Life Map Goal Setting: Targeted, Organized & Disciplined You

We begin with preparation to establish the mindset required for progress. We need to determine if you are going to live your Life’s Passion or take the Safe Bet. You should continue in this training either way. The information on managing your life will benefit you either way. But, this lesson is designed to show you what you would be missing if you took the safe bet.

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Identify your passion and giftedness.
• Distinguish between passion, gift, and purpose.
• Distinguish between identified purpose that is awareness and active purpose that is expression.
• Articulate the relationship between purpose and your tribe. 

If you are going to live your life’s passion, your questions must involve vision, doing, becoming, and legacy. It begins with your mindset—the way you discuss YOU with yourself. Your answers are just as strategic as your questions. Take the time to wrestle with the answers you have been given to determine if they are answers that make sense for you. 

This lesson explores a process for clarifying your identified purpose. Because purpose by any name is about expression, the lesson leads systematically to the daily activity of continuous education and the relentless development of skills and passions undergirding your purpose.

Three fallacies are re-educated in this lesson. 

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Clarify your identified purpose amid your interests, preoccupations, and natural giftedness.
• Prioritize elements of your passion according to the joy you feel and the importance you perceive concerning them.
• Articulate at least 3 considerations for the care and development of your identified purpose.

We are going to use a method based on the work of Rob Williamson. His approach to identifying your purpose has two steps. I add a third step that builds the model into a foundation for creating a lifestyle. The LIST step identifies your interests, preoccupations, and natural giftedness. The PRIORITIZE step adds order and timeliness to your items. The FEED step provides focus to ensure that your purpose becomes a daily lifestyle.

The lesson explores the idea of budgeting. The point is to get you ready for what some may see as a tedious process of self-reflection. It is more than that. It is an opportunity for you to put all your supports and drainers on the table—to review them and determine which to keep, which to limit, and which to dismiss. 

Two additional fallacies are dispelled with this lesson. 

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• List 4 resources that must be managed well.
• Articulate the importance of efficacy in resource management.
• Prioritize resources with information as the critical determinant of value potential from all other resources.

The lesson explores the ability to make time. Let’s face it. There is not enough time in the day to do all that we want to do. Yet somehow, we make the time to do the things that are most important to us. The subtle admission is that where we spend our time indicates where we place importance. It’s time to reclaim your time. Re-prioritize and give time to the commitments, relationships, and productivity you desire.

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Articulate the purpose, structure, and reflections on the time budget.
• Identify the available free time within your weekly schedule of tasks.
• Plan for productivity, leisure, and self-development.

Trust me. This exercise will be useful. It is one of those exercises that is practical for daily activity, but also cognitively stretching. It extends your perception and enables space for some revelations about the activities you schedule, what you do, and the meaning you draw from your utilization of time.

The lesson explores money in the context of your life map and purpose. It provides a step-by-step guide to the purpose, structure, and reflections on financial budgeting. If you are like most people, you believe you have a functional financial budget, but it amounts to a general recognition of what you need to pay each month. A full financial budget is about more than paying bills. It is anticipating income, scheduling for emergencies, and ensuring that you get fun and use out of your money.

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Articulate the purpose, structure, and reflections on the finance budget.
• Complete a 12-month budget spreadsheet and maintain it each month.
• Plan for investments, recreation, and emergency expenditures.

Truth be told, money influences our decision making. The greater awareness you have about your finances, the more prepared you are to make decisions. Perhaps financial capability can keep you from making decisions that frustrate your long-term goals and exhaust your motivation.

An awareness of your financial health can also prepare you to leverage the financial resources. 

The lesson explores the emotional energy that you expend daily. It is critical to your life map that you understand the direction, intensity, frequency, and duration or your energy expenditures. Like the other budgets, this information can make you aware of waste and opportunity. Even more than the other budgets, wasted emotions can impact physical health, mental health, and relational well-being in ways that throw you completely off your life map and purpose. 

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Articulate the purpose, structure, and reflections on the emotions budget.
• Intentionally schedule time for stressors and supports.
• Plan for reciprocity, inspiration, and discernment.

The point of the emotions budget is to realize that you are not obligated to make these your priorities. You choose them. Your typical process involves flow, stressors, and your reactions. Your goal of course is to maintain flow. 

Describes the bookends of the time budget. Notice the format of the document in 30 minute increments. I also utilize a chart beginning with Monday and ending with Saturday and Sunday.

Setting the routine for the week and making sure that the time allotments are realistic. Leaving some time as loose is okay. Including intentional reward time is important.

My weekends have a variation, starting a bit later and additional activities. These include preparing for the week ahead with open time for setup and family.

This lesson introduces the idea of expertise as purpose in action. It clarifies that your task is not to create capital. Your task is to develop your expertise, monetize it, and build the infrastructure to perpetuate the translation of resources into whatever form you need in each moment.

The fallacy of “hard work” is revealed with an emphasis on the value of information to create the opportunity of smart work—greater efficiency in the use of time, money, and emotional energy. 

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Define expertise in relationship to purpose and action.
• Mobilize your expertise.
• Translate expertise into capital.
• Structure sustainability.

