Ed. Note – This is the first in a series of posts in which I’ll deal with the main purpose of this site: Life Design.  The series will be an encapsulation of my thoughts on the subject, and the foundation for everything else that’s written here.  You can find the entire series of posts here.

Designing a personal development plan is a very involved task. A designer will start out any project with some thought as to what he or she wants to accomplish, and then will lay out a plan to complete it. For example, an architect will begin the design process with the idea that he or she is going to design a building for a specific purpose (say, an office building).  However, merely the thought of an “OFFICE BUILDING” isn’t comprehensive enough to provide all the information needed for the architect to complete the project.  Specific uses of the space by the potential tenants of the building must be understood and planned for, as will the environment in which the building will reside.  These and many other factors must be considered before the building plans are finalized. Planning is an intense process that requires a great deal of focus, concentration, clarity of purpose, and commitment to continue through the difficult portions.

Our lives can be thought of as buildings.  If attention to detail is present during the planning phase, and ruthless commitment to carrying out those plans occurs during the building process, the final structure will be sound, aesthetically pleasing, and able to be used for the intended purposes of the designer.  However, if the designer is haphazard in planning, or the builder doesn’t follow the plans to the letter, then you can run into a world of problems.  The very best you can hope for in that situation is that the building stays up.  It may be functional, but it certainly won’t be optimal.  And, it’s very likely that at some point, the building will come crashing down.

You alone are the designer and builder of your life.  No one can plan your life for you, and no one can take the steps needed to execute the personal development plan you’ve made.  You’re in control.  That thought can be tremendously liberating and heart-poundingly terrifying at the same time.  And, as we all know, failing to plan is planning to fail.  You can opt out of Life Design, if you’d like.  You’ll just never be able to build the optimal life for you.  The building analogy still holds here: if you have a skilled builder, he or she may be able to cobble together a functional shelter without plans. It won’t be great, it’ll cost a lot more than you originally planned, and it won’t be pretty from some angles, but it’ll work.  Wouldn’t it be easier to just take the time to develop a set of plans?

The first thing that has to occur is the determination of your values.  From the values you hold will flow your life’s vision, or the concept of how you want your life to play out. Some people can list what their values are off the top of their head, but most folks would have a tough time doing it immediately.

So, let’s take some time to determine those priorities, shall we?  Take out a pen and a piece of paper (you should do this tangibly, not on a screen), and write down ten or twelve (or however many you can think of) things that are important to you in your life.  Examples could be: “family”, “friends”, “baseball”, “the environment”.  Seriously, write down anything and everything you possibly can think of that’s important to you.  I’ll wait here.

…

Okay, you’re back?  Good.  Now, take this list, and find a quiet place.  You’re going to have to do something that might reveal some things to you about yourself that you didn’t know.  I want you to take the first two items on the list and think about which one is more important to you.  Once you’ve picked the winner, move on to the next two and do the same thing.  As you’re doing this, make a list of the winners.  Once you complete the original list, do the same with the new list you’ve created, and so on, until you boil your values down to the top one or two.  You need to make sure you’ve not eliminated a potential value that would have beaten out a pair of values farther down the list.  I wouldn’t go so far as to seed your values, NCAA tournament-style, but you get the idea.

You know what?  You might have found out that “family” isn’t really as important to you as some other things in your life.  Some things that society tells you should rank higher on you list might not.  That’s why we do this exercise in secret.  It’s so important to be brutally honest at this stage, because we’re trying to get at the heart of what makes you, you.  Your values are your values, and I’m not here to judge them.  If you personally think your priorities are out of whack when you do this exercise, then it’s up to you to fix that however you deem necessary.  I don’t care what they are, I just want you to know what they are so you can move forward with your own personal development plans.

Here’s another thing about priorities: you can only hold one or two at a time, but they can change.  Not willy-nilly or without a lot of consideration as to the consequences of that change, but they might.  For example, let’s say you have a small child or two in your home right now.  One of your priorities may be your children at this juncture in your life.  However, as they age and move out of the house, you may find that they don’t play as prominent a role in decisions you make as to how you allocate your time and resources.  They’re still important to you, but other priorities may have superseded them now.

