Happy Sunday Friends!

Welcome to part 2 of our little miniseries where we’re working to figure out what we really want. Don’t worry, we’ll still have the 1 quote I’m musing, 2 Ideas, 3 of my favorite things from the week, and 1 question. If you find it useful or interesting, please feel free to forward this along to some friends or others!

Last week we worked on figuring out what our guiding motivation is, what destination that is guiding us to, and the general direction we should be heading.

One Quote I’m Musing

“You can't read the label from inside the jar.”

-Blair Enns

This week we’ll be taking an honest look at ourselves and our lives to suss out where we are right now. To do that we’ll have to take a look not only at the present, but at our past and use those views as tools to help us figure out what we really want.

A quick note, we’re tackling some big questions, and we may discover some heavy answers. The essential takeaway is that we are on a journey, and we are all at very different places in our lives. We are wayfinders, adventurers, through life using and developing tools to figure out where we are currently and spot checking our azimuth. Don’t overthink it. Give it a try, and you’ll find one of two results that will help! You’ll either find what you want, or you’ll find the direction you should be heading. Maybe both!

Ready to go? Let’s do it!

The Life Audit

First, let’s take an objective look at our personal and professional lives. What’s working and what’s not working?

Professional Life

Same question. Example from me, rewinding a bit in life.

I’m a year 3-4 Officer, working as a staff primary in a battalion in the Pacific Northwest, USA. What’s working is that I love the location, I’m establishing a new organization. I really enjoy building something, establishing new systems, procedures, and the like. I have some autonomy and a good work-life schedule. I also love that I have time on the side to work at my physical fitness coaching in CrossFit and implement that into my work as a trainer.

What’s not working is that I get the Sunday dread before going in to work the next day. There are a few colleagues that I don’t get along with, including my immediate supervisor, and I don’t have a sense of this career path taking me where I want to be in life. I have a feeling that my life is run more by a system/conveyor belt rather than having some semblance of agency.

These are just examples of what I think my answers would have been had I been able to articulate this as well back then.

Personal Life

This should be about where you are with your personal relationships, physical, spiritual, and mental health. There are many aspects of this, such as personal fulfillment, joy, playtime, etc... that I find it difficult to actually encompass all aspects. Some of us have families, some of us don’t want families, some of us have fur babies, some of us don’t want fur babies. You get the picture. You also know what personal life means to you, so I won’t belabor the topic. Take a minute, write all these down just like in our professional life.

Now, I’m going to give you a favorite tool of mine to assist.

Wheel of Life

The system I’m going to use here is Wheel of Life reflection tool. It’s a pretty powerful tool because it gives us a visual report card on how we feel about our life in juxtaposition to our ideal.

Start by drawing a circle. Yes, just draw a circle.

Now, you’re going to split that circle into the various areas of your life you need to reflect on. For me that will fall into three rough bins. Health, Career, Relationships

Next, we’ll break those down into specific areas those bins are comprised of. So, for me it looks something like this:

Ok, now we’ve broken up life into its various components.

Next is to rate on a scale from zero to ten how aligned we feel those areas are with our vision or goals in life. Meaning, are we taking the appropriate actions necessary to get where we want to be? This is the introspection part.

This is us taking an inventory of our life. We want to set goals, we may know we need to set goals. But, as I said last week, if we don’t know where we are we can’t make the necessary decisions to move (or keep moving) in the appropriate direction.

The point isn’t to beat ourselves up, it’s to take an inventory of ourselves at a snapshot in time and then give yourself courses of action to remedy areas you’re concerned about.

Take a look at where you’re at in the various areas and decide where you’re out of alignment and what’s important to revector.

Mind tools has a pretty great template if you want to create it that way.

Quick Break to Address Something Important!

Depending on how well or poorly we are feeling, our scores tend to go up or down.

Specifically addressing my friends who may find that you’ve rated yourself low across every aspect here.

You’re probably someone who’s a little hard on yourself. You’re likely very kind to others, but hard on yourself.

This is an honest self-assessment, but the point is to come from a place of positivity. If you are below a 3 across the board, take a breath and look again.

I highly doubt every aspect of your life is a zero or failing.

If you have below a 3, ask yourself, “What would it take to nudge this from a 2 to a 3, or a 4, or a 5.

I’m not asking you to get it to a perfect 10. Let’s nudge this aspect up to a 5 or so, then shoot for big changes when we feel good about it.

Set yourself a side quest to get the lowest aspects up just a bit and to learn to love the journey to happiness, rather than simply journey to happiness.

Ok, now that we have an idea of where we are, it’s time to figure out what things motivate us.

What Do We Want (Really)

There’s a quote that comparison is the thief of joy. I think it’s not only folly to compare our achievements to those of others.

