There seems to be an unwritten rule that some people will succeed no matter how little they try and that others will fail regardless of how hard they try. The truth of the matter is that we all live in an existential framework where we are all presented with opportunities to pursue our purpose in life. Despite the seemingly insurmountable odds that are stacked against a considerable number of people, few people have accomplished their goals.
Interestingly enough, many of the people that have achieved success, don't necessarily come from a privileged background, but they have one thing in common. They are able to embrace the opportunities available to them, and through hard work, they were ultimately able to become successful. They have found a way to live purpose-driven lives. When you look at the data available on 6
the lives of people who have found success, you will find that because of their determination to find success, they were able to form a solid support system and have a sophisticate and well-researched toolkit that they use to confront the challenges they face on their journey.
People who are determined don't find success by accident; instead, they have trained themselves always to think and troubleshoot before they undertake any projects and pursuing specific causes. Their toolkit contains many valuable resources, including resourceful people and mentors, ways to cope with uncertainty and negativity, positive visualization techniques, goal setting strategies, and alternative courses of action when they run into roadblocks and face challenges.
With this determination, you can't afford to scroll through life without having a clear understanding of your potential, goals, and personal strengths. If you want to be able to discover and understand your purpose, you have to set aside time to think about the things that make you genuinely happy. This becomes your path of passion and the moment you discover it; you need to pursue it to the very end.
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Chapter 1 – What is Purpose?
One of the driving forces that have encouraged recent research into personal development and social behavior is purpose. As more people begin to become gradually aware of who they are, they feel the need to discover more about their existence and their life's purpose. The best approach to adopt when delving into and discussing the concept of purpose is to know what purpose is and how it is different from goals.
Purpose refers to a cognitive process that defines your goals in life and provides you with personal meaning. It is, in essence, a central self-organizing aim that stimulates goals, manages behavior, and give you the reality of existence.
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Purpose directs your decisions and goals by guiding the use of your finite personal resources. Instead of governing your behavior, purpose offers you direction, not dissimilar to a compass that guides a navigator. Following your purpose is purely optional, but there are significant benefits for doing so.
Living in accordance with your purpose makes you a self-sustaining force and an aggressive agent in goal pursuit and goal attainment. Therefore, purpose is critical for helping us to organize our lives and develop persistence that resonates across time and context.
The Difference Between Purpose and Goals Even though they are mentioned continuously together in conversational context and research, purpose and goals are not synonymous.
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Goals are more precise in their impact on proximal behaviors.
They focus on a more specific endpoint and serve to guide our behavior either toward or away from the endpoint.
Purpose, on the other hand, is a broader component that influences behavior and stimulates the goals. Purpose doesn't point you toward a designated outcome, but instead, it motivates 10
you to be goal oriented. Unlike goals, which have terminal results, purpose and values merely provide you with the general direction of life.
Another way to look at purpose is to view it as the goal manager.
Those who have a purpose in their lives are better able to move seamlessly from goal to goal and even have the capacity to manage multiple goals at once.
On the other hand, those who don’t have a purpose in life may be successful in achieving a single goal, but immediately afterward they find it extremely challenging to identify their next target.
Therefore, goals act as the center point and are produced and inspired by your purpose in life.
The Dimensions of Purpose
Purpose is found on a three-dimensional continuum consisting of strength, scope, and awareness. Scope refers to the extent to which your purpose affects your life. For example, a goal that influences all your actions, thoughts, and emotions is said to have a broad scope.
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A purpose with a narrow scope is more organized but doesn't impact a greater range of behaviors in comparison with a purpose with a full reach.
Strength, in regards to purpose, is the tendency for the purpose to influence your actions, thoughts, and emotions on the domains relevant to its scope. A definite purpose powerfully influences appropriate behaviors to your purpose. Combined with scope, strength dictates the extent to which your purpose will affect your health, longevity, and well-being.
For instance, a purpose that is characterized by great power and a broader scope will have a more pronounced effect on your life.
Additionally, a strong and broad purpose brings resilience to obstacles and barriers that you may face during your journey.
Awareness reflects the extent that a person is knowledgeable and can articulate their purpose. Both scope and strength strongly influence it. Consider the analogy of gravity for a moment. On earth, the force of gravity is broader in scope but weak in its impact.
