It’s 4am on a Sunday. You’re in the car park at the airport. The flight to site goes in forty minutes. You’ve done this drive in the dark so many times the route is in your hands and not in your head. Your partner is asleep. The kid is asleep. The dog is asleep. The house, when you left it, was the same shape it always is at this hour.
You’re going back on shift for two weeks. You’ll be in a different state. You’ll wear high-vis. You’ll work twelve-hour days. You’ll be in a donga, a camp, a hotel - somewhere that isn’t your house. When the two weeks are up, you’ll fly home for a week, and then you’ll drive back to this same car park at 4am on a Sunday seven days later.
This article isn’t about the roster. The roster gets discussed enough. The pay gets discussed enough. The shift work gets discussed enough.
This article is about the thing the roster does to you that the conversation about the roster doesn’t quite capture.
The Particular Cost of Two Lives
FIFO works the body in a specific way that other forms of work don’t. The body lives in two locations and runs two slightly different versions of itself depending on which one it’s in. The site version. The home version. The site version is on, working, social-in-a-particular-way with the crew, sleeping in a single bed in a room with thin walls. The home version is supposed to be off, family-centred, sleeping in the bed with the partner, being a parent, being a person whose day has nothing to do with where the roster is.
The transition between the two takes a day or two each way. You arrive home and the body isn’t quite home yet. You leave and the body isn’t quite at site yet. Over years of doing this, the transitions don’t get easier. They get more accustomed-to. There’s a difference.
What the FIFO body is also doing, that the conversation doesn’t always name, is a long-running grief. Every fortnight, the body says goodbye to one life and good morning to the other. The body never quite gets to fully commit to either, because the other one is always coming back in two weeks.
This isn’t a complaint about the work. The work is the work. People who do FIFO know what they signed up for and most of them, given the choice again, would sign up again. The conversation about FIFO isn’t a conversation about whether the work is worth doing.
It’s a conversation about what carrying two lives quietly costs, and about why no amount of “the schedule is just what it is” addresses the cost.
What’s Doing the Carrying
You’ll have tried things. Most FIFO people have. The structured calls home. The rituals around arriving and leaving. The mate at site who gets it. The mate at home who tries to. Some of it has helped. None of it has fully reached the carrying.
That’s not a failure of those things. They’re working the conscious level - about five per cent of what’s running in you at any given moment. The other ninety-five per cent is the subconscious, which has been doing the work of running two lives in parallel for as long as you’ve been on the roster.
For a lot of FIFO Australians, the subconscious script runs something like: Don’t get too settled in either place. The other one is coming. Don’t let the body fully commit. Stay ready to switch.
It doesn’t run as language. It runs as the way the body doesn’t quite let go on day five at home. The way you can’t quite arrive at site on day two. The reflex to check the date on your phone because the rotation has its own time and you’ve stopped tracking the regular one.
The conscious-level corrections don’t reach that script. The script is doing what the script was set up to do, which is keep you operational across two lives. The conscious mind would, if asked, like the script to take a holiday. The script doesn’t know how.
What the Method Reaches
The plane lands on the home side. Within an hour the second shape of life has been activated and the work-side has been packed away, and the next day the kids notice something is off even though the resolution to be present was made on the descent. By the third day the patter is back, the partner can tell you’re somewhere else again, and by the time the next plane is boarding the home side has been wrapped tight enough to fit in carry-on. The conscious mind has watched all of this happen. It has nothing to do with how the two sides are being held apart, because the holding is not conscious work.
Inner Influencing is a way of writing instructions to the part of you that’s been doing the actual holding. Not the part that books the family dinner. The deeper part that decides which life gets to be in the body at any given moment.
The instruction has to be structured for the subconscious to read it as one - not as more conscious traffic. The trigger phrase is “Purple Cow.” Strange enough to register as not-noise. One statement. Said once. No repetition.
Try It For Yourself
Read each statement below slowly - out loud if you can. Say it once, then stop. Let a moment of quiet follow before the next one.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the running script that keeps me from fully arriving in either of the lives I move between, the held tension of running two versions of myself in parallel, and the reflex to never quite let the body settle in case the other life calls in two weeks, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then pause and notice.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will get rid of the belief that staying not-quite-committed is what keeps me ready, that the other life will punish me for arriving fully in this one, that the cost of FIFO is just the price of the income, and the conviction that nothing can be done about what running two lives in parallel actually costs, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Take a breath. Let it settle.
“Subconscious, when I say Purple Cow, you will make it easy for me to arrive fully in whichever life I’m currently in, to be at home when I’m home and at site when I’m at site, and to know that letting one life land doesn’t endanger the other, and keep me free from that from now on, and do this in a way that is natural, easy, instant and graceful. Purple Cow.”
Say it once. Then simply rest for a moment.
What Just Landed
You may have felt something small. A breath that went somewhere it hadn’t been reaching. A slight unclenching in the place that’s been holding the not-quite-committed. A faint sense, even small, of being more fully where you actually are. Whatever happened, the subconscious received the signal at the layer where the parallel-running has been organised from.
This kind of shift doesn’t arrive with drama. It tends to arrive as less of something - less of the held in-betweenness, a slightly quieter version of the script that’s been running.
What you just did is the entry-level move of Inner Influencing. There are deeper layers underneath - the original instructions about how to manage two lives, the long-running rule that staying ready is more important than arriving, the inheritance of a particular Australian shape of work that asks more of a body than the roster admits. The free Inner Influencing Discovery Kit takes you further into this work and explains why it reaches what other methods don’t.
A lot of FIFO Australians have been running two lives in parallel for so long they’ve stopped distinguishing it from being alive.
There’s a being-alive that doesn’t require the parallel. The roster is the roster. The carrying around the roster is updateable.
The subconscious doesn’t need an argument. It needs the right signal at the right level. You’ve just sent one.