Additionally, we humans have tend to desire the things others have or have a passion for. If your best friend gets a sports car, you’re likely to want one. If someone you look up to decides to start cycling for health, you’re likely to want to start cycling.

Tell yourself (or write) about a time you did something well and it brings about a sense of fulfilment.

In Luke Burgis’ book “Wanting”, he describes these times very well. They are an action, something you did. They are things YOU believe you did well, regardless of what anyone else might think. Lastly, it brought you a sense of fulfillment. The next day, you still felt a sense of satisfaction. Just now, you were thinking about it, and it brought some of it back.

Find 3 or so times where this happened.

Thinking on it, one such time comes to mind immediately. I put together an event for one of my organizations for the first time. I had a couple people to work with and we had no budget, but we were going to throw a “Thanksmas”. This is an event between Thanksgiving and Christmas where we have food, games, prizes, and some laughs for several hundred of my colleagues, their families, and some others in our community.

I called my friend Zach (Same one from Clipt), and he jumped in with both feet. He got his organization to donate more food than we could have eaten, fantastic. I called a culinary institute and the chief chef had come from one of the same organizations I had been in. We hit it off and they donated all the time for food prep and meal creation; additionally, it served as a practical for their students. I made other calls, outreaches and the like and, combined, we created irrevocable momentum for the event. It was way bigger and way more fun than I could have imagined.

It was exhausting. BUT, everyone at the event had a great time, it cost pretty much only time and very little money on my end.

At the end of the night, we packaged up all the extra food and gifts. We drove it to the women and children’s shelter nearby and donated everything.

Even thinking about it years later brings back a lot of joy for me. We were all working together to make something that was greater than any of us could have been as individuals. Something none of us could have done on our own.

That tells me that maybe I want more of doing things like that.

OK, last exercise.

The Week Audit

Playing off the Ideal Week exercise. Take a look at the last week, or last few weeks.

What filled your joy bucket? What drained your joy bucket? Others will call it an energy audit.

Play back through your calendar and put a plus or a check for things that filled your joy bucket (or gave you energy). Put a minus or an X for things that drained your bucket (or drained energy).

Doing this should give you an idea of how the various aspects of what you do affect you. Moreover, it’ll give you an idea of what makes you tick and what you probably want to actually do for work.

For example, leading groups on projects that build something that didn’t exist before. Creating testable and measurable requirements for those projects and then leading coalitions of diverse people on quests to exceed those requirements and going out on engagements with stakeholders to build buy-in and value across communities fills my joy bucket. It gives me a ton of energy.

Now, I have things that entertain me, but don’t leave me with a sense of joy or energy. Find those, and they’re ok to have, but know what they are so you can understand that some forms of entertainment may just be a temporary diversion (justified, but a diversion nonetheless).

OK, this one is getting long. I have some other ideas, but I think they may just be justifiable diversions.

What I’d really love for you to do is to shoot me a line and let me know how this went. What questions did it spur? What did you like? What did you think was pointless? How can I help?

If you shoot me a message, I’ll respond. Many of you have and I’m positive my statement holds true.

-e

Two Ideas From Me

1. When you do something you love, the money will come. Or it won’t and you’ll still be happy. The problem with finding out what we want to do in life, discovering our passion is that unreality. Somewhere along the line we were told (by our parents, by our mentors, by our friends) that we have to do something that makes a certain threshold of money, or gains prestige, or is “more realistic”. The unreality of that is that these people never told us that the money will come as long as we perfect that thing we love to do. That thing that takes up the predominance of our daily thoughts and internal or external conversation. The unreality is that we will all find some portion of anything we do sucky. We say we love ourselves more than others, but somehow, we value their opinions more than our own.

2. Do something, do anything. Many times, I’ve caught myself unsure where to start, or what do to. The answer at the beginning is Do Something, Do Anything. The next steps will become apparent.

Three Favorite Things From Others

1. “If you want to change your life, don’t ask yourself what you want. Ask what you’re willing to suffer for. That’s the answer that will make a difference.” | Mark Manson

2. “What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” | Gabriel Garcia Marquez

3. 

   | Mark Manson - while a bit crass, I find it freeing to realize that no one (of importance) will care about your first few attempts at anything. No one will notice until you’re a success or catastrophic failure (which really requires a high degree of success to become catastrophic). So go do the next best thing and realize that you have the anonymity of 8.2 billion people on the planet and the security in knowing that if it’s something you’re interested in… there’s probably 8.2 million (1% of the population) who is also interested.

One Question

If your best friend asked you for the life advice you are thinking about right now, what would you tell them?

Have a wonderful week,

I’ll see you Sunday.
​-e