I want you to take some time and really focus on the priorities that came out of the exercise you did.  Do they resonate with you as you keep thinking about them throughout the next few days?  If you need to do the exercise a few times, that’s okay.  Sometimes people end up with answers they don’t really feel are representative of who they are, or they don’t like what they see.  If that’s you, and you feel like you need to adjust your priorities, then do that.  Make sure you get to a place where you are comfortable with the picture your priorities paint of you.  Just don’t lie to yourself.

photo courtesy: David Paul Ohmer

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1. Dreams
2. Goals
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Ed. Note – This is the second in a series of posts in which I’ll deal with the main purpose of this site: Life Design.  This will be an encapsulation of my thoughts on the subject, and the foundation for everything else that’s written here.  You can find the entire series here.

In the first post in this series on personal development plans, we dealt with values. What values are, why they’re important, and how to discover yours.  Your values are your priorities in life.  Each decision you make should advance those values somehow.  If you act in ways that are contrary to those values, you’ll find yourself frustrated and depressed.  What we’re really talking about is being a person with integrity (this is slightly different from “honesty”, which is how a lot of people interpret “integrity” today).  The way I’m using the word “integrity” means there is consistency between who you really are and the persona that you display to the world.  If you do things that go against your values, you’re not acting with integrity, and you’re not going to be a complete person.

In this post, we’re going to deal with dreams.  When we talk about dreams in this context, we’re discussing what we want to do with our lives.  That could refer to an overarching scenario as to how we see our lives playing out, or it could be specific events or things within it.  Since we know that acting according to our values is the only way we can achieve integrity in our lives, we need to ensure that our dreams flow from our values.

For instance, let’s say that one of your values is “time with family”.  All of your dreams need to advance that value (or, at least not conflict with it).  If one of your dreams is to have a Ferrari, you need to find a way to get that car without sacrificing your time with your family.  If you can’t do that, you should probably reconsider which is more important to you, the Ferrari or your family.

The first thing you need to do is make a list of all the things/experiences/achievements that you view as a dream.  These don’t necessarily have to be huge things, like “Climb Mt. Everest” or “make a million by the time I’m 35”.  They can be, but they don’t have to be.  The object during this exercise is to list as many of these dreams as you can possibly think of; big, small, or anywhere in between.

Once you’ve made this list, it’s time to evaluate those dreams against the values you’ve previously identified as part of your personal development plan.  Remember, you really only have one or two values.  Look at the first dream you’ve identified, and ask yourself, “How does this dream flow from my life’s priorities?”  Write down the answer to that question for each dream.  A few sentences will do.  It doesn’t have to be long, but it does need to be sufficient to really explain how the dream meshes with one or both of your values.

Keep progressing down the list, asking the same questions and writing down your answers.  If you run into some dreams that you can’t justify, you’ll need to put them in a separate list for further consideration.

These dreams you’ve segregated out from the main list aren’t necessarily things you have to abandon.  It may be that you just need more time to understand how it fits in with your priorities.  It’s also possible that it’s a dream that’s worthwhile, but it doesn’t fit with your values right now.  You may need to revisit it at some future point when it aligns more with your priorities at that time.  However, since you can’t justify it right now, it’s not a dream you can pursue at this time.

This exercise ensures your integrity.  If you say something is important to you, then you need to act like it.  If you don’t, your mind and attitude will rebel against you.  That lack of agreement between the value and the dream (and the actions needed to achieve the dream) will make you frustrated and will nag on your consciousness until you make some changes to bring the two into alignment.  This feeling of being unsettled with how your life is progressing is what many people refer to as your conscience.  You’ll know that you’re doing something you shouldn’t be doing, or not doing something you should.

In order to achieve your dreams, you’ll have to sacrifice time and effort, maybe money and pleasure.  It won’t be easy.  That’s why, if your dreams don’t align with your priorities, you’ll want to give up and quit.  The combination of sacrifice and an unsettled spirit is too much for anyone to overcome.  However, if you have the conviction inside of you that what you’re giving up is less important than the dream you’re striving for (and the value that dream represents), you’ll be able to continue on.

photo courtesy: francesco sgroi

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1. Goals
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Ed. Note – This is the third in a series of posts in which I’ll deal with the main purpose of this site: Life Design.  This will be an encapsulation of my thoughts on the subject, and the foundation for everything else that’s written here.  You can find the entire series here.

In the first post of this series, we discussed values, which is just another term for “priorities”.  Priorities are the one or two (that’s all; no more than that) things in your life that you love above everything else.  Those values will shape your dreams (part 2).  If you have dreams that don’t serve to advance your values, I said that they were probably inappropriate dreams for you to have at this point in your life.  You don’t necessarily have to give them up forever, but unless your values change, it’s not going to do you any good to try to achieve them.  You’ll only end up frustrated.

