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

No related posts.

When these words of wisdom were told to me I was still a young man. The real depth behind their meaning was not apparent to me yet.  Their wisdom was concealed by my unripe age. Not that they are cryptic or anything but rather because it’s one of those sayings which unfolds and reveals itself to you as your experiences in life grow and mature.

There are three fundamental notions that the saying points at:

1. Authenticity

2. Trust

3. Manifesting your destiny or Life’s Purpose

The lesson is simple as much it is abysmally deep: When you learn to discover your authentic self amongst socially constructed preconceptions, distorted self-images and learn to trust the natural pulse of your heart’s true desires then you will manifest them in your life. You will manifest your life’s purpose

Finding your Authenticity

The quest for authenticity, self-discovery, soul-searching, or call it what you like, is one of those things that has always been a popular note on anyone’s life diary.

But what is really meant by authenticity or self-discovery?

Many people who either have succeeded in their path to self-discovery or otherwise would all agree on one thing – that the authentic self is not something that is found along the path as one backpacks around the world, breaks through his normal parameters of existence, searches through every monastery or whore house in the world, capsizes his life’s agenda or anything that sounds bizarre and abnormal as possibly can.  Finding your authentic self is not done through adding or doing anything extravagant to your life. Actually, it’s not achieved by adding anything at all but on the contrary by stripping off what you already have – the blinkers and veils that skew one’s perspective on life.

We live most of our lives contending to the fact that we are what we are – what Mother Nature made us, how our genes determined us or how our past experiences have formed us. This deterministic worldview instead of inspiring us to go beyond our limitations and explore our inner world with open eyes holds us tightly firm into one position of thought and action. We think that we are what we are and so we cannot change. According to this view we are nothing more than our life-story, all our thoughts and experiences put together in a concept we call the ‘I’. This is a self-defeating start which will take us nowhere far.  It’s the first stumbling block towards self-discovery.

Another firm conviction is that life is limited and scarce in resources and not abundant. We believe that what others gain is taken from ours.

More importantly, it makes us believe that we are separate and special from the rest and that others’ successes are a threat to us.  We fall into a self-centered orientation which makes us lose perspective on life and especially of ourselves. It cuts us off from the source of abundance, life and the universe. It disconnects us from the network.

We are all connected to the same network and to the same source of limitless abundance which is life itself. Life is interdependent and if we think in a self-centered way, we are disconnecting ourselves from it and also from ourselves. This limited way of thinking also distorts our own image. We can’t see clearly who we are and what we want if our vision is obscured by a self-defeating and self-centered vision of life.

Building Trust

Once we can shift our perspective by understanding our authentic selves as part of a greater network of interdependent consciousnesses, we can more easily let go of the notion of self as being a powerless independent entity struggling for limited shared resources.

The more we change that the more we are able to trust in ourselves and in others. Things become easier since we are able to respond adequately and within perspective. As Stephen Covey would put it, we become response-able or responsible. Being responsible means, amongst other things, being able to be in charge of your life and destiny. It means listening to your heart’s calling without being sucked into negative patterns of thought and conditioning. It means trusting your heart’s true messages and not the short-sighted call of the ego.

It means being a healthy node in the network of life.

Manifesting your destiny

The natural consequent to listening to and trusting your heart is the true manifestation of your life’s dreams and goals.  This always sounded as something extremely big to me, and by all means it is. What excites me though is the prospect that it is possible and within any human being’s reach.

Many enlightened people along history have made reference to this basic truth in many different forms. A recent and very popular comeback to the idea which took the self-development bookshelves by storm was renamed ‘The secret” or “The Law of Attraction”.  This is very much referring to the same principle.

We all have within us the power to manifest our destiny but as we grow up in this world that capacity is blocked or obscured by our conditioning into limiting beliefs and distorted visions of ourselves. It’s rendered ineffective by the self-centered and short-sighted whims of our egos.

When people learn to transcend beyond their limitations, or to make reference to a Hollywood all time favorite, escape the Matrix, they are no longer held back into the parameters of the socially constructed illusion and mediocrity. They become co-creators of their life and destiny. They become self-realized beings with the potential of shaping their future instead of just reacting to it.

Wake up to your Life

This all sounds very good talk but I’m sure most of you are asking – how can something sounding so esoteric and transcendental have any proximity to my everyday mundane life?

Well the straight answer is that it has so much more than we dare think.

Here are a few things that I do and follow as a regular practice to manifesting my destiny (I started this a few days ago so I will keep you posted as I go along):

• Contemplate frequently on the fact that life is interdependent and connected. This helps entrench the perspective that I am not isolated but part of a holistic universe.

• I try to be conscious about the extent of my responsibility on the things I do and everyday occurrences. This has been a recent life-changer for me. I have started to grow from a ‘passive slacker’ attitude to a more proactive and self-disciplined attitude to life.  This comes out from the realization that I am a proactive agent in the cause and effect cycle of my life.

• Contemplate on the fact that life and the universe is infinitely abundant. I try to break free from the limited belief that life is limited and resources are scarce.

• Believe more in the fact that I am not what my past has made me. This is a self-incurred limitation. I try to believe more in the fact that my positive actions today will bring forth positive results tomorrow. I can break through the threshold of self-imposed limitations.

• Be more positive. This has been another life-changer for me. Accentuate the positive vibes and good moments while attenuating the not so good ones.

• Try to listen more to my heart’s true desires. This was somehow a bit harder for me to come by since one has to considerably slow down for this. One has to peel off the non-essential needs and goals (counter-intuitively even the so much needed immediate financial needs!) and listen to the more long-term and soul enriching needs of the heart. This has to do a lot with authenticity as explained above.

• Think vividly and visualize my goals.

• Expect them to happen because I am now starting to become more and more connected to the source of abundance and my heart is starting to unlock from useless and false expectations.

When your heart is open, then life can flow through it. Life will follow it and destiny will be naturally manifested.

Related posts:

1. Heart Driven Success