Photo by pfala

In a recent article I published on Lifescape artists I suggested that there is a psychological loophole in the way we look and talk about New Year resolutions.

For starters, the word “Year” in New Year, subconsciously (and wrongfully) suggests a timeframe we are bound with. Hence, we covertly hint to ourselves that whatever we aim to achieve is only bound by a year and not a lifetime.

The linguistics of it can provide the weakly resolute mind a stage trick – a back door out. Personally, I think that talking about ‘New life resolution’ rather than ‘New Year’s resolution’ might avoid this problem…but breaks from tradition and common forms of speech (can’t have everything can’t you?).

Secondly, the type of resolutions we often make are more about sorting out lifestyle habits that swayed out of line –smoking, drinking, excessive eating and accumulating clutter – rather than life changing  ones.

They are reactive rather than proactive.

I would like to drop a few suggestions about some proactive ‘New Life resolutions’ you might take for 2010….and hopefully, all the years to follow.

Business & money:

Start up that project or business venture you have been secretly aiming at or saving money for.  Now is the right time…it always is.

Sometimes we keep on deferring things because we say to ourselves that this is not the right time. We keep on thinking that something else must happen before, some sign that shows us that the time is right and the moment is ripe.

Of course this is not so. It’s a trick of our subconscious.

The first step is the hardest but once you do it you’re already half way through.

Health:

Go make that long due check up at the clinic, that blood test, stress test or whatever you have been putting off.

Be proactive towards your health and not reactive. OK, exercising and eating a healthy diet is definitely a proactive thing to do also. But we must follow them with the objective of starting a life changing habit and not just for the short term such as losing that extra pound gained during the holidays.

Relationships:

Mend those broken relationships and family ties. Make up again with loved ones. Go talk to that relative or friend you haven’t been keeping in touch with due to some past argument or quarrel.

Put your pride and hurt behind. Be the first one to take the step and break the ice. Sometimes it is the only thing that is needed. The other person could be secretly wanting to make up but didn’t find the courage to take the first step.

Heart:

Plan at least one meaningful act of kindness. I’m sure that we all do random acts of kindness throughout the year.  Be that helping a friend in need, lending an ear to a troubled co-worker or giving some money out for charity.

Yet planning an act of kindness is like putting more intention and deliberation into it. In the planning comes the preparation and the in the preparation we are setting our heart to be more proactive and open up to love and meaningful coexistence with others.

Lifestyle:

Simplify your lifestyle. In our hectic environments we chase all sorts of things and struggle to fit all our plans and goals in our daily routines.

It’s a constant balancing act trying to accommodate more and more into our agendas.  Our lifestyle becomes increasingly more complex and strenuous at times.

We all want the best for us and our loved ones but sometimes things get out of hand and we lose perspective of our true goals. This causes stress and anxiety.

A good resolution would be to look for a way to do less instead of doing more. This takes us to the next point.

Productivity:

Focus on what’s relevant.

It’s a good thing to strive towards a more productive life filled with more rewards and excitement.

The problem is that we often pick up goals along the way which are not necessarily relevant to our true purpose. This can effectively be counter-productive.

What should be relevant after all is having meaningful goals. Goals which are authentically ours and not imposed on us by social pressure or peer consensus.

All the rest can be cleared off to make way to do what we really are enthusiastic about.

This is the real meaning of doing more with less.

Spirit:

Last but not least are spiritual matters – that corner of our lives we often leave empty.

Try out some practice which combines together mind, body and soul.

Examples are Yoga, Tai Chi or meditation.

Meditation has been a life changing practice for me and I intend to catch on with Tai Chi as my next goal.

Related posts:

1. Why Resolutions Fail
2. Don’t Think Money – Think Life

Photo by timtom.ch

There are many factors that play a determining role in success. The most commonly identified are qualities such as passion, determination, perseverance, good planning, intuition and creativity amongst a few others.

It is to be said, however, that not all success comes from the heart or leads to happiness.

