Changing Your Life’s Direction –
What is your unlivedself. And how do you get there?
A Major Pivot in My Career
There’s no more CEO C suite for me – physical hard work that’s also spiritually fulfilling along with setting up other businesses that are climate-positive – the perfect life. There’s never been a better time – markets are turning upside down – AI is on the march – which is both a positive and negative thing. Now’s the time to find your own way forward.
Expect Friction: Your brain prefers safety and comfort. Moving toward your unlived self will feel scary, but discomfort is a sign of growth, not a sign of failure. Pivoting your career is a powerful opportunity to reconnect with your “unlived self”—the passions, creative talents, and deep interests you may have set aside for a career that is now slowly killing you.
I Built my Own System
I had to build my own way forward – a way out of corporate hell. And that’s what I did. I’m now on a mission to help others find their unlived self.
Don’t be the one who says;
“I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
I found my perfect life – natural burials return the body to the earth simply, beautifully, and without preservation. How can we all live our lives with that same raw, unpreserved authenticity?
Why don’t people follow their true path in life?
Here’s the 3 main reasons –
Sacrifice Meaning – choosing the practical path over the purposeful one, year after year, until your truest callings feel like a distant memory
Silencing Intuition – suppressing your deep gut instincts because the facts seem to point in a different direction (financial being a big one!)
Postponing the Dream: deferring your ultimate goals to a vague ‘someday’ – an horizon that continuously recedes into the future.
“Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between them stands resistance.”
Steven Pressfield
I used to measure my life in quarters, spreadsheets, and deliverables. As a CEO, my days were a hyper-efficient blur of back-to-back meetings and the relentless pursuit of growth. I lived entirely in the future, chasing an horizon that always seemed to move just out of reach.
But I broke out of the resistance barrier. It took me 6 years.
Today, I spend my mornings in the quiet company of the earth. I left the corporate suite to become a grave digger specializing in natural burials. I now have a portfolio lifestyle – natural burials, soil & stars (a peace garden we’re creating), experimental music creation, off-grid living, eco-friendly house building, helping people find their unlived self – my perfect life.
Bewilderment
To start with my transition left most of my former colleagues bewildered. They looked at my shift from CEO to graves as a step down. But they had it backwards. Moving from the boardroom to the graveyard wasn’t a retreat from life. It was my awakening to it. Now many want to find their unlived self. And look at my move with envy.
The Career Ladder
In the corporate world, everything is designed to project permanence. We build brands to outlast markets. We convince ourselves that if we just work hard enough, achieve enough, and optimize enough, we can outrun our competitors – win, win, win.
But when you stand inside a freshly dug grave, the illusion of permanence evaporates. In natural burials, there are no concrete vaults, no chemical embalming fluids, and no lacquered steel caskets. We lay bodies directly into the earth, wrapped in simple biodegradable shrouds or wicker baskets. The goal is to let the body return to the soil naturally, becoming part of the seasonal cycle of the forest or meadow.
It is beautifully, heartbreakingly simple. And it is the most honest thing I have ever done.
Polite Lies
Every single day, I look at the physical boundary of a human life. I see the exact space we all eventually fill. And when you look into that space often enough, you stop listening to the polite lies of modern society.
You realize that death isn’t a tragedy that happens at the end of a long story. The real tragedy is the unlived life we don’t pursue. The authentic self that we bury years before our hearts actually stop beating.
Dress Rehearsals
You do not need to quit your job tomorrow and become a grave digger to find your unlived self. But you do need to stop treating your life like a dress rehearsal. The timeline you think you have is a fiction. The corporate ladder, the societal expectations, the endless waiting for the “right time” to finally do what makes you feel alive—all of it is just a way to delay the terrifying, beautiful responsibility of being who you truly are.
Don’t blow up your existing life. Rather, find a way forward that allows for mistakes. The bad will happen. Step over them. Work around them. Knock them over. But don’t let them box you in.
Do you think you know what you unlivedself really is?
Not always. I did not set out in life to be a grave digger. It was only because my mind was open to new opportunities. A random conversation with a grave digger whilst out on a run changed everything. But I could not see this at the time. But in retrospect I can see the logic.
I’d started a notebook writing out ideas. Phrases, poems, myths (I don’t think in figures or spreadsheets any longer). Slowly I realised I was building a new life. My Unlived Self. Firstly, as ideas and then slowly they entered my reality.
I remember writing out the things I wanted in my life –
Nature, fitness, music, spirituality and enough money to live on without selling my soul.
And all the things I didn’t want –
A corporate life, tech bros and algorithms, and all the bad things that came with it.
Do the same – write out the things you’d like in your life. And those you don’t. Use these two questions to help you get started –
What if the voice inside you could speak without fear, what changes is it begging you to make?
What activities or environments make you feel incredibly alive and energised?
3:3:3
Don’t expect your answers to be correct from day one. I have a 3:3:3 rule. If what you write is still your best self after 3 days, then 3 weeks, then 3 months you’re moving forward. If at any of these points you need to change or modify – do it.
You’re starting you build your new reality.
A poem to finish off –
The unlived self
It permeates the air and clouds
The city and the countryside
It encompassing everything around you
It invites you to reach high and to take hold of it
Your unlivedself is calling out to you
Hear it’s call
Light,
David.
