The Homebody: Small Shifts for People Who Actually Like Their Life
Most advice about change is written for people who are unhappy. You are not unhappy.
You like your people. You like your kitchen in the morning. You know what matters to you and you are not confused about it, which puts you ahead of a great many people who look busier than you do.
There is just one thing. It has been on the someday list for a while now.
This is the Homebody
Knows exactly what matters. Happiest close to home.
Homebodies are clear about their direction and in no rush to prove it to anyone. You have built a life you would not trade, and you are protective of it, which is not the same as being stuck.
What you are good at
Knowing what matters, which sounds simple and is not. Most people cannot answer that question without a long walk. Loyalty, to people and to places. And contentment, which our culture treats as a lack of ambition and which is in fact the thing everyone else is trying to buy their way into.
Where the road gets rough
Someday quietly becomes the plan. Not a decision, exactly. More an absence of one, repeated often enough that it hardens.
Comfort outweighs change, and comfort is not a weakness. It is simply very good at its job. The trouble is that it does not distinguish between things worth protecting and things worth outgrowing.
And you wait for life to calm down first. It is a reasonable plan. It has never once worked, for anyone.
Three things that actually help
1. Ask what you would regret, not what you want
Want is a weak signal for a Homebody, because you already have most of what you want. Regret is sharper. What is the one thing that would bother you in ten years if it stayed on the list?
2. Make it small enough to be unremarkable
You do not need a new life. You need a next step that fits inside the one you have. If a step would require rearranging your whole week, it is too big, and it will not survive contact with a normal Tuesday.
3. Give it a home, literally
A chair, a corner of a table, a particular half hour. You are a person who is shaped by places. Use that. A thing with a place attached to it is far harder to forget than a thing with only an intention attached to it.
You do not have to leave home to go somewhere new.
Where the Compass Kit comes in
For a Homebody, the useful part of The Compass Guidebook is not the dreaming. You have done the dreaming. It is Momentum Goals and the Motivated Action Plan: a small number of steps sized for a real life rather than an imaginary one.
The Pocket Compass then does the quiet work of keeping it in view, which for you is the whole battle. Nothing about your life makes you forget what matters. It just makes it easy to postpone.
We are building it now, and we will tell you the day it is ready.