There is success which comes from taking smart decisions, hard work and perseverance together with a pinch of good luck. But this type of success does not necessarily lead to a happy fulfilled life. It might be the type of success that comes from striking the right six figure business deal or from having your name become big in your area of expertise.

This is obviously a great thing but does not necessarily entail what you really want deep inside.

Authenticity and inner purpose

Heart driven success is the ultimate form of success because it goes beyond limited beliefs about cause and effect, desire for money, fear and expectations and most of all, it is guided from the heart.

When you have stripped off the socially induced values of what is good, bad and ugly and listen more to what your heart is saying, you thrive towards your inner purpose. You would have found your authentic self.

Heart driven success comes from having your heart open to your life’s purpose without fear and limitations. It comes from the power of being conscious of your passion that drives you with enthusiasm and joy.

If you are in doubt, ask yourself: what drives you? What motivates you? What makes you work hard without getting tired and unsatisfied? If you had a guarantee of success in whatever venture you take, what would you do?

Aligning with your purpose in life

Heart driven success is powerful. There is a certain energy that flows through people when they are doing what they are passionate about. This comes from the fact that the person is aligned and in perfect sync with his purpose. When this happens, the energies of life flow through him freely without obstruction.

It’s like an unblocked pipe connected straight to the source. There are even some highly motivated and self-empowered people that would describe this energy as literally too powerful too handle at times. It feels as if it is filling every cell in their body and keeps them revved up as they produce work well beyond average quality and quantity.

Success beyond the self

Heart driven success means also, above other things, not to be limited and enslaved by narrow self-interest. It is not shallow. It’s free, unbounded, selfless and embraces broader interests than self-satisfying ones.

This is why some illustrious self-empowered people have given the world their creations and inventions for free.

They are already blessed by the greatness of following their life purpose with heart-driven success, so much so that monetary compensation falls way below that level of satisfaction.

A perfect example is the following TED talk from inventor Pranav Mistry,  who decided to give out his ingenious and mind blowing work on ‘sixth sense technology’ as open source knowledge. Utterly fantastic

Related posts:

1. Follow Your Heart and Life will Follow
2. A Note on Happiness
3. The art of creating meaning into your life

Knowing what I wanted in life had always been terribly hard for me. Of all the things that I always felt were not clicking in the right cog in my life, the lack of a clear mission faithfully accompanied by a complete absence of goal-setting skills, has always been the thing that irritated me most.

However, one thing I learned later on was that not having a clearly defined route plan, or rather not having a route in the first place, was not so much about lack of clarity or direction but had more to do about conflicting interests, unordered priorities and a lack of a simplified goal structure. Let me explain.

A Problem of Quantity?

I used to think that what was holding me back from having that rock solid definition of what I want in life, that one thing that fuels your determination and passion and keeps you tirelessly working on it without ever stopping day and night until you drop dead, is…well, not having that one thing but having many.

I have always been someone with divergent interests in life. My interests span across different disciplines and areas. This is not a bad thing but actually a very positive one. The problem was that it took me some time to realize that I should cherish and rejoice this fact.  Well better late than never right?

Now this thing used to be reflected in the way I used to see myself too. Sometimes I felt like a role-less individual with no specific job description as in “Hi I’m Martin the mechanic” or “Hi I’m Jenny the software engineer for distributed applications & ubiquitous networking.”  When someone used to describe himself with that amount of role-specificity it always used to make me feel somehow kind of standing and staring at the merry-go-round with a fast melting ice-cream in my hand if you know what I mean. It used to make me feel like someone who never checked-out of a bookstore but stayed endlessly browsing and flipping through as many books across as many category shelves as possible without ever exiting the store with that one book in hand.

I know people who knew what they wanted to be since they were 8 or 10 and never went astray or broke that devotion once in their lives. I could never quite fully grasp that notion no matter how hard I stretched the synaptic connections in my brain.

Yet later on I came to realize that whether you have one interest in life or many should not affect your clarity and direction in life.  This has nothing to do with it.

What really used to hold me back was lack of simplicity and structure.

The first thing I did was make a list of my mission and goals in life.

Mission and Goals

A mission is like having a foundation, a framework of beliefs and guidelines or simply an orientation. It is that main purpose in life upon which everything else threads.

