1. Your Heroes and Their Qualities

Heroes, protagonists, activists – whatever you want to call them, the hero is someone that we are inspired by. Heroic characters show us what is possible in life. They stand for what they believe in. They do things their own way. They think independently. They take risks to achieve their goals. They are resilient. They call in support from other people to help them achieve something that is important to them. Our choice of heroes is very personal. Each of us will have qualities we admire in ourselves, and each of us will be influenced by characters from real life or fiction, whose stories reflect something important for us.

Uncovering the heroic qualities that you most value

• Identify the people who inspire you the most. They can be friends and family, well known or anonymous, alive or dead, from fantasy or from history and from any walk of life.
• As you write their names down, have a go at identifying what qualities they possess that you most admire.
  
  My list as an example; alongside my grandmother, my heroes include:
  • Dad – brave, independent, loyal
  • Tori Amos – quirky, talented, eccentric, independent, unique
  • Vivienne Westwood – strong, creative, passionate, her own woman
  • Freddie Mercury – charismatic, creative, did what he did excellently, strong drive, entertaining
  • Anaïs Nin – unconventional, free, creative, prolific, wise
• Look closely at your list. Are there particular themes, behaviours or character traits in there that you most value?
• Now ask yourself – what would life be like if you expressed these qualities more in your own life? Are you willing to do so?

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Living a heroic life, expanding into all you can be, means being willing to grow into these qualities. Your Quest will invite you to practice living more of your life with these qualities at the forefront. If these qualities feel like “achey” muscles, they will need some re-training.

What action could you take to build the expression of these qualities?

2. Your Unique Features

In marketing speak, a fact about a product is known as a “feature.” This is something that products possess, for example, every car has wheels. Marketers also talk about the benefits – the advantages that the feature offers. In the case of the car, it would be getting to my grandma's house in Golders Green much faster than if I walked.

When features and benefits marry nicely, they offer a great solution to a problem. Take a spork – the great camping cutlery invention.

The design of a spork is perfectly matched to accomplish the task it needs to perform (eating) and the environments in which we are going to perform that task (by a fire in the woods). We want to discover your features and benefits so that you can start to identify what you are designed for.

Brainstorm all of the design features you possess that you value. Set your timer for 60 seconds. Don't pause, don't hesitate, anything you value counts. Ready, steady … go!

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How did you do? Was it easy to describe yourself and your abilities? Was it hard to be generous? Sometimes it can feel very uncomfortable to name and describe our abilities. We often get told that claiming who you are and being confident about being who you are is arrogance, bragging, or in some other way undesirable. To help counteract this shaming, let's look at you from another angle – from the perspective of those who care about you.

Set the timer. Think of someone in your life who really cares about you – a partner, a friend, a parent, a sibling, a teacher who really saw who you are. What would they describe as your unique features? What do they value? Set the timer for 60 seconds. Ready, steady … go!

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3. Your Intelligences

“I want my children to understand the world, but not just because the world is fascinating and the human mind is curious. I want them to understand it so that they will be positioned to make it a better place … An important part of that understanding is knowing who we are and what we can do.”

Howard Gardner

Every superhero has a unique and special power or talent. In the NBC show, Heroes, these included: the cheerleader who could repair her injured body, a politician who could fly, a police officer who could read people's minds and an addict who could paint the future. While our talent list may not extend to the realms of fantasy, we too have variable levels of aptitude in different types of smarts and so another way of getting to know your skill set is to explore the “type” of intelligence you have. The education system doesn't always value or differentiate between these intelligences. It focuses assessment on a very narrow range of skill sets mostly involving memory, fact retention and some problem solving. So it can be easy for us to go through life believing we are not intelligent in the traditional sense, yet have many other forms of intelligent ability.

Howard Gardner is an American academic. “Multiple intelligences” was a term coined by him. Howard has dedicated much of his life's work to uncovering and naming the intelligences. I've set them out below for you. Take time to scan through them and then identify your top three.

• Spatial intelligence – the ability to recognize and gracefully work within space and to use this intelligence to navigate in more compact areas (like parallel parking for instance).
• Interpersonal intelligence – the ability to understand the intentions, motivations and desires of other people. It allows people to work effectively with others and build relationships.
• Linguistic intelligence – the ability to understand and use language to accomplish goals or express oneself. We use this skill set when marketing a business, speaking in public or writing an article.
• Logical/mathematical intelligence – the ability to analyze, investigate and use logic to solve problems.
• Musical intelligence – the ability to spot patterns that create harmony, melody and pitch and to translate these into compositions.
• Intrapersonal intelligence – the ability to look inside and understand oneself, to appreciate one's feelings, fears and motivations.
• Bodily-kinesthetic intelligence – the ability to use our bodies or parts of the body to overcome obstacles or tackle a particular physical challenges.
• Naturalist intelligence – the ability to recognize, categorize and make use of information relating to the natural environment.
• Moral intelligence – the ability to focus upon and prioritize the rules, behaviours and attitudes that govern the sanctity of life and wellbeing of all living creatures and the world they inhabit.