As we live our lives, we don't pay attention to the gravitational forces that are keeping our feet firmly planted. However, if we were to be taken to Jupiter, which has twice as much gravitational 12
force, our awareness of the force of gravity would increase substantially.
Behaviors consistent with purpose can be activated to provide motivation for action. When you are aware of a purpose, it will require you less effort to pursue it than if you were completely unaware.
The Pursuit of Multiple Purposes
It isn't that unusual for someone to have multiple life purposes.
However, having many purposes can only be beneficial to a certain point, after which such purposes only serve to reduce the resource allocation.
For instance, if you pursue a single purpose, you might become discouraged if the challenges and obstacles you face become too substantial to surmount. On the other hand, if you have multiple purposes, which are independent of each other, then the moment you encounter an obstacle or face a challenge in one purpose, you automatically shift your attention and focus to the other purpose.
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This shifting between life purposes can enhance your pursuit of purposeful living and might even increase your chances of obtaining positive results.
Multiple purposes, however, may result in your constantly switching from one purpose to another, which can greatly hinder your progress. For a sensible and sustainable approach, you need a manageable number of life purposes to which you can allocate the adequate resources to and focus on so that you can reap the tangible benefits.
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Critical Elements of Purpose
For you to live a purposeful life, some elements are essential. You must display consistent behavior. This serves as the motivating force that will help you overcome obstacles, maintain your focus, and seek alternative means irrespective of the changing environmental conditions. People that live a purposeful life are more consistent in their behaviors in both their public and private lives.
You also must be psychologically flexible. This means that in light of changing demands, obstacles, and opportunities, your purpose enables you to be more flexible. Avoiding hardships by flexibly 15
managing your environment, both psychological and physical, you will be able to experience fewer problems compared to those who live without purpose.
Finally, purpose allows you to efficiently allocate the resources available to you, including the time and energy needed to pursue your purpose. Any other wasteful actions and behavior are kept at bay, and the resources they would have consumed are rerouted back to the purpose oriented activities.
These elements can also be considered necessary ingredients to live a purposeful life. Without them, it becomes near impossible to discover and reach your purpose in life.
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Chapter 2 – Keys to Finding Your Passion Most people try to justify their failures and uncertainties in life to not having enough passion in one thing or another. This causes them to be in a continuous cycle of pursuing boring and uninteresting things.
Contrary to popular belief, discovering what you love is not as challenging as it may seem. Passion is not a precious commodity that is reserved for a select few. Rather, it is a gift that everybody has been blessed with. The only thing we need to do to discover our passion is to have the right attitude. Work is supposed to be fun, so you must take the time to explore what you enjoy.
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Rather than viewing yourself as hopeless because you have yet to discover your passion, begin to visualize yourself being surrounded by endless possibilities. The reality is that the only limit you have to be doing what you love is your lack of imagination. To break through from this prison of uncertainty and lack of passion, some simple and straightforward keys will lead you to discover your purpose and meaning in life.
Give Yourself the Opportunities
Giving yourself the opportunities to be passionate is often seen as an ordinary and immaterial step for finding your passion, despite its incredible significance. The reason why you aren’t pursuing what you love might be because you don’t believe you deserve to be passionate about what you do.
However, everyone has the right to be passionate about their pursuits in life. You need to wake up excited about your life because you have every right to do so. When you permit yourself to pursue what you do passionately, you will be in a much better position to help others as well.
You need to modify your mental picture if you want to resonate, accept, and love what you do. The moment you can align your identity with your passion, it will become much easier for you to find fulfillment in the things you do in life.
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Allow Yourself to Explore
There exists one true passion for every one of us, and everything else is not worth the effort and focus. This creates the all or nothing mindset. Unfortunately, the danger with this perspective is that it makes you miss other opportunities in your pursuit to live passionately.
You have to understand that there is a spectrum of possibilities between your fulfillment and enjoyment in what you do. At one end of the spectrum is the work that you hate and can't do under every circumstance. The other end of the spectrum is the work that you love, and the mere thought of it brings you excitement and energy.
Between these two points is a huge range of possibilities for work that bores you, work that makes you feel indifferent, work that challenges and stimulates you, and tasks that make you come alive with excitement.
The best thing that you can do is to move toward the direction on the spectrum that makes you come alive. As you pursue what you love, you will come across options that will lead you to your ultimate life's purpose. The more aggressive and passionately you seek that work that excites you, the more efficient you will 19
become at filtering out everything else that tends to drain your energy and distracts you from your desired outcome.
