So this is Christmas and what have you done…

December 20, 2011 by Laura Good

More often than not, when someone asks me what I’ve done, or what I’ve been up to, they’ll get nothing more than a blank look, shrug of the shoulders and a “not much”, “working”, “this and that”, or  “same old stuff” reply. With that I’ll quickly throw it back to them, “how about you?”

I mean, who else, other than John Lennon, or a hiring manager, asks that kind of open ended, reflectively challenging ‘tell me about yourself, and what you’ve been up to’ question…. obviously someone who is dying to tell you what they’ve been up to… maybe they’ve just founded a social business, returned back from volunteering at an orphanage in Botswana, discovered the god particle, been published, donated blood, or they’ve just landed their dream job, and can’t wait to tell you all about it.

Well okay, maybe that’s not the case, and they’re genuinely interested, or just making conversation, but after having attended the Global Leadership Forum in Sydney this month, I’m feeling like everyone out there is doing a lot more than I am with myself. Listening to Muhammad Yunus, Russell Simmons, Jeff Taylor, Michael Fertik, George Clooney and Martha Stewart talk about what they’ve all been up to, which was a lot of good stuff, I was left feeling that I really could be doing more. Not just doing more, but also thinking more, helping more and achieving more in my life, and that it was actually possible, and I should already be doing it.

But what is the ‘it’ that I should be doing? What would I like to be able to say when someone asks me what I’ve done in the past year? What I’ve been up to lately? Or even, how I’m going?

Over the years, I’ve spent quite a bit of time contemplating what ‘it’ might be, worrying that I wasn’t doing ‘it’, wouldn’t find ‘it’, and had no idea how to follow ‘it’, live ‘it’, or if ‘it’ was something I would even notice if I fell over ‘it’.

So as I sat at the conference, with all of these amazing people sharing with us all what they had been up to, I began to listen (okay, I have to admit when George Clooney came onto the stage, there may have been more day-dreaming than listening going on), but what I heard, when I was listening, was that ‘it’ isn’t something that I had to wait to discover, worry about finding, or sit around contemplating, ‘it’ is what happens when you…

• get involved
• get out more, do more, say yes more, give more and don’t wait to be asked
  (at the very least you’ll have more stories to tell about what you’ve been up to)
• volunteer for things
• embrace feeling nervous – you’re probably learning something valuable
• learn something new on purpose
• ask what you can do for others
• support the things you believe in
• do more things you enjoy doing, and share them with others
• look for the white space, what’s missing that you could develop, give a voice to, or create
• if you don’t have a vision, help others achieve theirs
• solve a community problem
• think about being a job giver, rather than a job seeker, use your skills and your education to your best advantage
• surround yourself with people who know more than you, learn from others
• organise your wardrobe and that third draw full of rubber bands and paper clips and old tax receipts. Martha Stewart makes being organised look easy and fun – I’m not yet convinced of that one!

So, with that, bring on 2012! For me, it will be the year of me doing more things, being more active, getting more involved in life, and the people around me, and hopefully having more things to say when I’m asked, “so what have you been up to?”.