Futurize Yourself: Design your Life on Purpose

By Tom Meyers

What makes your life worth living? What purpose do you serve? How do you thrive in a fast-changing world?

As new emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics and machine learning reshape our world with unprecedented speed, scope and complexity, learning how to live and act ‘on purpose’ will become the greatest g

• Language: English
• Publisher: Filament Publishing
• Release date: Jul 24, 2018
• ISBN: 9781912635368

Tom Meyers

Tom Meyers was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1970. His life has been eventful, to say the least, but came to an abrupt halt at age 29 when his gourmet deli business failed, leading him into an existential crisis. Three revealing steps - what he now calls "Futurizing Yourself" - saved his life and helped him overcome his limiting beliefs and make his preferred future into an ongoing reality.Today, Tom is an osteopath and body-centred stress coach with a private practice in Brussels. He promotes health and wellbeing and is the founder of the "Reaset Approach". Tom combines his health practice with his work as a wellbeing futurist, speaker and author. His mission is to help people flourish and thrive as they prepare for the future with confidence.

Book preview

Preface

Seeing my future

________

August 2014, The Journey of Success, Gran Sasso, Italy

The School For Dreamers

TomTom, TomTom, TomTom, … I see a young-looking man being applauded and cheered after a workshop. He is part of the team of facilitators during ‘the Journey of Success’, an intensive training week designed for learning to govern oneself before others, organized by the School For Dreamers in the beautiful national park and mountain region of Gran Sasso, Italy.

This man has just given a compelling talk on a novel body-mind and educational approach he has developed with the intriguing name of ‘Reaset’. The term is an amalgam of the words ‘reset’ and ‘ease’. As the man has just explained, the Reaset Approach is designed to help people return to ease as a counterbalance to rising levels of stress. However, it is also an excellent way to stay healthy in body and mind on one’s journey of personal development, and in the ensuing times of change while fulfilling one’s dream.

On another occasion, I heard the same crowd cheer again: TomTom, TomTom, TomTom… This time, though, he was nowhere to be seen. Instead, the chorus of TomToms was sparked during the screening of a film on the spiritual evolution of mankind, the message of which resonated with the one he had given earlier.

TomTom, TomTom, TomTom… I observed his name being chanted on many occasions, and always with that same admiration for what he inspired and offered with humility and simplicity. No wannabe guru, he was just being himself. I found it intriguing, humbling, and emotionally moving to see him there on stage, but also somewhat bizarre. How had he got there?

So, one morning at the breakfast table, I asked Lorenzo, one of the participants in the training: Who is this TomTom everyone keeps talking about?

It was a spontaneous question. Yes, it was meant as a pleasantry, but nevertheless had a level of sincerity, as I was intrigued. Who is this TomTom?

As soon as I had asked the question, I knew deep inside that something very important had just taken place. I knew this was the beginning of something long awaited – the telling of a tale that had started in the year 1999 when I was 29, at a time when life had become meaningless and I was ready to give up on it.

Because that man TomTom was me.

Introduction

Where it all began

________

Give yourself permission to take action on your dreams,

because until you take action you’re just dreaming.

Teresa de Grosbois

Ioften get to hear that I’m lucky. I’m not going to deny it; lucky I am – seen from a certain perspective, that is. For example, I do what I love and love what I do. I have a sense of purpose, and living my dream is an ongoing reality.

So, some say: Oh, you’re so ‘lucky’ that you’ve found your purpose and do the work you love… I wish I could be so lucky. In answer to that, I reply: You can… Just know that what you call ‘luck’ didn’t come by happenstance.

It seems like only yesterday that I wasn’t so ‘lucky’. I was 29 at the time and life had become meaningless, a never-ending uphill battle. Tired of fighting against the odds and emotionally drained, I remember waking up one morning in my cold, damp bedroom thinking: If this is what life is about, this continuous struggle to survive, I don’t want it.

But then something unexpected happened. In my despair, I was thrown a lifeline which I could grasp, which eventually allowed me to pull myself up and out of a deep hole.

For a man standing on a bridge ready to jump to his final destination, the lifeline might be a passer-by who stops to talk him down from the edge. This is how it was for Jonny Benjamin, whose moving keynote presentation on his life with mental illness and schizophrenia I recently watched at the London conference of the International Stress Management Association (ISMA).

