Category Archives: goals

Immersing yourself in your dreams

By Kate Davis | Published: September 15, 2010

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Working towards your dreams is a gradual process, moving there action by action. It is also good to prepare your mind through methods like saying your goal several times a day and spending time with people who have already achieved your dream.

One of my husband’s dreams is to own a sailing yacht. His grandfather owned yachts so Ed has sailed since being a baby and to him it is a normal part of life.

He is taking several actions towards his goal. Firstly, he is introducing me to sailing, so we can sail around the world together! Secondly he is making sure we charter yachts regularly so he can retain his skill, we can try out different makes and models and sailing is integrated into our family life.

However, today is the day when he can get fully immersed in sailing; at the Southampton boat show. It is the biggest boat show in the UK and this is the 4th year in a row we’ve visited. You can buy anything boat related, but the key thing for us is looking around the yachts.

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Tips for using wheel of life exercise

By Kate Davis | Published: August 31, 2010

Photograph by PatCastaldo

A wheel of life aims to highlight the areas of your life that you need to give more attention (or areas where you need to give less) so you can work towards a balanced life. I like the approach because it is a simple graphical representation, so I started using the method on a monthly basis to track progress on my goals.

I started giving scores based on how I felt about each area, but thought this was too variable, so started counting up the number of times I worked on tasks in each area. Although this was tricky to track it did give unambiguous figures to plot. However,  on reviewing after a few months, I realised I was measuring the wrong thing; I was plotting how many times I worked in each area not by what I achieved, for example I could spend a lot of time sorting out my address book, but it isn’t as satisfying that I was developing  relationships as much as if I had a long telephone call with a friend .

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Why are ‘bad’ habits so easy to form?

By Kate Davis | Published: June 15, 2010

In a simplistic view, habits define your life. They are the little things that you do each day without thinking and enable you to focus on other things. Think how much less time you would have if you had to focus on breathing, driving or typing. Therefore it is essential that your habits connect with your goals, otherwise you are going to find it very difficult to meet them and it will frequently feel that you are fighting against yourself.

Recognising the ‘bad’ habits

The difficulty with habits is, by their nature of being a subconscious activity, is you don’t always recognise them as habits; and certainly in my life I’ve recently noticed several ‘bad’ habits have formed without me even realising.

“He who permits himself to tell a lie once, finds it much easier to do it a second and third time, till at length it becomes habitual.”

Thomas Jefferson

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Review of income (March 2010)

By Kate Davis | Published: April 9, 2010

Recently it has become increasingly clear of the importance of my goal to have multiple sources of income including passive income as my main income stream maybe threatened.

I’ve been tracking the sources and level of my income since the beginning of April 2009 and the results are interesting, and slightly scary.

Sources of income

In the last 12 months I’ve had 5 sources of income:

  • salary / maternity pay
  • interest
  • dividends
  • selling investments
  • gifts

This is slightly more than I estimated in April 2009 when I suggested my sources of income were salary (maternity pay), interest and from my blog. You will notice that blog is not on my list as I am waiting to receive my next payment.

What concerns me is that over 90% is coming from my job.  In the last year I received statutory maternity pay or no pay for several months and the salary I’ve received is lower than normal, therefore in a normal year my reliance on my salary would be even higher.

This is not reassuring if there are possibly threats to my job.

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Don’t forget maintenance actions

By Kate Davis | Published: September 11, 2009

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.

Unfortunately it seems something went wrong either with the installation of AVG or with my settings so in the last two months a full scan had not taken place and I did not check.  Even though I spent a lot of time in AVG to work out why the email scanner was not working I didn’t notice the main antivirus hadn’t run until I had been infected by at least one virus (the one I noticed redirected my google searches).

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Creating a goal daily reminder

By Kate Davis | Published: June 5, 2009

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.

Goal desktop May 2009

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Progress in the last month? (April 2009)

By Kate Davis | Published: April 30, 2009

April has been a better month and I feel I’m starting to make progress in many areas. I’m currently thinking about ways of tracking and reporting on this progress, so until I’ve decided this is another combined blog and personal progress update.

Blog – Using AutoFocus and focusing on one post a week my rate is approaching that of last summer, I assume this is also the reason for the slow increase in the number of subscribers that peaked at 190; obviously my goal now is to get to 200 subscribers. I have finally got Gravatars and nested comments in to my theme; I’ve been trying to do this since I installed wordpress 2.7 and finally completed it this morning. I haven’t looked at the styling yet so that is now on my task list.

Goals – I have reviewed my goals and have produced a second draft and now I want to ensure I keep working towards the goals by developing a suitable review method.

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Wheel of Life exercise review

By Kate Davis | Published: April 27, 2009

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.

The exercise is used by a lot of life coaches because it ensures you analyse each aspect of your life in turn and provides a good visual record of where you are. I’ve read about it in two books, How to be brilliant and The Pocket Life Coach, there is also a good post at MindTools.

My experience

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Reviewing goals after a major life change

By Kate Davis | Published: April 9, 2009

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

My purpose – to be happy and help those close to me to be happy

My values

  • build strong and supportive relationships
  • exist in pleasant and personal surroundings
  • be healthy and attractive for my own benefit and to benefit those around me
  • be financially independent
  • develop a rewarding and challenging career
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My personal purpose and vision (first draft)

By Kate Davis | Published: August 12, 2008

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

The core ideology includes two parts purpose and values, that remain constant. The purpose is the organisation’s reason for being; it is what motivates the employees beyond making money. The values are a set of guiding principles the organisation follows.

The envisioned future also includes two parts a 10 – 30 year audacious goal and a description of what it will be like when the organisation achieves the goal.

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  • About

    My name is Kate Davis and I'm working towards a happier and successful life and this blog follows my journey. I work almost full time as an environmental consultant and project manager and I'm the mother to a beautiful two year daughter.

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