A Better Life, Every Day

One of the Most Powerful Steps to a Better Life: Take 100% Responsibility for Your LIfe

I am reading Jack Canfield's book The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be.  The first principle Canfield mentions is taking 100% responsibility for your life.  This means you accept that everything that happens to you is a result of something you have done, thought, or said.  External factors can influence you, but in the end, it is up to you how these things impact you.  This is reflected in a very simple formula:

E + R = O

Event + Response = Outcome

This formula states that no matter what the event is in your life, it is your response to this event that will determine the outcome.  If you want to have positive outcomes, make sure that your responses are positive. 

A Perfect Example

Event:  You are eating at a restaurant with your family.  The restaurant is busy the service is a little slower than normal.  When you do finally get your food, it is not exactly how you ordered it.

Response 1:  Your impatience level sky-rocketed while waiting for your food, and when the order came out incorrectly, you angrily demand that the server take your food back.  You complain to the people at your table, and cause a scene. 

Response 2:  You hardly even recognize that it has taken awhile to get your food.  You are enjoying the conversations and interactions you are having with your family.  When your food order gets to the table and you notice that it isn't exactly how you ordered it, you politely point this out to the server who assures you that it will be taken care of.

Outcome 1:  You are upset, the people you are with are upset, the server is upset, and the people around are now disturbed and wondering what is happening.  Any enjoyment you were having on your night out is now gone.  Your blood pressure is up, and you are just not happy.  You will be complaining about this for awhile after leaving the restaurant, and your night has been ruined.

Outcome 2:  You enjoy the time are spending with your family.  There is no stress and no drama in the situation.  Since someone else had response #1 with your server already, she is thankful to have someone who is so understanding and she lets you know that your family's meals are free.

All around, the second scenario is so much better fro everyone.  A simple understanding response made such a huge difference over a response of anger and impatience.  I was faced with this event last week, and fortunately, I chose option #2.

How to Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life

1. Accept that everything that happens to you is a result of your thoughts, your words, and your actions.
2. Replace complaining with developing solutions for things that are not going as you would like.
3. Leave the excuses for others.  Instead of thinking about all of the reasons why you can't do something, come up with the reasons for why you can.  Develop a plan for how you are going to make things happen.
4. Track your responses to events in your life.  Write down the event, your response, and the outcome.  If the outcome was what you wanted note it, and determine why you felt it turned out as you expected.  If the outcome was not what you wanted, determine what you could have done differently in order to have gotten your desired outcome.

I have been working at taking 100% responsibility for my life.  While I am not always successful in doing so, I have found that I feel much more in control of my life when I do.  I have found that I can eliminate the negativity in my life when I stop complaining and making excuses.  When I am aware of my responses to events in my life, I have found that the outcomes generally turn out the way I want them to compared to when I react without thinking.  Each day I am able to do this is a better day in my life.

I'm Getting Married...Today!

Talk about a Better Life day! Today has to be the best example yet. It's early in the morning as I sit in my hotel room just hours before I get married, and all I can think about is how truly lucky I am to be marrying such an all-around beautiful woman with two amazing daughters. As I think about my good fortune, I am reflecting on my Better Life commandments. While each of the twelve apply, three in particular are standing out:

1. Be healthy
I've known that I've needed to lead a healthier lifestyle, but I have never really followed through on this. Thinking about this today, I know the stakes are now raised. I need to take care of myself better so that I can have more time with my wife and my girls. The other day, my very-soon-to-be step-dauhter J told me that she wanted to be with me forever. She then added, "You're not going to die on me, are you?" You've got to love the minds of six year olds, don't you? While I know anything can happen to anyone at anytime, I can decrease my chances by eating better and exercising more. So, that is exactly what I am going to do.

2. Be a role model for the girls
Being healthy is one area I can do this, but I also want them to see all that is possible in life. I want them to grow into happy, confident women. So, I hope that by living each day to be better than the day before, I can be a positive example for them.

3. Smell the roses, hear the music
Even more than before, I need to become more aware of the "little" things in life. For awhile, I was writing down in my Moleskine funny or amazing (to me at least) things the girls would say. I haven't been doing that lately because I have been "too busy", and think I have really missed out on some things as a result. I also really want to be aware of this today for my wedding and on my upcoming honeymoon. I want to be sure I am open to and aware of everything that happens as I spend this time with my new wife.

I know that today is going to be an incredible day for me. It is the start of a new life with the woman and two little girls who are my world. This day has highlighted the importance of following my Better Life commandments, and as a result, has made me even more committed to them.

Note: I have typed this post out on my Palm Treo, so I apologize for any spelling or formattin errors.

12 Better Life Commandments - Do You Have Yours?

One of my favorite blogs to read is Gretchen Rubin's The Happiness Project.  As part of her Happiness Project, Gretchen developed twelve happiness commandments (you can read hers just under her picture on her blog), and I thought that this was a great idea, so I came up with my own "Better Life Commandments":

1. Live my own life
2. Believe
3. Accept my imperfections
4. Spend more time with family and friends
5. Be healthy
6. Do the right thing
7. Continuously learn
8. Embrace healthy confrontation
9. Be a role model for the girls
10. Live within my means
11. Smell the roses, hear the music
12. Do it now!

While the list may change as the days pass, I think this is a great starting point.  I know that my life will be better every day if I follow these twelve commandments.  In a future post, I will explain what these commandments mean to me and why I chose them.

I recommend developing your own happiness or better life commandments.  What commandments do you follow?

Track Your Progress to a Better Life

You have taken the time to figure out where you want to go with your life, the steps needed to get there, and when you want to to reach each step.  You have also defined the Next Actions you need to take in order to get there, but how do you know where you stand at a particular time in your journey?  By tracking your progress!

There are many different ways to do this.  To name a few:

• Journal
• Spreadsheet
• Bank account
• Programs installed on your computer
• Web applications

Choose the one that works best for you and your destination.

Tracking your progress is an important part of your journey because it will show you where you are at any given time.  It will let you know whether you are going to hit your target date for each milestone, and whether your are ahead of or behind schedule.  This will give you the opportunity to change things if you find that you have fallen behind schedule.  I like to track my progress every week during my Weekly Review.

A couple of examples from my journey:

Productivity
Destination: I am a GTD Master (Black Belt)
Milestones: Hit the relevant points on the GTD Mastery 100
Next Action: Review the GTD Mastery 100 list to determine which points are relevant to my life, and to determine which ones I have already achieved. Complete!
Next Next Action: Prioritize the Mastery skills that I want/need to implement.  Kris from Fresh Focus...on Productivity! recently started a series on the Mastery skills that I will be commenting on as well.
Progress Tracking: I printed out the list, checked off what I am already doing and crossed out what isn't relevant to me.  As I complete each step, I simply check it off the list.

Health & Fitness
Destination: I weigh 180 lbs.
Milestones: I weigh 265 lbs. by August 1, 2008
Next Action: Schedule workouts on my Calendar for every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.  Complete!
Next Next Action:  Get to the gym!
Progress Tracking:  I use a program called VidaOne Health & Fitness.  I have been using it for a few years now, and I like the fact that I was able to install the program on my Treo with the Palm OS.  The program allows me to track my weight, my workouts, and my diet.  Since it is on my Treo, I can enter information just about anywhere, and then I get home it's a simple sync to get all of my data on my PC.

It doesn't matter what you choose to track your progress, just choose something!  Knowing where you are in your journey will help you stay on course.  If you can see at a given time that you are on schedule or ahead of schedule, it will be motivation to continue doing what you are doing.  However, if you are behind schedule or off course, regularly tracking your progress will help identify this so you can get on schedule or course.

Past posts in the A Better Life Series

1. What is Your Starting Point
2. What's Your Destination
3. Plot your Course to a Better Life
4. What Are Your Next Actions to a Better Life?

What Are Your Next Actions to a Better Life?

In the last post in the "A Better Life" series, you plotted your course from your starting point to your destination.  You then set dates for when you want to hit each milestone.  The "where" you want to go and "when" you want to get there are defined, so now you need to determine the "how" are you going to get there.  What is the one thing you can do that will allow you to take that first step towards your goal?  The answer to this becomes your Next Action.

Looking at my own life, here are a couple of examples:

Productivity
Destination: I am a GTD Master (Black Belt)
Milestones: Hit the relevant points on the GTD Mastery 100
Next Action: Review the GTD Mastery 100 list to determine which points are relevant to my life, and to determine which ones I have already achieved.

Health & Fitness
Destination: I weigh 180 lbs.
Milestones: I weigh 265 lbs. by August 1, 2008
Next Action: Schedule workouts on my Calendar for every Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.

Once you complete your Next Action, immediately determine the next Next Action.  Keep the ball rolling and build the momentum needed to reach your milestones.

An alternative to the above process is to plan all, or at least as many as you can, steps needed to reach your milestones.  This would entail thinking of every possible action you will need to take in order to reach your goal.  When using this method, I usually start brainstorming all ideas I have about reaching my milestone.  I will create a mind map and note each action I think of.  If I am not at my desktop PC or my Tablet PC, I will create these mind maps in my Moleskine.  If I am at one of my PCs, I will create the mind maps using MindManager.

Once I have brainstormed, and all of my ideas for reaching my goal are identified, I then determine if there are any dependencies.  I make a note of these in my Moleskine or I will set up a relationship in MindManager.  I then determine which of these steps is my Next Action, and I put only these on my To Do list.

Often times, reaching your destination can seem like a major undertaking, sometimes becoming overwhelming.  By plotting your course to establish milestones, and then determining your Next Action to reach milestone, the task becomes much less daunting.

Past posts in the A Better Life Series

1. What is Your Starting Point
2. What's Your Destination
3. Plot your Course to a Better Life

Plot Your Course to a Better Life

Having defined your Starting Point and determined your Destination, you are now ready to Plot Your Course.  These are the points you need to reach that will eventually lead you to your Destination.  We are not yet defining the "how", just the "where".  There are two possible ways to accomplish this:

1. Begin at your Starting Point and think of everything you must do in order to reach your Destination.
2. Begin at your Destination and think back to your Starting Point. 

Let's look at an example of both:

Starting Point to Destination
Starting Point - I weigh 270 lbs.
Destination - I weigh 180 lbs.
My Course (in lbs.) - 260, 250, 240, 230, 220, 210, 200, 190, 180

While this may seem very simplistic, these become the milestones I want to reach.  Once I reach the first milestone, my sense of accomplishment will be great, and I will be even more motivated to reach the next point.  In fact, I may change my course to increments of five so I can get that boost of motivation sooner and more often.

Destination to Starting Point
Destination - GTD Master (Black Belt)
Starting Point - Strong in the Collect, Process, and Organize phases, need to be more consistent with my Review, and really need to pick up the pace on my Doing
My Course - Want to hit all 100 points in The GTD Mastery 100.

In order to achieve this, I can work back from #100 to #1.

Once you have Plotted Your Course, you can put deadlines on when you want to reach each point.  Again, you can work from start to finish or finish to end.  Using my weight example:

I weigh 260 lbs. by Sept. 1, 2008
I weigh 250 lbs. by Nov. 1, 2008
...

Or

I weigh 180 lbs. by Jan. 1, 2010
I weigh 170 lbs. by Nov. 1, 2009
...

After completing this exercise, you will know where you are now, where you want to go, what milestones you need to hit, and by what date you want to hit them.  By doing this, you can easily track your progress towards your ultimate destination.

What's Your Destination?

Once you have defined your Starting Point, you need to determine where you are going.  You can't have a journey without a destination, so take the time to figure out exactly what you want from life.  Again, look at every aspect of your life:

• Your career & your work
• Your finances
• Your health & fitness
• Your relationships
• Your goals
• Your productivity
• Your personal time (recreation)

What would your ideal life look like if you could have everything you want in each of these areas?  Don't worry about what obstacles are in your way or how you are going to get to your destination, just figure out where you are going.  Imagine anything is possible!  As you determine your destinations in these areas, write them down!  Writing these things down will make it easier to review your answers later, and it will free your mind and creativity.

My Starting Point

In my previous post, I wrote about finding your Starting Point.  Taking a look at my life, here is mine:

The Good:

Career & work - I am very happy with the job that I have right now.  I enjoy the work that I do, and I wake up in the morning excited to get to work.  While I like what I am doing right now, I also want to take it to the next level, so I will be doing what is necessary to make that happen.

Relationships - I am engaged to a wonderful woman.   She has made  me extremely happy, and along with her two beautiful daughters, has had such a positive impact on my life.

Productivity - I follow David Allen's Getting Things Done philosophy fairly closely.  I do a very good job in 3 of the 5 stages of workflow : Collecting, Processing, and Organizing.  I write just about everything down in a ruled, pocket Moleskine that I carry with me everywhere that I go.  I process regularly, and I am very well organized.  My inboxes (work and home) are at zero.

Recreation - I spend most of my free time with my fiancee and her daughters, and I wouldn't trade that time for anything.  I also spend time watching sports, reading, writing, and taking pictures. 

The Bad:

Finances - I have more debt than makes me comfortable.  While I have cut way back on my spending over the past year, I am still paying for past mistakes.  I look forward to the day that I am debt free.

Relationships - I could do a much better job of keeping in touch with my family and friends.  I enjoy the time I spend with them, but sometimes I get too caught up in the things that I need to be doing.  Next thing I know, the time to hang out with them or call them has passed.

Goals - There are many things I want to do, and many things I want for my life, but I haven't taken the time to write them down, define them, and assign them a deadline.  I must make the time to do this.

Productivity - I mentioned earlier that I do a good job with the first three stages of GTD workflow, but I really need to work on the last two: Review and Do.  I have not been consistent enough with my Weekly Review, and I have a terrible procrastination habit.  In fact, It is so bad, I almost put this in the "Ugly" category.

Recreation - While I enjoy my free time, I have a tendency to have my mind on other things instead of enjoying the moment.  I need to focus more on living in the moment instead of being concerned about all sorts of extraneous things.

The Ugly:

Health & fitness - The bottom line here is that I have really let my physical fitness go over the past few years.  Right now, I am at 270 lbs., and I am amazed at how different my life after putting on 50 lbs. over the past couple of years.  I want, and need, to get more fit for many reasons, and it will take the most work of anything else I want to do.

This is my Starting Point for my journey to an extraordinary life.  I am interested in hearing about your Starting Points, so please share.

What is Your Starting Point?

So you've decided to start a journey towards an extraordinary life?  Just like any journey, you need to know exactly where you are starting from in order to get to where you want to go.  I call this your "Starting Point".  Your Starting Point is your chance to take a complete inventory of your life.  You will want to look at every area of your life:

• Your career & your work
• Your finances
• Your health & fitness
• Your relationships
• Your goals
• Your productivity
• Your personal time (recreation)

When defining my Starting Point, I like to use what I call the "Clint Eastwood Method"; I look at the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.

The Good - These are the areas of your life that are going well; the areas that you feel good about.  This does not mean that you can't, or don't want to make improvements in these areas, just that you are are happy with where you are right now.

The Bad - These are the areas where things aren't going so well, but they are also not causing you a great deal of stress.  You want to make improvements in these areas, but they will not require a great deal of effort to get them to "Good".

The Ugly - These are the areas that need the most work.  They are causing you a great deal of stress and may be affecting your overall well being.  Getting these aspects of your life to "Bad" will take some effort, and getting the to "Good" will take quite a bit of energy and commitment on your part.   

When defining your Starting Point, you want to be completely honest with yourself about wher you are because this is the foundation for your journey to a better life.

In the next post, I will show you how exactly how I have defined my Starting Point.

 

Ready to start a journey towards an extraordinary life?

Who is ready to start a journey towards an extraordinary life?  In this first post, I will let you know what the blog is going to be about, why I decided to start it, and a little about myself.

What
This blog is going to be about taking an "average" life and making it extraordinary. I will combine the various personal productivity and personal growth strategies I have learned over the years, as well as adding my own "hacks", to lead a better life, every day. My goal is to make every new day better than the day before.

Why
I decided to start this blog with the hope that I can assist others in their attempts to make their lives extraordinary by offering tips and tricks, showing what can be done, and getting discussions started around various topics. I also hope that through discussions and comments, readers of this blog will help me reach my goal of living an extraordinary life as well.

I have been a "student" of personal productivity and personal development for years, but I have not put enough of what I have learned into practice. This blog is the start of putting what I have learned into practice.

Who
I am a 35-year old IT Analyst living in a city just east of Cleveland. I am engaged to a wonderful woman who has two beautiful 6-year old twin girls. I grew up in the Chicago area, and most of my family still lives there. I also spent a little over a year in Colorado Springs.

Over the next few posts, I am sure you will get to know me better as I share my starting points; my "Where I am right now".

So, please join me for our journey to extraordinary lives!