One important thing to note is that you will have to grow accustomed to liking work first before you love it. Don't spend too much of your time and energy with an attitude that dreads work because it will blind you, deplete you, and turn you away from your passion.
Look Closely at What You’re Doing
The opportunities to do what we love is right in front of us.
Unfortunately, we tend to think that we can't make a meaningful living out of what we do. When you can change your perspective, you might find the things that you've been looking down on are actually the most fascinating and exciting.
Question Yourself
In an attempt to figure out what they are passionate about, most people fail to ask themselves the powerful questions. You need to give yourself time and let go of other activities to allow yourself to engage with your passion.
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Often, we let other things take precedence at the expense of exploring the things that excite us. For you to succeed in finding your passion, you need to set aside quality time to figure out what makes you excited. Some of the questions that you need to ask yourself that can lead you to discover your purpose and passion are:
• What would you do, even if you won’t get paid for it?
• Do you have any gifts or skills that you can share with the world?
• When in your life did you feel most creative?
• What comes naturally to you?
• What have you accomplished in the past that was successful?
Asking yourself these questions will awaken your subconscious mind and allow you to start searching within yourself to discover your passion.
Always Test Your Passion
Before you take yourself down a certain path and incur expenses, you need to test your passion for establishing its credibility. You can accomplish this by taking courses online or at your local college to figure out if you have a true passion in the area that you want to specialize in. Going through this process of testing your 21
passion will inform you whether it is real or just a fleeting fantasy with no possibility for long-term fulfillment.
After you’ve found your passion, start living it the right way. It will pay for you to immerse yourself in a passionate and deliberate action rather than dipping your toe in forever.
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Chapter 3 – Setting Personal Goals That
Fuel Your Purpose
Setting goals is an important foundation for awakening your true purpose and finding success. This is because goals help us to concentrate our actions and energy on the end result while measuring our progress concerning the goals that we've set.
However, many people acknowledge that a gap exists between setting goals and being able to develop and communicate important goals that produce sustained action while generating transformational results.
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It has been proven that there are clear links between motivation, performance, and goal setting. Along with imposing goals on yourself, you should also use goal setting as a tool to create a sense of direction and purpose. The environment of goal setting is crucial because it provides that conditions necessary to be effective in all your pursuits.
The Importance of Goals in Living a Purposeful Life Goals reflect your purpose and point you toward the expected quality, quantity or rate of performance. As a process, setting 24
goals always creates discrepancies because of the gap between our current situation and the desired future state. Additionally, the process of setting goals affects our overall level of motivation, our belief system and our capabilities to perform.
The discrepancy that is created by goal setting should be interpreted as a constructive discontent that will motivate us toward persistent and sustainable goal-relevant behavior. Three conditions need to be met if the process of setting goals is going to be motivating.
You need to have a commitment to your part in the process. This means that you need to have a "whatever it takes" attitude in achieving your goals. If you have a lack of commitment, you will have a lack of motivation.
You also need to set specific and unambiguous goals. This will make it easier to access your progress and adjust accordingly.
Finally, you need to have goal-directed behavior and happiness.
A goal-oriented action is a key element in the goal-setting theory.
If you don't have goal-directed action, it will be impossible for you to achieve your purpose.
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Harnessing the Power of Setting Goals
There are powerful tools that you can use to put goal setting to work. These tools take into consideration human dynamics as they help us to generate goals that will lead us to purposeful and effective behavior.
Self-Efficacy
The concept of self-efficacy is extremely important to setting and achieving goals. Efficacy is the belief that you hold about your ability to perform a certain task. These beliefs will affect the manner in which we set goals, as well as the choices that we make about the activities we engage in. Efficacy can also refer to the measure of how much effort we are willing to expand and the length of time we will persist in the face of challenges or failure.
Setting short-term, sub-goals will raise your self-efficacy as compared to a situation where only long-term goals exist. Your goals should be challenging, clear, and they should consist of a target and a timeframe. The level of self-confidence should commensurate with the level of goal difficulty.
Task Complexity
When you set goals for complex tasks, you want to ensure that you include short-term goals because they provide you with immediate guideline and incentives for better performance. Long-26
term goals alone can be too far removed and difficult for you to connect with. Goal setting requires subject-specific knowledge, realistic expectations, and appropriate strategies on how to accomplish the task.