You want to do the things that count, wasting as few resources as possible in the process. You want to know what you are doing at any given moment and predict both your outcomes and your activities.  You want to give some structure to your passion—a corporeal, tangible manifestation. It can’t just be a wish and a hope. It must become something that you can package and share. You want to maintain the transaction and positive interactions over the long term. You want to develop a model of impact that is holistic—having the qualities of being systematic and ecological. 

Up this point, we have discussed the fundamental mindset that supports your success. 7-3-1 plan is the first of a set of tools for mechanizing your producer mindset. This lesson introduces the 7-3-1 method. This method orders expertise, translation, and sustainability on a 7-year schedule. 

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Mechanize your success mindset through a scaffolding model of development.
• Construct specific and measurable goals.
• Compose goals that express what you will build, learn, produce, and become.

Consider your vision to be the closet where all your dreams hang like clothes. Expertise, translation, sustainability, and other concepts we discuss are hangers. Your life map is the rod that you hang the hangers on. The 7-3-1 Plan is coordination of the “clothes” in your closet into outfits and a schedule for when to wear them. It puts your dreams on a schedule of action, achievement, and evaluation.

This lesson presents a process for continuing the scaffolding of goal setting. It continues by breaking goals into program, programs into projects, and projects into tasks. This is one of those lessons that many would skip in the goal setting and production process, but it is possibly the most critical in comprehending what it takes to get things done. 

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Organize the system ecology of goals, programs, projects, and tasks.
• Deconstruct goals into programs that contribute to goal achievement creating a structure and control system.
• Plan programs in the context of intention, infrastructure, and integration with other programs.

Choose one of your Programs. Complete the attached Goal Deconstruction Pyramid as a draft of your goal deconstruction.

Time management is a critical skill in the execution of your life map. Prior to the rigors of scheduling, this lesson provides you with two important techniques that you may not have thought about intentionally.

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Estimate the time to completion of a program, project, and task.
• Construct a 4-hour daily work plan that produces a minimum of 8 programs per year.
• Identify the external motivation to regularly contribute time toward your production goals.

Use the provided worksheet if you would like to outline the complete set of tasks and estimate the time to completion of a project.

You will never be in a position to "find" the time. Your task is to MAKE time. It is surprisingly easy. We do it all the time when we take leisure time when we may have been tasked to make productive time. We have the experience. Now, we just need to make it intentionally productive.

Two cognitive reframes are presented to enable you to build on the knowledge you have gained in the training thus far. The conceptions are yet another way to inform your mental habits toward increased productivity.

The lesson explores scheduling and priorities. In this lesson, we cover a perspective that conceptualizes available time and what is considered the greatest support of procrastination: Overwhelm. We go deeper into the Time Budget meant to assist you with priorities. This time, we delineate how it can assist with the cultivation and caring of your tasks toward project completion. 

The whole idea of the Life Map is enabling you to see a path for your productive activity. The challenge that many face is that they only receive glimpses of the vision or the tasks or the projects. Without help they are unable to make lasting connections, maintain their progress, and rebound from setbacks. You have seen the solution presented by the 7-3-1 Plan and Goal Deconstruction. Let’s make that even more practical through an analogy.

Remember the Time Budget? Expanding it to a worksheet creates the opportunity for a Weekly Schedule. The time budget already lists the required activities that make up your week. We call these the “Have Tos.” In the expansion to worksheet, you will add Want Tos, Leisure, and Routines you want to maintain. Utilize the free space beyond your Have Tos to schedule productivity.

This lesson begins a section focused on expanding your understanding of motivation. Simply state, you make your own motivation. You may not have learned how that works, but it is founded in the concept of discipline. Thankfully, sustainable discipline is rooted in your interests—it is truly what you WANT to do. Even when faced with chores, you endure because they enable more enjoyment than the work they require. 

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Cognitively restructure your goals, program, project, task tools into discipline tools.
• Articulate the importance and power of increased competence and triggers to change behavior.
• Identify the relationship between discipline and motivation.
• Expand discussions of motivation to include monitoring, control, and support as competence and triggers.

The lesson explores Triggers. We have discussed priorities, consistency, and monitoring. We need to discuss motivation. We are moving away from motivation as a hurdle. We are locating inspiration for an internal engine of motivation. And, we are adding more sustainable information based on evidence-based practice in behavior modification.

The lesson explores the implementation of daily ToDo lists in the marshalling of your productivity. Consistent productivity is all about collecting small successes consistently building until they amount to large gains. A commitment to production, supported by a clearly outlined schedule, instructs motivation until it becomes inspiration and a habit of productive activity.

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Analyze your patterns of behavior and behavioral health including perfectionist, binging, and broke scheduling that threaten moderation and consistency.
• Implement behaviors that support holistic health including recreation, nutrition, and physical exercise.
• Identify your ACTUAL priorities through monitoring of your daily task completion. 

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Expand your comprehension of motivation to include a construct of behavior and behavioral economics or choice behavior.
• Identify 3 techniques for jumpstarting productive behavior.
• Identify a technique for content production.

The lesson explores a final component to your life map: support systems. You are going to benefit tremendously from a perspective that includes people as resources for your productivity. It is trite to suggest that no man is an island, but that does not make it less true. You can accomplish more with multiple hands at the ready. You can forego many mistakes on the strength of other’s experience. 

After this lesson, you will be able to:

• Articulate the basic support package of teams, mentors, partners, and peers. 
• Identify the function, characteristics, and typical offering of each type of support.