So, how do we reach those dreams that we’ve set for ourselves?  With goals, of course.  A goal is something that you’re trying to achieve.  I’ve often heard the definition, “a goal is a dream with a deadline”, and I like that.  Deadlines tend to create forward motion on the part of the person who has them.  They provide a frame of reference through which a person can create, in this case,  a personal development plan to achieve.

A lot of people are down on goals these days.  If you read a lot of the same blogs I do, I’m sure you’ve seen a backlash lately toward productivity and “lifehacks” (things people do to simplify and streamline their daily tasks).  If you don’t read the same blogs I do, let me tell you there’s been a backlash.   While I agree to a certain extent (people can get so caught up tweaking with their productivity system that they become less effective and efficient than they were before they started), I’m hardly ready to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which I think is the direction these “anti-hack” people are going.

When I suggest that you set goals, there are some specific guidelines that you need to put in place in order to make them work for you, not against you.

1. Your goals need to be actionable. That means that you need to have specific, evident actions associated with everything you want to achieve.  Many people think “Climb Mt. Everest” is a goal.  It’s not; it’s a dream. Goals are mileposts along the way to achieving your dream.  So, if you want to climb Mt. Everest, but you’ve never been hiking before, your first goal should probably be research of some kind, not strapping on crampons and booking a flight to Nepal.  A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

 

2. Your goals need to be incremental. You’re going to want to read accounts of people who’ve climbed Everest previously, to see what they did to prepare.  You’ll want to know the kind of training they did, what they packed, how the application process works to get a visa and a permit, the medical screening they went through, etc. etc.  Each of these areas (and probably plenty of others) have sub-tasks associated with them that  build upon each other.  For example, if you’ve never even hiked before, then you can’t very well start training for Everest by climbing Mt. McKinley.  You can’t start in the middle; you’ve got to start at the beginning.  So, you’ll want to find someone who’s good at hiking and have them show you how it’s done.  Once you’ve become proficient at hiking (from a fitness and technical standpoint), you’ll want to take that experience and transfer it to learning to mountain climb.  Some of the same skills will apply, and others will form the basis for new skills that didn’t come into play at all when you were merely walking trails.

 

3. You need to have a mentor. Each goal should be self-contained.  Only one task at any time.  Try not to do things in parallel.  When you try to accomplish multiple things at one time (especially in relation to a big dream that you have only the foggiest idea of how you’ll accomplish it), you tend to get distracted.  Focus on one thing at a time and do that one thing the best you can.  It’s very helpful to have someone assist you in setting priorities if you’ve never done something before.  If you’re able to find someone who’s a skill mountain climber, they can help you determine what you need to work on in order to achieve the status that they have.  These people are out there, you just have to look.  They might be someone you know, or you might need to find a discussion board on the internet somewhere and ask for advice on how you proceed.

Goal-setting provides clarity and purpose.  It eliminates distractions along the way, because there’s always a task for you to accomplish to move ahead.  A lot of people’s problems with goals stem from the fact that they really don’t have clarity on how to get from where they are to where they want to be.  What’s that old saying?  “If you don’t know where you’re going, then any road will do,”.  Something like that.  But, if you know where you want to end up, then you need to have a map that lists the route with all the twists and turns.  This is a crucial part of your personal development plan.  The “map” provided by your goals gives you an orderly procession from one task to the next until you almost magically arrive at your destination.  You can’t help but get where you’re going if you follow the directions and actually move forward.

Photo courtesy: coxy

Related posts:

1. Dreams
2. Staying On Track With Your Goals
3. What’s The Problem With Goals?

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Ed. Note – This is the fourth in a series of posts in which I’ll deal with the main purpose of this site: Life Design.  This will be an encapsulation of my thoughts on the subject, and the foundation for everything else that’s written here.  You can find the entire series here.

So, now that we have all these goals, what do we do?  The problem that everyone seems to have with goals is that they’re hard to keep up with.  What I mean is, typically people will keep their goals in their heads, and won’t commit them to paper (a big no-no).  I’ve heard statistics stating that only 2% of Americans write down goals of any kind.  If you never write your goals down, they remain nebulous and vague.  Writing them down forces clarity and directness, and it removes them from your mind so that you can focus on coming up with actions to achieve them.