Goal Commitment
When you are committed to your goals, the relationship between your performance and the goal increases. As the goals become more difficult, the level of commitment has to be raised to inject the effort that is required to attain those goals. The two main categories of factors that are needed in enhancing your goal commitment are prioritization and self-belief.
You have to believe that you will attain the goals you’ve set as well as making achieving your goals a priority. To succeed in achieving your goals, you have to link them to the bigger picture.
Feedback
For goal setting to be effective, it has to be paired with the appropriate feedback. Timely feedback will provide you with the necessary information about whether your picture of reality is properly aligned with what you need to achieve your goals. When you receive ongoing feedback, it indicates that you are paying attention to the progress you are making in achieving the goals you've set.
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Satisfaction
Satisfaction in your life tends to increase when you exceed your goals. As you increase your number of successes, your overall satisfaction also grows. To incorporate satisfaction when setting your goals, you need to set challenging goals that improve your interest. This will help you discover the pleasurable aspects of accomplishing your tasks.
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Chapter 4 – Being Proactive
As an individual, you are directly responsible for your own life.
Your behavior is a sum of all the decisions you’ve made, not your conditions. You are the only person who has the initiative and the responsibility to turn your life around and make things happen.
People who are proactive, are conscious of their purpose and they know that the conditions and circumstances around them are not to blame, but it is rather their own behavior that holds them back from awakening their true purpose in life.
Your behavior is a direct product of your conscious choices that are based on your value systems. By nature, we are all proactive beings, and in the event, our lives are conditioned by the circumstances around us, it is because we have made the decision, consciously, to empower those things to control us.
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The opposite of being proactive is reactive. When you are reactive, you are affected by the physical environment more than your own value system. For example, when the weather around a reactive person is good, then everything else is fine, and their attitude and performance is not affected. However, if the weather changes, so does their position and performance.
Proactive people are masters of their own destiny and purpose.
Whether it rains or not, it makes absolutely no difference to proactive people. Because their value systems drive them, they will continue to produce quality work.
If you want to live a purposeful life, you need to lessen your impulses to a value that is central to your existence. Even though external stimuli may influence you from time to time, your response to this stimuli should be value based. To remain on track in pursuing your goals and life's purpose, you need to own up to and acknowledge that the choices you've made thus far in your life have made you into who you are today.
Taking Initiative
Our basic nature is programmed to act and not be acted upon.
We ultimately have the power to choose our responses to the circumstances around us. Taking the initiative has nothing to do with being aggressive, obnoxious, or pushy, but rather it has 30
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everything to do with being able to recognize our personal responsibility to make things happen. Too many people stand around waiting for something to happen or for someone else to take care of their affairs.
If you want to find a good job that centers around your passion, one that you will enjoy for a long time, you have to be proactive and generate the creative solutions to the problems that you or your company face. You have to seize the initiative so that you can do whatever takes to get the job done.
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Prevail or Be Prevailed Upon
There is a substantial difference between people who take the initiative and those who don't. Life is fair in the sense that everyone has the opportunity to steer their lives toward their purpose or destiny. However, if you don't utilize the opportunities in front of you to prevail, those around you will use you to accomplish their own purposes. Regardless of your personality, you can create a proactive culture in your life by combining your creativity and resourcefulness. You don’t have any excuses to be at the mercy of the environment. Instead, you can take the initiative and accomplish your life’s purpose.
Become More Aware of Your Proactivity
A great way to become more aware of your degree of proactivity is to analyze where you focus your resources. There are a lot of concerns that each of us has in our lives. In an attempt to separate the things that we have no specific emotional or mental involvement, you can create a circle of concern.
When you begin to examine those things in your circle of concern, it will start to become clear that there are certain things that you have no control over and others that you might be able to do something about. The things you discover that you have control over can be regrouped further into a smaller circle of influence.
When you can determine your allocation of time and energy 32
between the circle of concern and the sphere of influence, you can then discover the extent of your proactivity. Those who are proactive in their lives care about their purpose in life and focus their efforts on those things that are in their circle of influence.
They only concentrate on the things that they can do something about.
On the other hand, reactive people, become much more engrossed in the circle of concern. They focus more on the weaknesses of others, the problems with the environment, and the circumstances that are well beyond their control. This results in a confused and purposeless life that is based on blaming and accusing attitudes, reactive language, and increased feelings of victimization.
