Our lovely friend John (incidentally, the nicest, kindest person you could hope to meet) is not a great user of the Internet and all things computery so it was with amusement when chatting to a mutual friend recently, she said:
“Your friend John, he doesn’t really know what your website is about does he?”
Intrigued, I asked her what he thought it was and she spouted a highly incoherent spiel, which bore little or no resemblance to the reality of our work and the essence of brilliant living – and I was soon in fits of laughter.
But it did get me thinking. How do you encapsulate the concept of brilliant living? Is John echoing others in wondering What is brilliant living?
A quick look in the dictionary reveals brilliant as ‘very good’, ‘very bright’, ‘excellent’ and ‘marvellous’. With living defined as ‘the way in which you live your life’, ‘alive now’ and ‘the pursuit of a lifestyle of the specified type’ (Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary and Oxford Dictionary).
So brilliant living is about being alive and living life in a way that is excellent and marvellous for you; about pursuing a lifestyle that feels very good to you.
You notice I said ‘pursuing a lifestyle that feels very good to you’, because in the end brilliant living is about how you define it.
The characteristics of brilliant living
Everyone will have their own definition of brilliant living but here are what I consider to be some of the key characteristics:
- Sense of control – being in charge of one’s own destiny, choosing the life you wish to lead, and taking positive action to get it.
- Inner contentment – both within yourself and your relationships with the world.
- Purpose – you have a clear concept in mind of what you’d like to achieve in your brilliant life which is in alignment with your personal values.
- To love and be loved – to love oneself and also to give and receive love in its wider form, through friends, family and the intimacy of connections.
- Self-esteem – recognition of your own worth and a respect for others alongside a need for your own individuality.
- Achievement – mastery of your own talents, recognition and respect of your efforts by yourself and others.
- Fulfilment – experiencing and fulfilling your creative potential.
These could be thought of as refinements of Mazlow’s hierarchy of needs. In other words it assumes your most basic needs are being met such as food, water, shelter, clothing or even safety and security, however if they weren’t, one could imagine that those needs would become the key characteristics of brilliant living. Hence the concept of brilliant living being self-determined by you.
What was our impetus for pursuing brilliant living?
So why did we decide we wanted to pursue this ideal? A few reasons really, including:
- A desire for more time to do the things we wanted to do in life.
- A recognition that although we weren’t unhappy with our lives (working the 9-5) we knew there was something more to life.
- A sort of Oliver type demand from life ‘Please, sir, can I have some more?’ A desire to have more of the things we want and less of the things we didn’t want and not being afraid to dare to ask for it – ‘MORE, the boy wants more?’ (See the film if you haven’t already).
- A motivation to change an aspect, or aspects of our lives – principally to have more fun.
- A feeling that ‘life is not a dress rehearsal for the real thing’; we need to make the most of it now.
The quest for brilliant living
In our quest for brilliant living we’ve explored what it means to us, how to get it and live it, how we can help others as we help ourselves in this journey; the tools and techniques to achieve it; whether it’s in the future or we have it already and it’s a matter of recognizing what’s been there all the time.
We’re certainly not saying that we’ve made it and now know it all. And we’re not saying that brilliant living is a fixed end point somewhere in the future to be attained. It’s a bit of a cliché to talk about it being about the journey and not the destination, but as with many clichés there is much truth in this statement. But we are saying that there are things you can do to move towards living a life you think is brilliant.
If you think your life is already totally brilliant then congratulations, but if there’s something you want to change then we’re saying that there are specific techniques and tools that will help you do this. And one of the first things you can do is think about what brilliant living looks like to you. You might know exactly what this means to you but if you don’t then a good place to start is with what you don’t like about your life now, and think about what your life would look like without these or with them changed in some way. However you do it, determining what you want out of life is the first step in making the small changes or total transformation you want in order to create a life you love.
So back to John; a couple of days after my conversation I was reminded of What is brilliant living and put this together for John and those still left wondering.
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Your version of brilliant living
What does brilliant living look like to you? What is your idea of brilliant living or the characteristics that describe it?
Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below, or like our post to share it with others who might also like a bit of brilliant living.