Who's rules are you playing by?

“I love rules and I love following them, unless that rule is stupid.” - Anna Kendrick, Scrappy Little Nobody

Rules are kind of like rope, they can save your life in some situations, but hold you back in others.

As the parent of a three and a half year old, on a daily basis the most frequent question I am asked is, "Why.......Dad?". It's caused me to have to reflect on many of the firmly held beliefs I have about the world and the rules we all live our daily lives by. I've also recently started my own business and walked away from over 15 years of rules about the way work happens. It's been both liberating and challenging, because I am so used to having rules and structures that I now have had to come up with all by myself.

This is an important thing to ponder given the highly connected world we live in - information for just about anything you can think of is at our fingertips. We often defer the truth about what is right and wrong to external sources. There are explicit rules that everyone knows and then there are implicit rules - the ones you create for yourself.

Day to day, what rules are you using to guide your thoughts and decisions? And...how helpful are they to you and the people or situations you experience? What are the outcomes of those decisions?

Realising that you can choose to change the implicit rules - or mental 'goal posts' you use to guide your thinking and behaviour - provides each of us with the opportunity to re-imagine the world we wish to experience and ultimately participate in.

If you changed the rules of your game, what would be the first rule you'd change?