As long as you find yourself working in the circle of concern and focusing on the things within that circle, you won't accomplish anything. However, if you can shift your focus and start working in your sphere of influence, you will create positive energy that will change you and that will influence your subsequent actions.
It's inspiring to realize that you can powerfully affect your overall situation by choosing the manner in which you respond to circumstances. When you can change a section of your chemical formula, you can alter the nature of the results. If you want to improve your situation and find your purpose in life, you need to concentrate on the things that you have control over.
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Chapter 5 – Begin with the End in Mind
None of us is immortal. There will come a time when we shall leave this world, and whether you’ve lived your purpose or not, your time will be out with no possibility of a bonus. Living with the end in mind will help you to align your life to your purpose. You need to live your life in a way that, in the end everyone will have something positive to say about your contributions, achievements, and character. Having this perspective in life will enhance your personal understanding of your purpose and how to go about accomplishing it.
Living With the End in Mind
What does it mean to live your life with the end in mind? It says that you have a picture, an image, or a paradigm of the end as a 34
point of reference by which you examine everything in life. Every part of your life can be aptly observed in the context of your entire life and what really matters to you. By keeping the end in mind, you can be sure that whatever you do in any particular day will not change, in any way, your overall purpose.
Just like a pilot beginning his journey with a destination in mind, so should your life. This means that you should know where you want to go so that you can better understand where you are now and the steps that you will need to take to move in the right direction.
Often, people will find themselves attaining victories that are hollow. They realize that their success came at the expense of thing that was far more important and valuable to them. People from every profession and all walks of life struggle to achieve a high income, more recognition, or a certain level of professional competence. However, they may not realize that their ambition to achieve these lofty goals can potentially blind them to the things that matter the most, and unfortunately, they don't understand this until it is too late. Your true definition of success will become clear when you consider what you want to be said about you at the end of your life.
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Design or Default
In your life, if you aren’t able to develop a sense of self-awareness and become responsible for your mental creations, you are empowering other people outside your circle of influence to shape your life by default.
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If you want to awaken your true calling, then you need to stop living the scripts that are handed to you by your family, associates, and other people’s agenda.
These scripts have their origins in people, not principles and cannot lead you to your purpose.
Writing Your Own Script
Since we already have a lot of scripts handed over to us, the process of writing our own scripts can be seen more as a re-scripting process.
In developing your self-awareness, you can discover some ineffective scripts that are deeply embedded in you that are completely incongruent with your values.
You are responsible for writing new scripts that are more effective with your deepest values and principles.
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Develop a Personal Mission Statement
The most effective way you can integrate the end into your journey is to develop a personal mission statement. Your mission statement should focus on what you want to be, what you want to do, and the values upon which your character and your achievements are to be found.
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To write a meaningful personal statement, you have to start at the center of your circle of influence. The center is what consists of the lens through which you view the world. It is what enables you to deal with your values and visions and to help you mentally create the life you were meant to live.
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Chapter 6 – Leveraging Positive
Visualization
Creative visualization is instrumental in achieving your goals and accomplishing your tasks. When it comes to our internal mental creation, our brains aren’t capable of differentiating between the real and the imagined. The imagery that you create in your mind has a real and tangible effect on your body. When you place your personal belief in the process of imagination, you can attain your goals and live a purposeful life.
Building a Foundation
Just like any physical or mental process, visualization requires a foundation upon which to rest. It is important that you understand 40
the strongest sensory qualities that your mind perceives, whether visual or auditory.
If you bring to your memory, the thoughts that occupied your mind before past failed or successful events, you will discover that your thought pattern led you to act in a certain manner which attracted the corresponding events and circumstances. This proves that your thoughts can create great changes with the help of visualization and imagery.
Creative Visualization
Creative visualization is a mental technique that uses the power of imagination and the mind to make changes in your life and drive you toward your purpose. With creative visualization, you can shape your character, circumstances, and habits, as well as attracting the opportunities and the things that you most desire in your life.
The thoughts that are repeated most will affect your subconscious mind and make things happen. The subconscious controls your desires, habits, reactions, and actions. They also attract similar circumstances. Your imagination will create mental scenarios of certain events and incidences in your life through creative visualization.
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The more you feed your thoughts, the stronger they get. Your imagination is your most important and powerful tool of creative visualization. Through the imagination, we develop the cars, computers, and building that you see today.