What are your top three natural intelligences?

• 1.
• 2.
• 3.

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Now review the list again for the one or two that you know you struggle with a little more. When you think about your Quest over the next few chapters, you will want to be on the lookout for tasks that require this kind of intelligence and begin to think about who or what could support you in completing those tasks.

In a way it doesn't matter whether we agree with the categories that Gardner has given us. What his work does is help us to understand our uniqueness – each of us has numerous strengths across these general categories. The more specific we can get about which ones “feel” like us, the more we can use this to guide our sense of our own heroism.

For more information about Howard Gardner and to find out where to take the intelligence test, please check out the resource section at the end of this book.

4. Your Values

Think about a boat bobbing about on the ocean. It might sway left and right with the tide and the waves, but if it has an anchor attached, this will prevent it drifting off and getting lost at sea. Our values are like our anchors – they tie us to who we are in a way that rarely changes throughout our lives. Our values are our guiding principles, the criteria against which we make decisions and the aspects of life that we most prize. In our teens, we tend to rebel against the values of our parents or caregivers, it's a natural part of the self-differentiation stage. However, in the long term, we do tend to align to the values that we grew up with.

Take a moment to look at the values you were taught as a young person. For me, with parents as first-generation immigrants, education was a key value. The ideas of working hard, learning new things, becoming accomplished, these values were drummed into me at almost every key decision point in my life. Rightly or wrongly, my parents wanted me to have the best education they could afford and they expected me to put the effort in to justify the expense. I also watched my parents work very hard to create financial stability for themselves, with my father doing two or three jobs when I was very young. I learned that autonomy and independence were important and these have remained guiding forces in my life. So it is no surprise that I have found myself working in the education field, always learning new things and often working in an independent fashion – either as a freelancer or as a change agent in a business.

• Rightly or wrongly, what did your parents teach you to value?
• What principles guided their lives and decisions?
• Which of these still resonate with you today?
• Are there other values that you have learned to prize – when and how did these become important to you?

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We are not our parents. They gave us our lives, but we need to claim our life and live by what matters to us. Our parents did the best they could with the knowledge and skill set they had at the time. Part of our growing up is realizing that we have choices about which of the gifts they gave us we wish to take with us and which we wish to leave behind.

5. Your Risk Profile

If you have ever been involved in a pension or investment discussion, the concept of a risk “profile” will not be foreign to you. For everyone else, any time you decide to take on an activity or responsibility about which you are not supremely confident, you are in the process of managing risk. Risk is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “to expose oneself to danger and harm.”

Risk is relevant in almost every aspect of our lives. Trevor Baylis, inventor of the wind-up radio once described us as “a banana skin away from serious injury.” Luckily, most of us are not conscious of risk all the time; if we were, we would be a very worried bunch indeed. However, anything that you want to try that you haven't done before will raise your risk antennae. This helps your survival instinct make an assessment of whether your next move will seriously harm your health.

Although many life projects can be started without a serious risk assessment, there are also many where your level of comfort around risk will be important.

If, for example, you are looking to take on a business or go self-employed, you will need to be comfortable with a certain measure of financial exposure, which if things do not go according to plan, may leave you in a precarious position in relation to money. Or if you are about to begin a significant physical challenge, like breaking a world record for sailing round the world, then you may need to consider the risk of doing damage to yourself when you assess the strain of the challenge.

Here are the three levels of risk that a pension adviser would typically assess you on concerning your finances. We can use these to determine your level of risk in general life.

Which one sounds most like you?

If you are job hunting, you will begin to notice that some jobs – investment trading, commission-only sales, are more risky than others. If you are considering a project that means a lot to you but may not be a success, e.g. restoring an old boat or property, having a child through IVF, then you may wish to consider whether your next step is in line with your risk level. Our later exploration of the support you may need in your life project should be useful for toning up your risk and resilience muscle. You will learn how to bounce back as well as prepare yourself to respond effectively to unexpected surprises.

6. Your “Fit”

The final factor to consider when reflecting on your Quest is the context in which you are most likely to be successful. Do you need people around you in a team, or do you prefer to work alone? Are you someone who likes a structure set by a mentor or expert, or do you prefer to devise your own programme? Do you want to be a parent to a child regardless of whether you have a partner or not, or do you only fantasize about a family with A.N. Other?

These things are important. Sometimes it is a matter of trial and error. You can only know that an environment does not suit you by trying it out. For me, for example, I love working with ideas and their practical application – especially in relation to people's lives. My first role was as a policy adviser at the Home Office. I was dealing with interesting topics, such as sex offending and corporate manslaughter and I loved the variety of the job. But the inherent conservatism of the Civil Service and the snail-like pace it moved at used to drive me batty! I got bored, frustrated, fidgety, demanding. I didn't feel I was really making a difference in people's lives. So when I was offered an alternative opportunity that was more about individual people's lives, I grabbed it and was much, much happier in that role. Trying to fit yourself as a square peg into a round hole can cause all kinds of health problems, lead to stress, anxiety and “failure.”