Some people receive their lifeline in the form of a sudden insight that changes their perspective and bestows a new lease of life.

My lifeline showed up in the unlikely guise of questions. Yes, I can say that three questions saved my life. They offered me a deep and holistic understanding of myself, gave me a foundational sense of purpose and helped me to design a meaningful vision that I could believe in.

That all-important pivotal moment was 18 years ago, and my mission ever since has been to fulfil that vision and become the man I was born to be. As a result, today I am an osteopath with a private practice, stress expert, writer, international public speaker and, most importantly, I am fulfilled and happily enjoying life.

I have no doubt that without those three questions that permitted me to glimpse the future and contribute to a vision, life would have been very different. Who knows? It might have ended long ago.

This book is the story of the questions that saved me, and the vision that sprouted from them. It is my hope that you too can become the architect of your life and, by living your life on purpose, grow into the best version of yourself – happy, fulfilled and resilient to embrace the uncertainty in a fast-changing world and thrive.

I would be lying if I failed to admit that the journey that followed brought challenges. I was often faced with seemingly insurmountable hurdles and obstacles.

However, when I encountered difficult moments or found myself doubting, my sense of purpose and my vision became like a metamotive or concept against which every challenge was measured. Was I still on my path? Was this challenge meaningful for my growth or did it show that I had lost focus and needed to bring myself back on course?

With each successive challenge, I chose to walk the journey of the vision I had created, even though some decisions weren’t the easiest ones. But I believed in my purpose, and that gave me the strength, resilience and patience I needed to continue.

In the beginning, this was far from easy, for several reasons. First, the outline of my vision was primitive. It was based on five key words that could be filled in with multiple options. Secondly, even though I firmly believed in my sense of purpose, which had been logically constructed – who was to say that I was not deluding myself?

But what did I have to lose? Life had become meaningless and I didn’t want to – and couldn’t – go on living as I had been. And so I took my chances – and won.

Luck? Chance? Or was it fate? Looking back, I now know that my journey was written in the stars, but I had to choose my destiny. I had to find the key ‘ME’ which had been hidden in plain sight, place the key in the lock on the door of life, turn it, open the door, find out what was on the other side, walk through and travel on the path destined for me. In other words, I had to become more engaged with life, steering in a direction guided by a deep and holistic understanding of myself and seen from a future perspective, instead of being its passenger.

When I started writing this book, the initial purpose was to share the unlikely journey that has changed everything for me. Because – who knew this? Maybe, just maybe, someone else might benefit from it.

My other reason for writing this book is that I strongly believe that finding yourself and doing what you were born to do is an important contributor to health and well-being, and the cornerstone of effective stress management. This belief was recently confirmed by the experts I interviewed for an online stress summit that I hosted on International Stress Awareness Day. In the interviews, all the experts shared how important knowing yourself is, and that this, together with living within the means of your potential, makes up the cornerstone for your health and well-being, and for reducing stress levels.

I’ve done some jobs in the past for which I had no innate ability and which therefore caused me much stress and even made me sick. It therefore seemed the right thing to do to share my experience of how I found my purpose and created a vision. As you will see, empowering people to flourish is part of my purpose and vision, and thus very close to my heart!

Be good to you, always

Tom Meyers

Chapter 1

What makes life

worth living?

Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

I don’t much care where –

Then it doesn’t matter which way you go.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Stillpoint

________

Life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards.

Søren Kierkegaard

One day I woke up in a cold, damp bedroom and thought: What’s the point of all of this, of life, of living? Really, is this what it is all about, a mere struggle to survive day in and day out? It seemed completely preposterous to me that my life was based on just that, a continuous battle against the odds, with now and then a spark of joy, and then to someday die, never really having lived. I sighed… internally screaming and shouting from frustration and desperation. Where was progress, the sense that we evolve? Weren’t we – I mean, wasn’t I – supposed to advance somehow? Grow, get smarter, richer and more complete year upon year? I could see none of that. No, all I could see was that I was regressing, becoming more futile and hopeless by the minute. I pinched myself to check if I wasn’t still dreaming, and no, I wasn’t. I was still in a cold, damp attic bedroom situated at the back of my business that I had