A brutal coaching question

I've just finished a book about classic coaching questions, the sort that cut you to the bone and sort out truth from falsehood, and consequently have the power to set you free.

It's a simple enough approach, but tellingly powerful. Imagine the thing you want to change. Now project forward to your eightieth birthday and let yourself reminisce. What does your life look like:

1. If you made the change.
2. If you didn't make the change.

I found this both fascinating and terrifying, terrifying because if you apply it across the board, your life would have already ended up very different from the way it is now.

What if you had finally felt able, after an upbringing of holding back, caution and playing percentages, to ask for what you really wanted, like you probably did when you were a baby or as a small child, until it was trained out of you in the effort to socialise you and civilise you?  What if you had really got to the bottom of who you were and what you wanted your life to amount to, and had felt able to make the necessary changes and take the inevitable flak in order to live your purpose authentically?

Life is short enough, without wearing leaden boots and living someone else's story. Abundant life is what Jesus said he'd come to bring. What do you do with work that is unfulfilling, with stale or dead relationships, with things that, when your eighty-year-old self looks back at them, fill you with a sense of loss?

We only have one life. Most probably, anyway. Live it well.