A boring life?

My fourteen year old son is a fairly typical teenager, he likes to spend his life online with his Xbox mates and thinks his parents are massively uncool. Whilst doing my Mum taxi side job the other evening we were discussing his lack of enthusiasm for doing anything more than doing the bare minimum at school. According to him school is just too boring and he doesn’t see the point of doing well at school if it just means he’ll end up with a boring life like mine. When I asked him to expand on how my life was boring he said it was because I did the same thing day in, day out and then week in, week out. Of course I disagreed with him, telling him about recent events that demonstrated my life wasn’t as dull as he was portraying.

For example I have just finished a stint as juror in Bristol Crown Court, it was the first time I have been called as a juror and it certainly was a new experience. I had never been inside a court before, never taken that sort of legal oath before, never thought about how our justice system works and how the decision taken by a group of strangers can affect the lives of those involved in a criminal case, the accused, the victim and their families. The case I sat on involved drugs, a world with which I wholly unfamiliar, but now know more about thanks to listening to the evidence of the trial. It is not knowledge I hope to ever need use again and it was certainly outside of my comfort zone and not boring.

I have always thought of myself as a lifelong learner and have consistently taken opportunities to learn new skills or try new things. I have amassed quite a few accreditations through my career, I have gained technical IT certifications, developed process expertise and achieved management qualifications. I am generally quite happy to be studying for something and even quite enjoy exams (I am very goal orientated). More recently I have been focused on my general health and well-being and started new activities such as yoga and Pilates. Last week I decided to mix things up a bit and did my first ever Zumba class, a definite change in my weekly routine and again not boring.

I admit I am a live to work kind of person and being fulfilled in my job is pretty important to me. In the past year I have been involved in a very large customer delivery for Max IT which has been a massive challenge for all involved but a fantastic delivery both in terms of technical innovation and benefits realisation for the customer. We are proud of what we have accomplished and put our project for some of the UK most prestigious awards and been successfully shortlisted in 2 UK IT Awards and the also the Financial Innovation Awards. This is a fantastic result for us and my focus is now preparing for the judging sessions for the UK IT awards next week, to make sure we bring home a prize, again not boring.

Of course none of these examples changed my son’s mind but thinking about it gave me a fresh perspective and an appreciation of my boring life :)

Lynsey