Today we hear from someone who has become a friend through Twitter and then meeting in real life. Claire Huxley (@ClaireLHuxley), a fellow Brit living the NZ dream, has a wonderful, warm northern English wit. She is the Marketing Director at the International Travel College of New Zealand. She is passionate about education and training and has a low tolerance of corporate BS!

Dear Santa, please can I have a better life?

(or Stop moaning on and do something about it!)

Tonight I met an old friend. I’ve known her for about 7-8 years now, we met through work. She’s a skilled, intelligent, passionate person, with plenty of energy to make even the most active person feel like a lazy layabout.

Endless restructures, constant changes in management, lack of direction, growing workload has, well, changed her. She has become (her words not mine) a bitter, negative, moaning old fart! She hated all that she had become and was morphing into something she was definitely not.

How could she stop ‘the beast’? Well, she didn’t, someone else did. One day merrily (or not so merrily in her case) she was working away, when she moaned to a colleague, and he quickly replied with: “If you could do anything in the world you wanted to do, what would you do?”

Without hesitation, she replied with her dream trip! And what her colleague said to her, has, indeed changed her life forever. “Well, why don’t you just bloody do it! What is stopping you?”

A simple question, but one that is so many times met with many if’s and buts’ and maybes! This time though it wasn’t.

So here I sit typing her story and I am so proud to know her and say that she is doing her dream trip in February 2015! It’s something I couldn’t envisage ever doing, but for her, it’s an exciting, lifelong dream and I know the experience and trip will be life enriching. She had the vision to decide to do it and without hesitation, she knew that was just what she needed. She just needed someone else to point out those weak points and ask her that hard question.

So, back to the blog title, if you are waiting for someone else to change your life, I am sorry but that isn’t going to happen. If you hate your job, my advice is always, get another one. If you love doing something else, try to work out a way to make that your job, don’t mess about, money is short lived. Yes, we all need money to live and for stuff, but, it is just that: stuff!

Don’t do something forever just because one day you might get a bigger chair, desk or pay rise!

And like my friend, take risks, have the courage to follow that dream, that passion! And, if you have to do something you hate (nobody forced you), have a plan to get something else.

We all have a choice to change, and only YOU are in charge of that.

Ho-ho-ho! Happy Christmas everyone!

Dedicated to my friend, you are awesome 🙂