The MeKubi Method of Living Your Best Life
We’ve all been watching the rise of Marie Kondo and how her marvelous new mindset sparks joy in your life. There’s nothing more satisfying than KonMari’ing the sh*t out of your closet, peacefully saying goodbye to all those dank t-shirts and barely worn shoes that are a half size too small. A simpler lifestyle is definitely an enriched and joyful lifestyle. Stuff without feeling is just stuff and doesn’t always make you happy.
Along the same lines, I have a personal mantra that I have grown and created over my years of managing myself (lol), many creative teams, and my crazy family. This mantra is what gets us to stop barely rolling through life, but to live each day with gusto. Say hello to what I call, the MeKubi Method.¹
The MeKubi Method is the act of infusing creativity and positive energy into everything you do, even the simplest tasks. It’s making beautiful and inspiring places to live and work so that you rise every morning excited and energized. It’s attacking life with passion and making every day, hour, minute, and second count. Not a single moment should be wasted on wishing the days away.
LIVE. YOUR. BEST. LIFE. EVERY. DAY.
Let’s get started…
CREATE. We’ve all heard that phrase, “something heart and whatever something your home is”. Sorry my brain couldn’t reconcile it at the moment, but you totally know what I’m saying. Yes, you will always feel the greatest happiness where ever your heart is, but it’s even more complex than that. A home is a home because it’s an exterior extension of the root of you. When you open yourself up to a space, you are filling that space around you with your positive energy. YOU ARE FILLING IT WITH YOU. And the longer you live in a space, the more time to make your mark on it’s bedrock.
The home is really even only the beginning. The act of creating things is taking what’s inside and externalizing it. That’s why we feel so great when we knit, wood work, re-decorate or write a blog. We clone a tiny bit of ourselves and expel it into something special. We literally crap out a bit of our soul into the form of an object.
Step 1 of the MeKubi Method of living your best life is to CREATE. Do something for yourself that takes your internal spirit and externalizes it into a thing. Take that thing and display it, wear it, show it, and fill your home with it. Don’t let a “lack of creativity” stop you and certainly don’t give two sh*ts about imperfections. Creations need to be perfectly imperfect otherwise it’s just manufactured.
LIVE. It is very easy to get lost in the routine. Wake up, breakfast, work, dinner, kids, sleep. Rinse and repeat. The weekends follow a similar fate. By Sunday afternoon, you’re looking forward to being at work just so you can have a momentary minute of peace and quiet. Now instead of wishing the weekdays away, you are wishing the weekends away. At least at work no one is sneezing into your open mouth or hiding perishable snacks under the couch for “later”.
So step 2 of the Mekubi Method is to make time for you to just LIVE and reconnect with yourself, others, and the planet. In our daily lives, we probably experience .01% of what life has to offer and that’s mind blowing to me. There are activities we’ve never tried, skills we’ve never learned, and world wonders we’ve never traveled. Yet we spend a majority of our working lives doing the same repetitive tasks over and over again until we turn into a potato. Then 20 years before our expiration date we decide it’s time to travel the world with our retirement savings. In my opinion, IT’S TOO LATE BY THEN. We have no clue if we are 30%, 50% or 80% through our total lifespan and I refuse to die having not experienced a ton of the wonders this amazing planet has to offer.
Personally, my husband and I are super blessed. I have an amazing mother who gives us the most important scarcity nowadays: TIME. We have date night once a week, a long weekend every 6 months, and a whole freaking week once a year. The shorter durations allows us to reconnect with one another, reset our minds during times of stress, and live an overall healthier life. During our week long vacations, we definitely make it count, rarely visiting the same place twice, and always choosing from our bucket list. We take in new cultures, foods, history, and adventures while we are young and able. I don’t want to be scaling the Great Wall of China when I’m at 80% potato.
SELF. As I have mentioned before, you are more than a label. People are unbelievably complex and each person’s individuality is as unique as their fingerprint. The question is, how in tune are you to what drives your mindset and decision making processes? Do you know what unique qualities you possess? Are you capitalizing on them to drive yourself forward in life? Given the same exact circumstances, do you know what drives OTHER people to make decisions that are different than yours? Do know why you’re super frustrated when you’re not on time, yet Jimbo Slice over there is happy as a clam showing up 15 minutes late!?! SERIOUSLY, WHAT IS WRONG WITH THAT GUY!²
The 3rd and most important part of the MeKubi Method is taking the time to map out and understand YOURSELF. Foremost, you need to have a certain level of self awareness. It’s impossible to understand yourself if you’re in denial about shortcomings. A good tool that I like to use is the 16 Personalities Assessment³ based off of Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®️. I’ve been using and studying MBTI®️ in my personal and work relationships for about 15 years. It’s an assessment tool that categorizes people into 16 personality types based on psychological preferences and how they make decisions in the world.
Since I’m a freak, I’ve memorized the personality profiles and use that knowledge pretty frequently, especially with managing people. Studying my ENTJ personality profile let’s me know how to capitalize on my strengths and fortify my weaknesses. And it goes even further than work. By mastering your complete sense of self you get to acknowledge and celebrate the strength of YOU making you a better co-worker, mother, spouse, and plain old human being.
RISE.
Living your best life isn’t easy and it takes an exhausting amount of work. No one wakes up everyday with the expectation they’ll do nothing and everything will be amazing. You reap what you sow and I’m not about to sow cow turds. We could be at 80% of our lifespan right now. Who wants to spend the last 20% stagnantly grinding the days away. NOT ME. Every day you have to make tiny improvements to not only yourself, but your home, your work and your quality of life. Those tiny improvements slowly add up and before you know it, YOU ARE LIVING A LIFE YOU TRULY LOVE!!!!
(1)³⁶⁵ = 1
(1.01)³⁶⁵ = 37.78
¹ Apparently in Google translate MeKubi means a whole lot of things when you split up the word in different ways. Some of the translations are “eye neck/eyebrows” in Japanese, “we have to” in Kurdish and “soft killed” in Bulgarian. There is no relation to any of these multi-lingual translations. MeKubi is a combination of my maiden name and my married name. This represents the mix of who I was born to be, and the person I have now become thanks to some wonderful life experiences.
²Oh I’ll give you a mouthful about “Jim”. But I’ll reserve that for another post when I delve into the specifics of the 16 personality profiles and changing your style and expectations to get the best outcome for everyone.
³The Myer Briggs Assessment tool on 16personalities.com only works if you answer the questions honestly and about who you really are, warts and all. People have a tendency to want to sway the results and answer the questions about who you wish you were, throwing off the whole test. Only a complete sense of self awareness will get you the correct personality profile match and you need to know your profile to grow as person.
Myers-Briggs Type Indicator®️, and MBTI®️ are registered trademarks of The Myers & Briggs Foundation. No endorsement or affiliation is implied.