How many times have you been asked the question 'What do you want from your life'?
I'll bet it's more than you'd care to answer. For many people, it's not a fun question to answer. This is because most people haven't fully answered the question for themselves.
This past Summer, I was floundering around looking for a reference point to give me a sense of purpose and direction. I switched jobs twice within the span of 6 months, going from a residential counselor at a mental health facility to an estate gardener for a landscaping company.
It was nice to get out of sterile healthcare environments into more open and wild scenery. But it still didn't answer the deeper question of what I wanted from life and where I wanted to head from there.
And then I realized: I don't have any resemblance of a plan for myself.
It was at a friend's gathering in August of this past year that I was fully confronted with this fact. A few of my friends and old co-workers from the mental health field were hanging out, enjoying a few drinks on a weekend evening. I informed them that I had switched career paths and was now working as an estate gardener.
A friend/old co-worker promptly asked me what my plan for my career/life was. I was immediately taken aback, as I realized that I hadn't given much thought to it. After giving some half-assed response about wanting to live sustainably and homestead somewhere, I quickly faced the reality that I needed to sit down and figure this thing out.
I began searching for an adequate template from which to work off of. After listening to plenty of Tony Robbins' talks on the subject, I stumbled upon this template by Stefan James, which mimics Robbins' RPM (Rapid Planning Management).
Without a vision, we are doomed to wander aimlessly until we expire.
The most important aspect of a life plan is to create a compelling vision for your life. This means looking at what your day-to-day reality is going to be like. Do you value freedom or security? Do you like to travel or are you perfectly fine staying in one location? Ideally, who do you want to become and what will you be doing in service of that identity?
Answering these questions honestly and thoroughly will give you the clearest vision of where you want to go. It's important to consider all of the various roles and categories that impact your level of satisfaction, as overlooking one area can sabotage the outcome for another.
For example, you may have the desire to help others and may think it is wise to go back to school to get a masters degree in counseling. However, as a result, you will incur a large amount of debt as well as make your life stressful for 2 years as you juggle work and school.
Eventually, you finally graduate with your degree, only to realize that the reality of working in community mental health is as frustrating as it is rewarding. Now that you are saddled with a large debt load, you have a sense of regret over the decision, and realize your desire to help people doesn't fully override your desire to attain financial freedom.
This situation illustrates why it is important to develop a comprehensive life plan that addresses all areas which contribute to happiness, satisfaction, and well-being.
Define your purpose in order to fuel your vision.
Once you've determined your ideal vision for your life, you begin the work of deciding why you want to do this. Assuming this vision becomes a reality, why and how will it serve my sense of purpose and direction? It has been said that if you know your why, you can make anything happen.
Will this vision lead to increased financial stability? Will it allow me the ability to travel, to have a great work-life balance? By seeing this vision through, will I achieve a greater degree of connectedness to the world, will I contribute to a purpose higher than myself?
Breaking down your motivation for doing something is critical to the process of actually achieving it. It can be unsettling to peel back the various layers that hide our true intentions, but it is completely worth the discomfort in the long-term.
As a part of this process, it is also important to define your identity. Are you a community connector? Are you an inventor, a creator, a teacher, etc.?
How you want to be viewed by others starts with how you view yourself, and that starts with defining who you are as a person. You may be multiple things all at once, which brings us to the next section of our life plan.
Once you've narrowed down your vision, your identity and your motivation for achieving it, you can begin the process of breaking down your life into categories.
Our life is made up of many components and areas, most of which have a degree of overlap. As a way of achieving a well-rounded and balanced life, it is important to separate our life into categories in order to structure our objectives for each particular area.
This is an exercise in being specific. If we keep our goals general and vague, they are much less likely to become a reality, as the target is hazy and undefined.
Stefan James' life plan breaks things down into 8 areas:
- Health and Fitness
- Emotions
- Romantic Relationships
- Finances
- Career/Business
- Family
- Friends
- Spiritual.
It is possible to tweak these categories to fit your particular situation, but these are a solid base from which to work. The next step is to define our vision, identity, and time-bound objectives for each particular category.
For example, in the Finances category, I put: I am a financially sound person, with multiple streams of income and making me at least $70,000 per year by the end of 2019. I earn at least $50,000 from writing ventures, whether freelance, my own blog, and/or through a hired position. I produce creative content and events, which earns an additional $10,000 in income. My investments net me another $10,000 in yearly passive income. I am mostly free to travel the world, working remotely a great deal of the time, allowing Karley and I to visit some incredible locales around the world.
Life is what happens when you're making other plans
To be clear, your life plan will change as unexpected things inevitably occur in life. I wrote my life plan in early September, and already I have made significant changes to this plan as a result of various opportunities presenting themselves. Obviously, we cannot plan for every possible outcome, and a degree of flexibility is required in initiating any plan.
A vital component of this life plan is to consistently review your goals, objectives, and progress, as a way to measure how you are coming along. Of course, you won't hit all of your targets perfectly, but you may find there are things you excel at better than others, giving you insight into what works and what you still need to improve upon.
The value in writing out an extensive life plan is immeasurable in terms of giving you a guidepost from which to draw. By completing this exercise, you will challenge yourself to ask the questions you have probably never sufficiently answered, and in doing so you will learn a lot about who you are and what you want from your life.
All uncredited pictures from pixabay.com or my personal account
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