Do you feel like you are a whole person 100% of the time? Like you are the same person at home as you are at work?
As you’ll learn from Tim King, becoming a whole person is a process. It takes time, but it’s totally worth it!
A couple of years ago, Tim returned home to help out on his family’s farm in New Hampshire after spending seven years working for a political advocacy group in Washington, DC.
He has no regrets about the time he spent working in DC (he even said the work was great) but at the end of the day, he didn’t feel whole.
Becoming a whole person starts with exploring your deepest held values, then understanding them for yourself, then communicating them to others, and finally living them in your work
In our conversation, we’ll discuss several ways Tim self-reflected to enable him to make this shift in his work including:
- Life crises. How a health scare and the death of a loved one stopped him in his tracks to gain new perspectives.
- Travel. Before he returned home to New Hampshire, he traveled the world to pick up skills that could be useful to the family farm.
- Physical work. He learned to appreciate the value of farm labor to help him process his mental work and to feel like a whole person.
His life is kind of coming full circle now. In addition to working on the farm, he’s leveraging his extensive communication skills from his days as a political advocate to help local businesses enter the digital age.
Life Skills That Matter In This Episode
- Self-awareness and self-reflection.
- Repackaging your skills.
- Simplifying.
How Timothy Works and Thinks
- Wake up time: 6 am
- Ideal work environment: Early morning in the quiet.
- Superpower: Seeing connections.
- Self-reflection practice: Journaling, writing, and a daily run.
- Work purpose: Finding the missing piece of someone’s idea.
- Book recommendation: The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield.
- Regains focus by: Shoveling manure.
- Unproductive habit: Reading too much about politics.
- 90-day goal: Building out the agricultural side of what he does, figuring out how to get people to purchase more local food.
Inspirational Quotes
“You don’t need to stick to one direction because you think that’s being true to yourself. Sometimes being true to yourself is going through the process of refining your understanding of yourself.”
“I’m enjoying having full-person experience.”
“I think I’m doing better work than I have before in less time because I’m not just exhausting myself staring at a screen.”
Coaching Advice
Some of you are probably thinking, “Wow, I wish I could just step away from my desk job and work outside with my hands, on a farm, in a garden.” Here’s what Timothy thinks you should know first before going that route:
1) Apprentice yourself to someone wiser and more experienced.
2) Respect the wisdom of the past.
Resources + Bonus Materials
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