Get The Matrix Out Of Your Head And Into The World - Need/Want Matrix
Just not sure what's driving your decisions anymore?
Well since I have no formal training or education in psychology and no clinical experience whatsoever, I'm the perfect person to tell you what might help you!
This experiment to me is an easy, tactile way to draw distinctions between things in your life and observe their extremes. Just seeing where the pieces of your life fall can help define their edges and where those things bump up against each other.
Try this 10 minute exercise and fill in the four quadrants with whatever is inside your head, clogging up your decision making.
When you oppose your Needs and Wants on an XY axis, you create four quadrants:
Things I Need & Want - These should create a goal goldmine. Items here meet the qualifications of being something that you actually Need for psychological, emotional, physical or financial stability, and your Want creates a desire to go after them.
Things I Don't Need, but Want - Items here will create an image of frivolous time or resource expenditures. No one is without the desire for care-free enjoyment, but it is only healthy if pursued within reason.
Things I Don't Need & Don't Want - Perfect fodder for your "Stop Doing List". Items here clearly show you that you should be moving away from them. Minimize effort on these things ASAP. Clear the decks for better work.
Things I Need, but Don't Want - Going after these items will require discipline. You know they are good for you, but the desire to pursue them isn't strong. This is possibly the most important quadrant, because it shows you where the real work is going to be in doing what is right for yourself.
If you want to do this exercise with no other importing on how and what should fill in your page STOP HERE. Because I'm going to share my Need/Want Matrix from last year.
.
.
.
.
.
OK. did you stop?
.
.
.
.
..
...
Really, it's right below here.
OK. Assuming now that if you're here you want to see this too. This is what mine ended up looking like. Now I took it a step further and once I had my brain emptied out onto the chart paper, I drew a little box in the center and thought about the things that I'd listed out and what capabilities it would take to have a reasonable shot at attaining them. This was my thinking
Energy : How much work am I going to have to actually put in to make these things materialize
Focus : How much of my time should be spent thinking about these things, or how to get them done
Avoidance : How hard or how often am I going to work to stay clear of these things
My thinking was that anything I needed should take a reasonable amount of my focus and energy, especially the things I didn't want because there is no real emotional or practical trigger for me to do them, other than the fact that they would probably be good for me if I got them. Avoidance would have to be practiced so that I didn't just default to doing things that were easy to get, and the things that fall into the Holy Mother of Incentives (I Both Want & Need) would be the most likely to happen, with the least additional input from me.
All I can say is that it's been a year since writing this and it is goddamn scary all the ways I've consciously and subconsciously constructed my life in order to reflect what I put up on this board.
Check out my few other posts on Steem @
- https://steemit.com/funding/@almostfitz/think-local-act-global
- https://steemit.com/revenue/@almostfitz/day-4-369-the-wheel-turns-all-ways
- https://steemit.com/insurance/@almostfitz/day-3-368-what-aren-t-you-insured-for
- https://steemit.com/startup/@almostfitz/day-2-find-funding-day-367-find-customers
- https://steemit.com/startup/@almostfitz/the-day-it-all-started
- https://steemit.com/startup/@almostfitz/experimenting-with-the-bogo-3-0-business-model
- https://steemit.com/startup/@almostfitz/why-this-business-data-confidence-and-shit-testing
- https://steemit.com/startup/@almostfitz/why-this-business-set-your-anchors-deep
- https://steemit.com/travel/@almostfitz/tourists-pull-your-head-out-of-your-ass
- https://steemit.com/worst/@almostfitz/the-potential-freedom-in-being-the-world-s-worst-entrepreneur
- https://steemit.com/storage/@almostfitz/the-self-storage-industry-feeds-off-laziness-save-money-by-organizing
- https://steemit.com/business/@almostfitz/open-for-business-11-pictures-about-launching-a-startup-speak-11-000-words
- https://steemit.com/shark/@almostfitz/i-binged-5-seasons-of-shark-tank-and-got-something-out-of-it
- https://steemit.com/dnn/@almostfitz/dnn-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-on-how-to-create-a-decentralized-free-news-platform
- https://steemit.com/writing/@almostfitz/free-writing-cage-that-monkey-mind-and-get-creative
- https://steemit.com/data/@almostfitz/stop-wasting-time-168-hours-tracking-system
Check out my posts on my other blog on my Shopify store @