Integrating Creative Visualization into Your Life To live a purposeful, driven life, you need to bring in visualization.
Just like learning how to drive a car or play a musical instrument, visualization will require patience and persistence. If you want to experience the full benefits of visualization, you need to put in the discipline as well as the time and practice until you perfect the process.
The length of time that it will take for you to start seeing results will fully depend on the vividness of your imagination, as well as your own level of determination. Experts suggest that you practice for 15 to 20 minutes every day. As you start to master the skill and become more comfortable with the technique, you can reduce the time to just a few minutes a day.
Research indicates that for your visualization to work, it's best done in conjunction with a relaxation technique. The studies showed that when your body is relaxed, your mind is also comfortable and not so much under conscious control, giving it the freedom to daydream.
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There are many techniques that can be used in visualization and imagery to call the desired feeling and provide you with a direction of purpose. One of the most common methods is known as guided visualization, and it involves visualizing a goal you want to achieve and then imagining yourself going through the process of achieving that goal.
Since thoughts, when combined with mental images and emotions, will lead to actions and results, creative visualization can overcome the practical barriers to the attainment of your purpose. By repeating the same thoughts, every day, you will program your subconscious mind to bring the visualization into reality.
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Chapter 7 – Mastering Personal
Management
An important process in purposeful living is personal management. Personal management is what helps in directing and establishing you on the right path toward your destiny. It’s simplest definition, personal management refers to the planning, organizing, directing, and coordinating various aspects of your life so that you achieve your life’s purpose.
To effectively manage yourself, you need to possess a strong and independent will.
Personal management is a necessary skill in today's complex world if we want to recognize our hidden potential. We need to 44
master effective personal management principles if we're going to maximize the usage of our skills to be able to come up with solutions to our daily challenges.
Personal management helps you control your life and build meaningful interpersonal relationships in the pursuit of your passion and purpose. Through personal management, you can break from your confines and live a fulfilled life.
The Four Rules of Self-Management
If you want to become an effective person who knows how to manage your affairs and take control of your life, there are four rules that you need to observe. These rules will act as your personal guiding system as you work toward discovering your purpose.
The first thing that you must do is map your life. This step will allow you to understand yourself regarding who you are, where you are coming from, and where you are going. This will provide you with an orientation of purpose and direction. Mapping out your life is the core of every success that you will achieve in your life.
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The second rule that you need to observe is to review your assumptions. Everyone has a belief system and a unique perspective that is used to assess ourselves. Some of the assumptions that you hold can hinder your journey to achieving your life goals and finding happiness. Reviewing the assumptions that you hold will allow you to look inside yourself and count your weaknesses and strengths.
Once you’ve reviewed your assumptions, the third rule you need to observe is to organize yourself and your potential to achieve your desired goals. Without this self-organization, even the skills that you possess have the potential to be easily dissolved and rendered useless.
The fourth rule is to develop your abilities, which is closely linked with self-organization. This includes the development and improvement of your imagination, introspection, and willpower, along with other skills. These will greatly enhance your capacity to express yourself.
The Power of a Strong and Independent Will Will refers to the ability to make decisions and choices and act in accordance with them. It is a proactive approach to carrying out the program that you have developed for your life. The extent of 46
your personal integrity measures the degree of will development in your life.
The higher the level of your integrity, the more independent your will. Integrity is simply your ability to make commitments and follow through with them.
Effective personal management requires that you prioritize things in your life. As a self-manager, your discipline to organize the various aspects of your life should come from within. You must be a discipline of your own value system.
Being independent will give you the power to do something even when you don’t want to, as long as it is in line with your underlying values.
To develop your will, you must start by setting up and achieving small resolutions. This can give you the momentum and the zeal to move on and take on more substantial assignments.
You can boost your willpower through clarity of purpose, the priority of purpose, good planning, and determination.
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Time Management
Another essential personal management skill is your ability to manage your time.
Time management skills help you to organize and execute your tasks based on your priorities. Each of us has the same number of hours and how we use them determines the extent of our success or failure.
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To manage the time that you have, you need to prioritize and discipline yourself. Whenever the tasks overwhelm you, you should learn to effectively delegate to reliable and capable people. This will give you more time to focus on your remaining tasks.
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Chapter 8 – Learning to Overcome
Negativity
The ability to move through challenges and difficulties and still maintain hope, wellness of mind, and positive coping methods are known as resilience. People who possess resilience can keep their focus and emerge stronger after going through difficult situations.
