blog to discovery

It’s easy to identify an action or goal; sometimes it’s easy to complete them and cross them off your list. However, it is the maintenance actions that really make a difference. For instance, in terms of losing my pregnancy weight I could just think about reaching my pre-pregnancy weight, but the real desired outcome is to maintain that weight. This means when I reach that weight I don’t stop exercising, instead I move to the maintenance level of exercise and diet.

This is currently on my mind because I am in the process of reinstalling software on to my laptop after I reformatted at the weekend. Yes, less than two months since I bought it. After buying the laptop, my first tasks were to remove Vista and install XP, remove the preinstalled  software I didn’t want and to install AVG antivirus. Then I moved on to the business of installing other software and moving across my files.

Writing down your goals is good, but of course it is even better to take action to help realise the goals. When I announced the second draft of my goals, Gary asked how often I considered them. This got me thinking; I intend to review them at the end of each month using a wheel of life, but was this good enough? I decided that as well as a regular review, I also needed a regular reminder of my goals.

I created desktop wallpaper for my laptop depicting each of my goals,  so I am reminded of them whenever I use my laptop. This was a task I could have spent a long time on by finding the perfect pictures and learning how to use photoshop to get the perfect layout. Instead I put something together very quickly finding the best pictures I could and over time I intend to update it when I find better pictures.  This means the wallpaper isn’t as pretty as it could be and some of the images are a bit of a loose connection to the goal, but as it is acting as a reminder to me it is doing its job.

I started drawing regular wheel of life diagrams in 2007, although it has been several months since my last one. I’ve been thinking about introducing them as a regular exercise again so I thought I should review the method for its usefulness before adding something else to my to do list.

Background to wheel of life

The idea behind the wheel of life exercise is to ensure there is balance in your life. By plotting how you perceive you are doing in each area of your life you easily see how balanced or unbalanced your life is, and how this changes over time.  Even if you don’t want all parts of your life to have the same value you can use it by plotting the values for how you would like your life as well as your current position.

Having developed your goals its important to review them at a later date, particularly after any major changes in your life, to ensure they are still relevant; you don’t want to be working towards something you no longer want. Plus it is a useful reminder to ensure you are making progress.

I only developed a first draft of my goals in August 2008, but since then I’ve given birth to my first child so my life has changed significantly. Although I wrote my draft knowing I was pregnant, I had no idea what it was going to be like being a mother, so after four months I now feel ready to review my goals. Plus I’ve now had almost half of my maternity leave and would like to spend some of the remaining time to progress  my goals.

My first draft vision

I have been working on my goals for a long time but seemed to stall at identifying what my top level vision was. Looking back on my notes it appears that I’ve had the content nearly there for a long time, but the thing that seemed to be stopping me was how to actually write my vision.

I have decided to use the format suggested by Jim Collins for organisation’s vision in his book Built to Last, which I remembered from the dissertation for my management diploma a few years ago.

The concept

According to Jim Collins a good vision consists of two components:

• Core ideology – what we stand for and why we exist
• Envisioned future – what we aspire to become, to achieve, to create

Time really does go quickly when you’re busy and I can’t believe it has been a month since I last did this exercise. Unfortunately, because I’ve been so busy I haven’t been able to put the effort into progressing my wheel, however I feel most things are the same as last month although I have marked a few as slipping backwards.

During the last month, I suffered a headache for almost a week, which I just could not shift. When I saw my chiropractor she told me my back was doing really well, but because I have been stressed at work I have been tensing my jaw which had caused the headache, within a few moments my jaw was manipulated and my headache was gone.

Having decided the next step in my goal development is to develop a personal mission statement I have been doing some research. Just about everything I’ve read suggests there are many benefits to developing a mission statement, but the key ones are greater self knowledge and improved decision making, so obviously the more effort I put into developing the mission statement the greater results I will see.

During my research I have identified several blog posts that appear to be useful and that I am intending to revisit to help me complete this stage of my goal identification exercise.

Despite a significant amount of resistance I finally completed the next stage of the goal setting tutorial, the brainstorming exercise.  The aim is to draw out the subconscious thoughts that show what you are really passionate about and therefore help identify the goals that will fill you with desire.  The idea is to brainstorm things that will improve your life in four areas; personal development, career and economic, adventure and contribution.  Then by reviewing each idea to assign the timescale by which you want to complete it, it is possible to select one goal in each area that you want to achieve with the shortest timescale.

I completed the brainstorm, but didn’t find it as thought provoking as the as the one I did as a mind map after completing the past, future and present review.  In fact, I think the main reason I procrastinated with this exercise is because I knew it wasn’t what I needed to do next.  I want a framework to define what I’m working towards in my life, a structure that helps me select my goals.

When things start getting difficult you know things do not progress as you would like,  so subconsciously you stop measuring them. I can not believe that the last wheel of life review I did was over three months ago. Anyway, I’m back to measuring and it is reassuring to see that I have made some progress in the last few weeks.

There has been an equal number of areas decreasing and increasing, but I feel the overall movement is forward because I have got some of the difficult areas improving such as vision and career.

I have completed another exercise which is moving me towards identifying my goals and I will be writing a post on it soon, before I move on to the next step which I think will be more difficult, but will also have a great impact on my life.