Live a life less ordinary

Just when I thought our family couldn’t get any more ‘un-normal’ we just decided to totally change our diet and eating habits, and have spent the past two weeks totally uprooting everything we know and settling into our ‘new normal’. Living a life less ordinary certainly involves throwing all the eggs in the air sometimes, and expecting balls in their place. Like some sort of sureal magic trick.

(Loosly translated, that means, I haven’t eaten chocolate in two weeks - and I’m (mostly) surviving!)

But it has challenged everything about my eating habits - and made me question even more about my life. And the reason for that, is that this diet has cleared things that have been sitting for YEARS, that I thought were just part of my personality. Like halving my procrastination proclivity, increasing my energy levels from about 4 hours a day back to all day long, and essentially - giving me back my future.

It’s like someone took old glasses covered in fingerprints and cleaned them for me - and for the first time in years, I can see clearly.

I say of all this not to toot my own horn, or give a ‘you should live a better life’ lecture - but because the biggest realisation I had was that to radically change my life, I had to radically change my mindset.

Don’t get me wrong - that’s not exactly a mic-drop moment. Until you live it.

One of the things I’m passionate about, is Living the Creative Life - A life less ordinary.

A life that you not only create, but that helps fulful the creative part of you - because everything these days feels so ‘pre-packaged’ and one-size-fits-all. I find myself scrolling through amazing small businesses who are making incredible, unusual things that spark me so much more than the same-old-same-old I see in the shops.

It’s so inspiring - not just visually, or as a desire to own or experience things - but that others are out there doing what I want to do.

So what I want, is clearly not impossible.

But for all the inspiration I see, scrolling through instagram when I’ve done as much as I’m able that day and feel like I just can’t do anything more, it was never enough to change me - to motivate me to move forward. I was doing some of the things I needed to, but just too exhausted to do everything I knew I needed to.

I realised just how crucial the ability to see clearly is - and to have the health to do that.

It’s hard enough when you’re over 40 (I’d even go as far as to over 35) to really change direction in life - logistically with kids, but also with well formed habits and when everyone knows you as your current personality and your current trajectory. Not to mention years of bad stress eating that’s made you so foggy you don’t even know where you are most days. (Speaking from VERY recent experience!)

So how do you just become a totally new person? Or - maybe even - return to the person you were heading towards when you were 17 before you got pushed off track?

I’m not going to tell you it’s easy - the question is, what are you willing to give up to achieve it?

If I told you that if you gave up netflix for 6 months, you could be successful in your business, would you do it? If I told you you could only live on 10 foods and it would give you all the energy you would ever need to be successful in life, would you do it? If I told you to give up buying coffee’s out for a year and you could build your own camper and travel the country, would you do it?

The intriging bit is that it’s not simply a ‘replacement’, it’s a total paradym shift in the way you think.

So, back to the photography portion of this lecture… lol

So often I see photographers taking photo’s that - while technically correct - are flat and uninteresting. And I don’t want to judge - we all go through learning processes, and I have SO much more space to go in my own photography journey. But if you’re choosing to live a life less ordinary, and you take up some sort of creative pursuit, why would you not go the whole way. Push yourself to find your style. Stand out. Try a different angle. Push the saturation. Change the colours. Turn it upside down.

If you’ve come this far - take the next step to be the best you can. Share your journey. Don’t do it half-hearted.

And if you don’t have the energy or the schedule to fit it all in - find a way to fix that. I’m loving Atomic Habits by James Clear at the moment (personal growth never ends in my world) - get any help you can to get to where you want to be.

Seriously, change your habits to get the future you really want. You’ve only got one life.

Live the Creative Life - Capture your legacy.

Tracy

PS: For those of you who are going - ok, but what’s this wonder diet? It’s not for everyone. But if you’re interested, watch this interview with Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson to get an idea and a really interesting discussion on the topic. Make your own judgements - this is not an endorsement of something you should do - simply saying that the difference in our life has been truly night and day in just a fortnight - in health, mental health, clarity, and energy.