Goals on the other hand should be more specific, practically attainable (despite being challenging), measurable and time-constrained targets that make you achieve your mission in life or at least bring you a step closer to it.

There are also sub-goals or mini-goals. A lot of literature about goal-setting and motivation in fact do recommend slicing down a goal or a problem to solve into manageable chunks.  If your mission is for example to establish yourself as a creative writer, one of your high-level goals could be writing articles for a widely distributed magazine or blog. Or perhaps write a book. Then your middle level goal could be writing a series of high quality articles on your own blog until you establish a name, enrich your profile and improve your writing skills. A smaller chunk of that would be to finish off those 3 articles you set to write until the end of this week and an even smaller chunk of that would be to finish off these two paragraphs before you wiggle your bones and walk to the kitchen to do yourself a coffee and then come back to work on it.

It’s a whole chain of goals that are aligned hierarchically and each one of those goals is driven by the bigger goal ahead of it.  Many people would tell us that great things come out of a whole series of little simple unassuming baby steps. I agree.

Order, Alignment & Simplification

My difficulty was not in doing or keeping up with the baby steps but in not having those baby steps aligned with a clearly defined mission and goal structure. The structure was unordered, complex and at times conflicting.

More and more I started realizing on the importance of simplifying things and understanding more clearly my mission statement.

These are some of the few things I started doing to understand better my mission, put goals in the perspective of that mission and simplify my action plan.

• Wrote down my Mission Statement declaring in point form what are the highest ends I want to achieve in life. These are broad and encompassing goals or qualities I want to achieve or be.

• I categorized the points into groups according to some label. My labels were: a) Mind: anything relating to learning and the intellect b) Heart: example – happiness, Love, relationships, authenticity c) Soul: expanded awareness and spiritual awakening are my 2 most important in this category d) Productivity: Would do I like to be most productive on and create the most in my life? e) Finance: What level of financial freedom do I seek? f) Health: Physical & mental well being, fitness and longevity are a classical example.

Note: I have used these categories because they seem to encompass everything that is of an interest in my life. These categories are however arbitrary. You can add your own or leave out any of the above which you feel has no importance to your life’s mission.

• The categories above helped me put my concepts into fixed dimensions and thus help me gain more focus on them. For those of you who are more of the visual type, I suggest mind-mapping your ideas. There are some interesting free online tools to do this. Mind-mapping is a very effective way of structuring your ideas and concepts into a very visually stimulating way.

I try to often look into my ‘mission statement’ and reaffirm it mentally. This entrenches a sense of being on the right track which can be motivating and encouraging.

• I then wrote down all of my goals in one unordered list first. These also included all those things that I have wanted to explore or do someday but never had the time or found out that they come after other things which are more demanding, etc.

• As in the mission items, I also categorized my goals according to: Mind, Heart, Soul, Productivity, Finance & Health.

• Cross-checked those goals with their corresponding category in the mission items. It then dawned on me that there were some goals somewhere in my head which were relatively unimportant (relative to my mission) but holding up the queue and weighing down the bag. I realized, for example that some of them were not ‘destination points’ but ‘hub points’ that would be nice to pass through but not necessary to stay there.  I discarded these unimportant goals. The result was a more defined and simpler set of goals which already started to be easier to put in perspective.

• After having filtered out the unimportant goals, I tagged the remaining goals by one of these two labels: Important and Urgent. Like other things in life, some things may be important but not urgent while some others may be urgent but not important. Those which are both important and urgent are given utmost priority. Those which are urgent but not important need to be swept away immediately but not a lot of time should be allocated. Those which are important but not urgent are dealt with later but more time is given to planning them.

This exercise has been liberating and has helped me a lot but I still need time to entrench it. Like any new habit, it needs an incubation period to settle. So far the response has been very positive and I am in a much more confident, self-disciplined and goal-oriented mode than I ever was before.

Let me know if you have further ideas, experiences or suggestion. It would be nice to hear them. Thanks

Related posts:

1. Why Resolutions Fail