As you move toward your purpose, you will realize that you will face many challenges that will require you to have self-confidence and new coping skills to make it through to the other side.
Resilience can help you overcome any negative element that tries to take you off course.
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Individuals who are resilient usually display certain personality characteristics that influence the manner in which they view problems and how they solve them. Resilience is affected by some of the following personality qualities.
Optimism
When you believe that things will get better and that the current difficulties and challenges that you are currently facing will be solved, it means that you have optimism.
Independence
Independence refers to your ability to make decisions in your life and order your own actions without having to rely on other people to tell you what to do.
Control and Responsibility
This refers to the calmness and inner peace that comes when you believe that you can do something to change the unfortunate circumstances that you may find yourself in from time to time.
In order for you to learn to overcome negativity, you have to learn how to train yourself to think positively, even when you are going through a difficult and stressful situation. You have the innate ability to change your negative thoughts into more positive ones and find the humor in things, even when everything seems to be going wrong.
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While the past may have been bad, and your present situation isn’t the greatest, this doesn’t mean that your future opportunities are going to be jeopardized, unless, however, you allow the situation to do so. Your purpose in life may not be on a straight path that is lined with cupcakes and rainbows, and that is why you have to push away the bad times actively and set your eyes on the final goal.
How to Develop Personal Resilience
In order for you to overcome challenges in your life, you have to take the deliberate steps to enhance your resilience levels. The first thing that you can do is to start to incorporate positive affirmations into your daily life. Words are extremely powerful.
Whatever you speak has the potential to become a reality. When you talk positively about your life, you will be amazed at how quickly it turns around for the better.
Life isn't always going to give you easy options out. You have to strive and make it a purpose irrespective of the surrounding circumstances. When you can increase your determination to go against all the odds, you will build your resilience reservoirs.
When you can learn how to establish cultural bridges and enhance your communication skills, you will be able to express 52
yourself better and get the help you need when faced with difficult situations. When it comes to some of the challenges that you meet, you will find that you need someone to listen to you and a shoulder to lean on, with better communication you will find it easier to seek advice when facing a crisis concerning your purpose.
Decision making is an integral process in your daily life. When you face challenges and problems, your ability to conduct yourself with an open mind can help you to get through your problems regardless of their difficulty. These skills will help you to maneuver and maintain focus on your ultimate goals and life’s purpose.
The Brain and Resilience
Modern science helps us learn about the biological processes of the brain and how it affects our reasoning, determination, and ability to pull through difficult situations. Some parts of the brain produce chemicals that boost our happiness levels while other bring about anxiety and fear.
To be mentally, physically and behaviorally healthy, even in stressful situations, we need to change our perspectives and thought patterns. By speaking to your subconscious, you can awaken your potential to stand firm and display resilience even in difficult times. By thinking positively on what you are currently 53
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doing, you will find satisfaction, happiness, and a reason to continue moving forward.
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Chapter 9 – Leveraging Mentors and
Coaches for Your Personal Development
Mentorship is a capacity building tool that is very common in the area of leadership development. It has been used around the world in different capacities depending on the existing need.
Likewise, in personal development, mentorship has a tremendous impact on developing personal capabilities and increasing our potentials.
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Mentoring and Coaching Continuum
Rather than viewing mentorship and coaching as two distinct approaches, you can choose to look at them as different styles along the same continuum. Whether you will decide to utilize coaching or mentorship will depend on your specific circumstances.
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Through mentorship and coaching, you can develop your skills, improve your performance, maximize your potential and actively become the person that you want to be.
Mentorship will take you through a psychological process that involves an exchange of practical help and guidance from the mentor to you as the mentee. This develops your personality and aligns you with your purpose.
Key Principles of Quality Coaching and Mentoring Through a mainly informal process, coaching and mentorship should take place daily. The problem, however, with this kind of coaching is that it isn’t scheduled and structured, which means that the purpose and the roles are somewhat ambiguous. For coaching and mentoring to have an impact, it needs to involve focused discussions, which are steered by specific and agreed upon goals. Here are the top ingredients of a good and quality mentoring process.
A Learning Agreement
The learning agreement is important in order to clarify the expectations and objectives that need to be obtained throughout the mentorship process.