Even if people write down their goals, they still find it difficult to keep on track with them.  As long as they remain big, long-term statements, there’s really no road map to get from where you are to where you’re going.  Having big goals is fine; it’s a great motivator for you to just see where you’d like to be.  However, under those goals should be a list of tasks that, taken in sequential order, will get you to that end goal.  This requires a lot more work than just sitting down at a table and listing out what you want your life to look like in 5 years, like many people have done in the past.

I’m not saying this to discourage you from setting big, audacious goals that express your innermost desires.  What I am saying is that you need to be able to plan from your goals a way to achieve them.

1. You need a daily to-do list.  The list is just what it says: a list of tasks that you need to complete every day, to move you farther along the road toward your goals.  The format of the list isn’t that important; you can use a piece of paper and a pencil, or any number of software options (from the free Google Tasks in Gmail through any number of expensive stand-alone programs).  Just be sure it fits easily into how you live your life.  For example, if you work outside all day, away from a computer or means to monitor an electronic list, then electronic lists probably aren’t the best option for you.  You need to be able to refer to it at any time during your day.

   Once you’ve identified incremental steps along the road to the goals you’ve set, like I suggested in the previous post, you should take the first one and put it on this list.  I would personally suggest that you have one task for each goal in your life to be accomplished every day.  You can set up your list depending on the options available to you, but you should associate each task with every goal that you have.  You can color-code them with highlighters or use the “@” sign followed by the name of the goal, and then list the task associated with it.

2. You need to have periodic updates where you review your progress.  These updates can happen whenever you feel they’re necessary; I personally think that anything more regular than monthly is probably too often.  I would go with quarterly.

   In your first update, you’ll want to sit down with your list of big goals, and detail all that you’ve accomplished in the past quarter on the way to achieving it.  You should also take the time to note anything that went wrong during the past quarter when trying to complete certain tasks.  Perhaps you ran into challenges in finding the information you needed or you somehow got off-track and didn’t keep up with doing tasks to reach a particular goal.  Don’t beat yourself up about it, just use these cues to understand your trouble areas, and set about thinking of ways to get around them during the next quarter.

   During subsequent updates, you can have the opportunity to look back on where you were at the last update and how far you’ve come.  You should also look for areas where you had challenges in the prior periods, to see if you’ve overcome them sufficiently.  If not, you need to dig deeper to examine your motivation.  Is it really just a set of circumstances conspiring against you (that happens sometimes!), or are you subconsciously not as interested in the goal as you used to be?  There’s nothing wrong with that, either.  If you find yourself plugging away at something that doesn’t bring you joy currently, and you don’t see it adding much long-term value to your life, then quit doing it.  Don’t plug away at something for a long period of time just because you made a commitment to yourself.

   The commitment you made with yourself initially is to become the best “you” you could possibly be.  These goals are supposed to help you get there.  If all a goal is doing is making you crabby and irritable because you set it and now see that it’s not the goal for you, then drop it.  Life’s too short.

3. You should do a yearly review.  This is somewhat like your periodic updates, except for you’ll need to examine every goal you have set for yourself, whether you’re making good progress or not.  Evaluate them against your life values and make sure that they’re still matching up.  Also, make sure that you’ve not uncovered a better way to reach your dream during the prior year.  The good can be the enemy of the best sometimes, and the same is true with goals.  If something has come up during the course of the year that has led you to believe that your dream can be more quickly or easily reached without compromising who you are, then you should consider changing your goals to align with that.

   Next, plan for the upcoming year.  See if you have any new dreams that have come up and make sure you’ve set up a plan to achieve them.  This is especially easy if you’ve achieved a dream during the prior year.  Always try to replace one with another.  We risk becoming stagnant in our lives if we’re not focused on achieving a dream of some kind.

4. Finally, you need an accountability partner.  This could be a mentor of yours, who’s helping you along the road to achieving one or more of your goals.  However, it can also be someone you’re close to who you feel comfortable in sharing your goals and dreams with.  These people should feel the same way about you.  You both should make a pact to have regular discussions about  your progress, and promise to be totally honest about your successes and failures.  The motivational power of knowing that someone you respect expects something from you is amazing.  Many times in the past, it’s been the only thing that kept me going on the road to doing what I know I needed to do.

Am I perfect at all these steps?  Absolutely not.  I’m especially sloppy at numbers 2 and 4.  I also have a tendency to get lazy and keep lists in my head.  However, I think this is a good road map for getting your dreams realized.  You can’t build a personal development plan without a systematic effort like the one described here.  I’m working towards the discipline involved in numbers 1 through 3, and the willingness to be open with someone for number 4.  I hope you’ll be able to work through these steps to achieve your dreams.

