I was working through Chapter 7 of the book Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching by Stephen G. Fairley and Chris E. Stout, hoping to gain some clarity on restarting a blog.
Doing the exercises in chapter 7; ‘7 Tools for Making a Great First Impression’ on creating a powerful company name and dynamic tag lines; I thought it was interesting how the following words kept popping up: ‘focus’ & ‘important’.
After writing them down a few times, I found myself writing this down:
All personal development tools should center around your mission, what’s important to you and helping you optimize your life around that.
Even though I hadn’t intended to go deep into my beliefs, this exercise brought out the central idea I have about what’s really important in personal development.
So much of personal development helps you get things done faster and makes you feel better about it. But if you don’t know what your mission is in life, your purpose and your destination, what’s really important to you…then it’s like fine-tuning a Ferrari and pointing it in the wrong direction.
It’s the folly of placing the urgent before the important and like Tony Robbins says in this must-listen audio, the mistake of placing achievement before fulfillment.
What’s really important to you?
Is it love? Achievement? Time with family? Money - or the feelings that money give you?
Doing this exercise has given me some clarity and some exciting new ideas about Life Coaches Blog and personal development. Stay tuned.
September 30th, 2007 at 3:08 pm
“the mistake of placing achievement before fulfillment”
An interesting thought… I have always assumed that achievement led to fulfillment. But on reflection I can see it can sometimes be an enemy of fulfillment. You can spend all your time and energy ‘achieving’ but give little thought to where you are going in life - your life purpose.
September 30th, 2007 at 11:28 pm
Exactly, Chris. Sometimes we keep busy just to starve off the feeling that we’re not living up to our purpose - we go for the short-term pleasure of checking off our to-do lists while ignoring the longer-term task of mapping out our life’s vision.