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Purposeful Conversations
There need to be structured, constructive, and meaningful conversations to enable you to open up to your mentor and discuss your personal beliefs and practices. This will give the mentor an opportunity to make necessary changes and amendments for your benefit.
Empowering
A good mentorship should take into account the emotional, intellectual, and relational dimensions. The coach should be dedicated to building upon your capabilities and strengths to better enhance your development.
Trust
A trusting relationship is necessary for mentorships to have an impact. Mentors need to create a safe environment where you feel free to engage with them, even in the matter of private issues.
Flexibility in Approach
Depending on your situation, mentoring should be able to adapt and address the challenges you face.
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Impact of Coaching and Mentoring
The benefits that coaching and mentoring provide are mostly long-term and purpose oriented. Mentoring will make you more confident and enhance your self-belief. It also will help to inspire and motivate you to engage in your activities with passion. In specific circumstances, mentoring will lead to more self-awareness and make you understand the contributions that you make to society. Additionally, mentorship develops problem-solving, thinking, and people skills that are crucial for helping you complete your daily tasks.
Therefore, coaching and mentoring can help you improve your work performance, change your attitude and find happiness in everything that you do.
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Chapter 10 – Learning to Live a Balanced Life
Four dimensions can describe a healthy and balanced life. These are mental, physical, spiritual, and social. By exercising all four aspects on a regular basis, you will improve your life and your general outlook toward work and your purpose. However, this will require time and proactivity.
The single most powerful investment that you can make in finding your purpose is an investment in yourself. You are the instrument of your performance, and if you want to be effective, you need to recognize the importance of taking the time to exercise and sharpen your life.
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The Physical Dimension
This dimension involves making sure that you are taking care of your physical body by eating right, exercising, relaxing, and getting enough rest. Exercise is an extremely important activity.
While it isn’t urgent, most people wish they didn’t have to do it and give it a low priority. For many, we simply believe that we don't have enough time to exercise, which is itself a distorted paradigm.
Exercising for a minimum of 30 minutes a day is really not much if you take into consideration the numerous benefits that you will gain from the physical activity.
Spiritual Dimension
We are spiritual beings that have an inclination toward a higher being. The spiritual dimension forms the core and the center of your commitment to your value system. It is a private and vital area of your life. It draws upon the resources that uplift and inspire you toward awakening your purpose.
Mediation is one of the fundamental exercises of the spiritual dimension. It helps to strengthen, renew, center and reaffirm your commitment to serve. These are the same things that you need if you want to live your purpose. Nature has a way of bequeathing its own unique blessings to those who immerse themselves in it.
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The Mental Dimension
Formal education provides you with discipline and mental development. However, the moment you leave this external discipline of school, many tend to let our minds sink into atrophy.
We tend to avoid engaging in serious reading, and the passion for exploring new subjects dies away. We no longer think analytically, and we don't write as creatively as we used to.
Continuing education is important because it hones and expands our minds. To be a proactive and purposeful individual, you need to find as many ways to educate yourself and train your mind as possible. Reading good literature will give you access into the best minds of authors and philosophers. You can set a goal to read one book a month and increase it as you learn to read faster.
Remember, a person who doesn't read is no better off than the person who can't read.
The Social Dimension
The social dimension focuses on the interpersonal relationships, creative cooperation and empathic communication with those around you. Since your emotional and social life is manifested through your relationships with others, they are often tied together. Renewing our social dimension doesn’t take as much time as the other, and it can be done on a daily basis through our interactions with others.
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The true joy in life comes from being used for a purpose that you are totally aware of. Aim to be completely used up by the time you come to the end of your time.
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Conclusion
In your quest to awaken your true calling, you need to focus on the fundamental components that motivate you. This will allow you to avoid wasting time on something that is not in sync with your potential. It is disastrous to spend your time chasing after the wrong goals, whether in your personal life, career, or business.
Instead, you need to find some quality time and ask yourself some soul-searching questions.
Find out whether you are currently happy in your life and think about what you can do to improve it. Start to take care of unfinished business and find things that you are passionate about. Reflect on your life as much as possible and continue to recalibrate things when needed. It isn’t a must for you to reach 64
adulthood before you can discover your life’s purpose. Learn to take the time to think about your choices whenever you can.
It is important that you find what you are passionate about because focusing your time and energy on the wrong thing can cause you to become unmotivated and disappointed with your life.
And remember, that sometimes the light that you need to shine on your path is right inside of you.
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