Photo Courtesy: comedy_nose

Which of these steps seems the most difficult to you?  Why?  Have you ever used any of these methods to achieve a dream of yours in the past?  Tell us about it in the comments…

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1. Goals
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Ed. Note – This is the fifth and last in a series of posts in which I’ll deal with the main purpose of this site: Life Design.  This will be an encapsulation of my thoughts on the subject, and the foundation for everything else that’s written here.  You can find the entire series here.

We’ve covered a lot in the past few weeks, discussing the various steps one needs to take in order to create a personal development plan and live an ordered, effective life (what I’ve been calling “Life Design”). What this is really all about is getting your life to the point where you’re content with where you’re at. Not so much that you’re happy all the time (although, this process could lead you toward being happy a lot more often than you currently are), but that you have a peace inside of you that comes from knowing that you’re doing what you are meant to be doing. Having an ordered, effective life will bring you to that place.

I know that those terms, especially “ordered”, can be anathema to many folks (mainly creative types).  ”Order” tends to have connotations of rigidity and it’s not something that most people associate with the creative process.

I maintain, however, that it’s only through order that we can be free to truly create.  I wrote an article prior to this site really taking off called Design Patterns, in which I discussed this very issue.  You may not have read it before; if you haven’t, I’d encourage you to check it out (and the accompanying video, which is really much better than my musings on the subject).  What it talks about in a nutshell is that creativity can be harnessed by habit.  You can force creativity to come, but only through developing habits that you mind associates with the creative process.  It’s much like a Pavlovian response.  For instance, I’ve formed a ritual that I associate with writing.  It’s quite personal, and may sound dumb to everyone else reading this.  I know that when I sit down at my desk and put in my earplugs, the words are just going to start running out of my fingers onto the keyboard.  It’s something that I’ve trained my mind to associate:  earplugs while sitting up=time to write.

The same thing is true with our lives.  By conditioning ourselves to take the steps of evaluating our dreams against our values and setting incremental goals to achieve those dreams, we’re instilling a way of thinking that provides clarity and focus to our routine.  While the specific tasks change quite often, the process we use to define them does not.  Eventually, we form a habit through intentional action that continues with us.  The process doesn’t quite become automated, but it makes creation and achievement easier.

What the repetition really does is associates success in completing our goals with the physical process that we go through.  My mind has linked the earplugs with the act of writing, and so now when the earplugs go in, the mind switches on.  It’s just like Pavlov ringing the bell every time when food was presented to his dogs; eventually, all he had to do was ring the bell and the dogs started to slobber all over the place, even if no food was ever presented again.

Another thing that I’ve noticed happens with this intentional process of building this personal development plan is it causes me to re-evaluate how I define success.  By having standards to measure up to, I’ve found that even when I fail in a conventional sense, I still succeed.  By not reaching my goal, but still working toward it in an organized fashion, I’ve found that I pick up new skills, learn new concepts, and discover more about myself than I ever did before.  If I hadn’t had something to shoot for, I’d drift through life, meandering from one circumstance to the next, never really understanding the plot.  I might pick up new understandings (obviously, since I stumbled on this process that I’ve got now), but they come more slowly and with more difficulty.

Finally, the process of Life Design allows people to live a ife of no regrets.  By evaluating every dream and goal through the lens of my most treasured values, I ensure that I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing.  If my guiding principles say that I need to spend more time with my family, and sacrifice the “opportunity cost” of that time, then I spend time with my family.  It gives me a quick mental checklist to evaluate my big life decisions by.  I know that only by keeping my values elevated above the fray can I truly be happy with the way my life is going.  It helps me to know that my circumstances can’t bring me happiness, because true happiness needs to come from me being satisfied with who I am.

So, that’s it.  Keep up the process, replace a realized dream with a new one, and continue to grow and develop into the person you were created to be.  It’s simple, but not easy.  It requires sacrifice, effort, and discipline.  It’s not something that a lot of people do, quite honestly.  You’ll stand out from the crowd.  But I can’t imagine ever going back to the aimless drift that I used to have.  Like Robert Frost said, “I took the [road] less traveled by, and that has made all the difference”.

So, what about it?  What’s holding you back from putting a Life Plan into place?  Do you already have one?  Is it working out for you, or are the tweaks you could make that would make it even more successful?  Let us know in the comments…

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1. Your Situation Isn’t Your Problem
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