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Be Present - Life Itself Is The Reward: My Top Just Press Record '24 Moment #1
feat. Mark McCartney and Sean DeLaney
Matt Zeigler
January 09, 2025
If there’s one idea I want to carry into 2025 and beyond, it’s to stop and check in with how I’m feeling.
Mark McCartney and Sean DeLaney are both professional coaches who know a thing or two about listening to our inner voices.
They both work predominantly with professionals these days, but Mark, with his finance and consulting background, and Sean with his accomplished athlete background, each have so much to bring to the conversation with each other about the roots of their approaches.
In what was probably my most responded-to clip of the year, here’s Mark sharing his story about listening to his gut and why it mattered,
Sometimes that energy, and Sean I don’t know about you, but it comes for me without words, with a very clear action from it.
Matt mentioned I left finance. The weekend before I was leaving it, I was supposed to start a new job at a 40% pay increase. I told people, “Oh I’m doing this job, I’ve been offered this thing,” probably fluffing my own feathers a bit, and then the weekend before I was supposed to start the role, I was laying on my bed, doing a body scan, and I just had almost like a whiplash, like a lightning bolt through my body.
And my misses is from Germany, hence I’m living in Berlin now, but at the time we were living in Vancouver, and she was back in Germany over Christmas, I simply picked up the phone after I had that experience and I said, “There’s no way I can do this.” She goes, “Cool. Where are we off to?” I said, “I don’t know, Mario says Peru was good,” and then that was it.
This moment, to check in with his gut, and then to admit feeling the lightning bolt… I’ve reduced the lightning bolt to a lightning bug and put it in a jar too many times to count.
Apparently a lot of others have to.
And as I was processing that thought in the moment, Mark dropped the title that’s essentially on the Best of 2024 YouTube cover:
Life itself ends up being the reward.
It’s not about being anywhere else, but right here, right now. And Sean swooped in to add,
Mark, I think you said probably the best line that’s going to be said this conversation, and that was, “To hold what is present, what is present right in front of you. ”
That right there, if you can teach someone a skill, “Can I sit there and hold what is transpiring in front of me…”
The reward isn’t going to ever be any place except in the moment when you receive it.
Maybe not every moment will be a perfect reward. Actually, definitely not every moment. And maybe even a handful of finding them is a level of Zen I’ll never achieve.
But, the lightning bolt moments, when the anti-reward cluing is upon me, where the signal to move towards a present you want, and then feel it when it arrives?
That’s attainable. That’s a lesson from the year that was, for the year that’s coming. And it takes the people around you, the ideas in your head (and heart), and the willingness to find and enjoy the amazing connections they can create.
Listen to your gut. And listen to Mark DeLaney and Sean McCartney #1 clip in the clip show below, as well as their brilliant conversation on Just Press Record.
Ever since I heard this story, every time I think of it I get this Jake Bugg song stuck in my head too. To the present moments and the lightning bolts: