Know Your 'Why', and Your 'How' Will Follow
This past year has been a period of great personal transformation beyond what I thought was possible.
The process of understanding myself and what I want from life has been an incredible journey, one that I didn’t see developing in the fashion that it has.
Pinning down where this transformation began is tricky, but I can think of a particular instance that sparked my current trajectory.
I was over at a friend’s gathering and I was visiting with individuals I hadn’t seen in a few months time. During that period, I had started a new job in a different field, as I made the move to leave the mental health field for the literal field, as I decided to take up professional gardening.
I was unhappy with my current career path in mental health, and seeing as I didn’t have a masters degree and didn’t have the desire to go back to school (and accrue massive student loans), I decided it made more sense to change paths.
Upon telling a friend that I had become a professional gardener, he asked me a question which I was, at the time, unprepared to answer. He asked what my plan for my life/career was.
I Honestly Couldn’t Sufficiently Answer the Question
It was then that I realized I had overlooked a very important component in life, that being...having a plan for how I wanted my life to go. And I’m not just talking about a few paragraphs about my dreams or aspirations, I’m referring to a concrete, specific life plan that details every important aspect of my life.
Shockingly, most people do not have a concrete idea of what they want out of their life beyond the generalities of being happy and having someone to love and share their experience with. I was one of those people, and up until the second half of 2017, I was clueless about what I wanted from life and how I would get there.
When people would ask me what I wanted from life, I would usually say my pie-in-the-sky dream of living sustainably, building an off-grid house and homesteading on my property. If anyone prompted me to explain how I would get from point A to point B, I would fail to have an adequte answer.
I decided to go back to the drawing board
In realizing I didn’t have a solid map for my life’s path, I decided to write one out. I searched for templates online, and stumbled upon one from projectlifemastery. This life plan is based on the work of both Tony Robbins and Steven Covey, whose work I had begun to consume in the process of self-discovery and searching for deeper answers.
The process of writing a life plan was surprisingly difficult. The template breaks down your life into the various roles that we play, whether it is as a significant other, a family member/friend, a business owner, a personal financial steward, a mental/physical health steward, etc. I wrote a piece a few months ago about the importance of defining your roles, outcomes, and activities as a means to organizing your life plan.
Writing a life plan took approximately a week, and prompted me to think deeply about what I actually wanted to see from my life. The exercise encourages you to truly think about the most ideal outcome for your life, not just a watered down version that seems more realistic.
If your goals are uninspiring, you will be much less inspired to complete them.
Tony Robbins, the world-renowned motivational speaker, stresses the importance of knowing your ‘why’ in life. Robbins says that if you know your why, the how in life becomes dramatically easier.
If you don’t know why you are doing something, you are much less likely to follow through with each task that is required in order to achieve your desired outcome. The process of writing out the most ideal version of your life makes this ‘why’ more tangible and easier to grativitate towards.
I have personally experienced a tremendous increase in my productivity since writing this life plan. Having laid out for myself a clear vision of the best possible outcome for my life, I now have a better understanding of where I’m going and WHY I’m headed that way.
The act of writing your own personal life plan is an immeasurably powerful tool in terms of giving you the direction you seek. In defining your why, you will have a much stronger connection to the who, the what, the where, and the how of your life. The value of your why should not be underestimated.
All uncredited pictures from the pixabay.com
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Very nic post
power of w's <3 strongly agreed with that point you put into your post if you don't know about 'why' then 'How" could not be easier for you :) thanks for sharing such valuable knowledge :) upvote resteem done :)