The Fire Within from Stephen Covey’s groundbreaking First Things First.
How do you lead a life of fulfillment instead of disappointment?
By focusing on your human needs. Not human wants, like a brand new iPod, but human needs, and here is a method that helps you live a life of fulfillment and ignite the fire within.
Here Is A Powerful Method To Direct The Time Of Your Life
A time-tested way to manage the time of our lives is to compartmentalize the different areas of our lives into easy-to-manage, bite-sized pieces. You can think about these areas like career, family, health, finance, studies, relationships, the list is endless.
An master way to handle these lists is from Stephen Covey’s First Things First. In it, he describes the 4 master needs that everybody has, and must satisfy to live, to love, to learn and to leave a legacy.
Physical needs are the needs you have to live. These include needs like taking care of your health, finances, career.
Social needs are the needs you have to love. The need to love and be loved drive your needs for good relationships with friends, family, lovers, colleagues, community.
Mental needs are the needs you have to learn. These include the need for growth and constant, never-ending improvement.
Spiritual needs are the needs you have to leave a legacy, by filling your life with meaning, purpose and mission.
When any of these needs are unmet, you’re like a car running without a tire. You know you’re moving, but something’s not quite right.
You might be doing extremely well at work, for example, and have truckloads of cash raining on you. But if your late hours cause you to become distant from your wife and friends, then you’re not running on all cylinders.
In those moments when you take conscious control and have all areas going on strong, that’s when the engine of your life ignites with the fire within.
How To Ignite The Fire Within
The personal power you have when you take care of all areas is incredible, and it even builds on itself.
When you have a great relationship (social), you feel more motivated to take care of yourself (physical). The more energy you have (physical) the more you can do at work (physical). The more you live on purpose (spiritual), the happier you’ll be and the better relationships you have (social).
Satisfying all 4 needs brings you to a life of vitality, passion and fulfillment, and that inner joy for life that you can only describe as the fire within.
Take a moment, stop and reflect back on the past week. Have you been focusing on one area of life and neglecting another? If so, time for you to take back the power.
The great thing is that you can combine the different areas for a double-punch of power. You could get your husband to go play a few rounds of tennis with you, for example, or listen to a motivational audio program while running. You could join a class to learn something new and meet new people at the same time. The possible combinations are endless.
The Fire Within At Life Coaches Blog
Life Coaches Blog is as much a reflection of my journey as it is a one-stop personal development library for you, my dear readers. I’ve always had this deep want to become a better person, whether physically by studying the martial arts, socially by learning how to be more empathic, mentally by picking up the success strategies of NLP, or spiritually by defining my mission and creating meaning in what I do.
That’s why there are 21 subject categories in Life Coaches Blog, from awareness, coaching to communication. They reflect my own interests and drive to become better, instead of just focusing on one area of my life like relationships or productivity.
I’m still writing to strike the balance between good writing, informational content and sharing my own personal path to growing in wisdom, power and love.
The last 13 months have been an interesting journey, but if you liked what’s come so far, those were just baby steps. Stick around with me, I have a feeling the next 13 months is going to be even more exciting!
December 11th, 2006 at 11:11 am
This method is very similar to the one Steve recommends for finding your purpose of finding the overlap of:
Needs - What you need to survive, pay-bills, etc.
Wants - What you want to do
Skill - What you are skilled at doing
Purpose - What you should do to help others
Great post!
December 12th, 2006 at 8:43 pm
Thanks Scott! I love Steve’s 4 points too, I found it an invaluable exercise to go through.
December 13th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
Thanks Alvin for the great post!
A timely reminder for self-reflection, self-awareness and self-transformation as we awake to a brand new day, a brand new year.
December 14th, 2006 at 1:56 pm
Good post, Alvin.
Question: what would you say are the common obstacles that prevent us from living those principles? The power of many such principles is their apparent simplicity-they are not rocket science. Why don’t we live by them so many times?
December 14th, 2006 at 10:10 pm
Good question Alvaro, it’s a question that deserves an answer in a post itself :).
I think the trick is to make these principles a real, operational part of our lives. I know my life changed the moment I got a PDA, started mapping out and tracking the time of my life and how I spent it.
When take these principles down and make them specific actionable steps, and then schedule it and put it in your face day after day it becomes real. If you can make the best way the easiest way it’ll get done, I see my PDA which is also my mobile phone everyday so there’s no escaping.
It also boils down to a lack of enough pain or pleasure. If the consequences of not staying true to these principles isn’t painful enough, then it’s easy to let them slide. If you don’t get sheer pleasure from using them, you’ll probably won’t be motivated to stay on track either.
March 5th, 2007 at 8:10 am
Excellent post. I think thats a very good reminder of how to live and maintain a balanced life