancients knew it, or time as indigenous peoples still experience it today. That clock on the wall, watch on your wrist or digital display on your smartphone is a construct invented for a linear, one-right-answer society, but believing time is something outside ourselves that we can buy, save or measure is like believing the Earth is flat. Time is essence: the changing of the seasons, the phases of the moon, the biological cycles of both women and men.

People who live in tune with these natural rhythms experience time as creative possibility, by honoring the paradox inherent in living. Life is orderly and messy (anyone with a small child knows this), pragmatic and unpredictable, spiritual and material.

As we expand into this broader sense of time, we come into a place of knowing the right time to act. The Greeks had a wonderful word for it: kairos, the crucial time of opportunity (remember, this can be heralded as crisis!). Kairos means that what might not have been right last year or last week may be perfect in the next moment. If you’re stalled at the crossroads in your career quest, for example, it may be that you’ve been too focused on “career” and not enough on “quest”, the inner inquiry into your true purpose.

So we see that time, learning to live with paradox, and something as seemingly conventional as enhancing your reverse mortgage business are all intimately related. By taking the time, when faced with the unfamiliar, to s-l-o-w d-o-w-n, to breathe into the mystery and to look through a larger lens, with the eyes of wonder, you’ll be able to sense the kairos, the right moment in which to embrace creative opportunity.

If you can carpe diem with expansiveness, time will be on your side!