Tuesday, June 30, 2009

Time, Mobility, Money (In That Order!)




I narrowed down to a list of 4 values with my Coach. I had to start by defining 30 values. I was stuck at 6. When I finally had a list of 30 and had to choose my 5 most important ones, I had trouble letting some of them go. Here are the 4 I chose and as I look at them now, they truly represent where I stand right now.
  • Personal Power defined as strength, belief in myself, clarity.
  • Authenticity defined as friendship, trust and being my authentic self.
  • Continuous Learning defined as Knowledge, Achievement and Trying New Things.
  • Freedom defined as Adventure, Choice and Variety.
Tim Ferriss of The 4-Hour Work Week defines the new goals of increasing time and mobility now rather than waiting for some vague retirement time which may not come. He discusses automating your cash flow so you can finance your mobility and use your free time to try new things. I like how he turns the old "Work until you can Retire" model on it's head. He makes me think differently and see possibilities in a model for life that I had never even considered. He shows you how to go now.
His principles align perfectly with my values. Sychronicity.

Two Things and Five Things


Two things I learned this week. Waiting is my way of procrastinating. If I am waiting for an answer from someone else, I am not responsible to act. By knowing this I can move past it. When I am about to make the most challenging step on a path to a goal, I tend to ask questions of others and then spend time waiting for the answers. It keeps me from having to take the big step.


The second thing I learned was to keep on trying when I was not getting the result I needed. (Hmmm that's new!) I reached a wall on a project that I was working on and I just kept calling to get another opinion until one person provided me with the lead I needed to move on to the next step. As a result, I made a huge leap toward the goal.


Just putting words onto these behaviors helps me to grow past them.


Jack Canfield says to do 5 things each day that move you towards your goal. I like that idea. 5 things a day for a year is more than 1800 things done to achieve your goals. Imagine contacting 5 PR sources for your business. Imagine contacting 5 people that can assist with production. Imagine meeting with a mentor each week to keep your momentum going. Do one thing to move you towards production of a prototype. Build your website. Have labels created. Have bar codes registered for your product. Contact 5 web sites that will carry your product. Contact 5 stores that might carry your product. 5 more things each day until one day you are looking back at what you have accomplished. Victorious retrospect.

Friday, June 19, 2009

A Series of Small Steps


When you have a big idea, it is exciting and motivating. Then you begin the actual execution of the tasks to make your idea become real. These are banal tasks that are seemingly unrelated to the exhiliaration of the goal. That makes them hard to do. Do them anyway. I have experienced this sequence before and it leads directly to the goal by completing one task and moving on to the next one. Some of the tasks are difficult and new. Some of them feel like showstoppers. Go around them. There is a new path just beyond.

I had dinner with a friend last night and she started a very successful business doing what she loves. She said when she is working she feels like this is exactly what she should be doing. She tried to think of her ideal life and what it would look like. And she says her ideal life and her real life are the same. What an achievement. We should all be that focussed.

Monday, June 15, 2009

Optimism

Nancy Davis wrote a book about optimism and MS. I ordered it immediately. I am frighteningly optimistic in thinking I can control this strange disease. I balk at the word disease as I type it. I refuse to think of it as a disease but rather just another thing that I can manage within my list of priorities. A little self deception? Maybe. Whatever gets you through the night. An attack could suddenly change my life. But I can also get hit unexpectedly by a bus. Could result in the same outcome. Yet....I do not worry about being hit by a bus. I will not worry about this as there is little affect that will have on my outcome.

Here is what the knowledge of a possible attack of MS should do. It should make me re-evaluate what I am doing with the precious minutes and days that I have available. Am I doing the things that I enjoy or am I doing the things that people my age do. I think it is the latter and I am making it the former. So....now armed with my list of things I want to do, I am carving out a new lifestyle for myself. “Every adversity and defeat carries the seed of an equivalent benefit, if we are ingenious enough to find it.”

This should not be an exercise related to an MS diagnosis but one which we should all do to create the life of our dreams. Ask yourself if you are you who you dreamed you would be when you were young? The answer to that will probably be "no". But the achievement of that is not beyond our reach. So how can we gradually change our lives to become who we had hoped to be. We all need to feel the momentum of new goals that we stretch towards and feel the victory of reaching new levels of ability in every area of our lives.

We all have precious time left and we want to be sure to do the things that make our hearts sing. Today, not someday.
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