In Getting Your Life On Track Part 2 we revealed how you could use that understanding to develop clear and important goals for yourself, so you’d always know you’re doing what you could best be doing.

In Getting Your Life On Track Part 3 we learned how dumping it, stuffing it and dealing it could help you unload your overload and reduce the anxiety you feel in your life.

It can be very stress-relieving to do core-dumps, and inspiring to set important goals for your roles. But how do you make sure you live in the flow constantly, instead of having it just another productivity pump-up that doesn’t last?

Here are 2 methods; they’re simple, but not always easy.

The Daily Review

Keep your goals and daily actions in a place where you can see them everyday. I keep them in my mobile and on my PC desktop.

Also keep your steps simple and actionable. The difference between ‘make more money’ and ‘look through the classifieds for new openings’ is that one is do-able.

The Weekly Review

Every week, do a review of your roles and goals – are they still the most important or have your priorities shifted? If you feel like you have a lot weighing on your mind, dump, stuff and deal it.

These 2 steps are simple, but not always easy, because they need consistent action on. The only real peace of mind is in knowing that everyday, you are taking steps towards what’s important to you, and that takes a constant review of where you are and where you want to go.

Getting Your Life On Track Series

Getting Your Life On Track Part 1
Getting Your Life On Track Part 2
Getting Your Life On Track Part 3
Getting Your Life On Track Part 4

To Master Your Time

First Things First : To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy

Getting Things Done : The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

In Getting Your Life On Track Part 2 we revealed how you could use that understanding to develop clear and important goals for yourself, so you’d always know you’re doing what you could best be doing.

But if you’re still feeling stressed and overwhelmed, here are 3 simple steps, adapted from David Allen’s Getting Things Done to unload your overload and reduce the anxiety you feel in your life.

Dump It

Do a mental core-dump. Get everything that you feel you should, want and need to do, out of your head and into something else: a piece of paper or a document in your computer. Write it all out.

Stuff It

If we had our way, we’d do everything on our lists. But if you’re already suffering from overload chances are you don’t have enough time to do everything you want. Looking at the list, what do you want to keep in there and what do you want to let go of?

Sort them out into 2 lists: Actionable for those you want to keep and act on, and Someday/Maybe for those you don’t.

So, be as selective as you can. Which are the high-leverage, important and worthwhile tasks you want to keep in your life?

Deal It

Looking at the Actionable list, which are the most important and worthwhile tasks to act on in the coming week? Schedule them in and make them real.

Dump, Stuff and Deal It.

Getting uncompleted commitments out of your head and into a list, which you then sort and then act on will help you let go of unnecessary worries and relieve the stress in your life.

But sure, you might ask yourself, it works, I’m feeling better already, but how can I keep my life on track like this all the time instead of making it just a one-off deal? The answer is simple, but not always easy, and I’ll explain it in my next post.

Getting Your Life On Track Series

Getting Your Life On Track Part 1
Getting Your Life On Track Part 2
Getting Your Life On Track Part 3
Getting Your Life On Track Part 4

Recommended Reading

First Things First : To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy

Getting Things Done : The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

In Getting Your Life On Track Part 1, we discovered a powerful way to find out if the things we spend our time on are really that urgent and important.

Now, here’s another powerful method from Stephen Covey’s First Things First to get your life on track.

What Are Your Roles?

We all play several roles in our lives. I could be a brother, employee, writer, martial artist, coach, friend, lover, artist, son, depending on where I am, what I’m doing and whom I’m with.

What are the roles current in your life?

List them out. Now, looking at each role, ask yourself; what’s the most important thing you could be doing for this role?

And are you doing it?

Set Your Goals

Looking at your roles, pare them down to a manageable 4 to 7 if you have more, for the next 7 days ahead. Looking at each role, ask yourself what the most important thing you could do for the week ahead is.

Break that goal down into actionable steps. Steps simple enough that you can take, and schedule them into the week ahead so they become real.

This will get you to shift from Q3 and Q4 into the Q2 activities that matter, and overcome the tyranny of the faux urgent to do what’s truly important for you.

Doing these simple steps will also get you feeling more relaxed and at flow. But if you still feel stressed from the daily grind, in my next post I outline a way for you to unload your anxiety.

Getting Your Life On Track Series

Getting Your Life On Track Part 1
Getting Your Life On Track Part 2
Getting Your Life On Track Part 3
Getting Your Life On Track Part 4

Recommended Reading

First Things First : To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy

Getting Things Done : The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

I had a blinding flash of the obvious the other day: I realized why I’d been falling behind on my commitments and feeling more stressed out the last few weeks.

I’d fallen for the lure of the urgent important and been chasing shiny trinkets of faux productivity. And it wasn’t because I didn’t have enough time, although that would have been a convenient – and irresponsible – excuse. It was because instead of leading my schedule, I’d let myself by led by it.

Ever feel like you’re caught up in doing, but not sure if you’re doing what you should be doing? It’s scary to think we could be throwing all our time and energy into climbing a ladder, only to find at the top it’s been leaning on the wrong wall.

Luckily for me, I have a method I’ve used throughout the years to help me get back on track – fast.

The Urgent Isn’t Always Important

Stephen Covey, in his must-read book First Things First, outlined these 4 Quadrants. If you find your life spiraling out of control, you need to know the 4 Quadrants and why they’re important.

Quadrant 1 are the things in your life that are both urgent and important. Matters like deadline-driven projects and crises. We all have Q1 activities in our lives, but if you’re feeling burnt out, chances are you live here.

Quadrant 2 is full of things that are not urgent but important which could range from spending quality time with your family to regular exercise. They won’t enact urgency on you like a deadline but they’re the foundations a quality life is built on.

The more time you spend in Q2, planning, building up your strength, preparing, the less time you spend and the more effective you become in Q1.

Quadrant 3 is where the urgent but not important matters lie. Some phone calls, meetings, last minute appointments that seem urgent but are actually not important fall into Q3.

Quadrant 4 are where the frivolous not urgent and not important stuff is. Stoning out in front of the TV, not learning and doing anything is a Q4 activity.

It’s obvious we should be spending most of our time in Q1 & 2. Spending too much time in Q3 and Q4 robs you of your time, gives you stress and saps your ability to perform in real Q1 and Q3 activities.

Which quadrant do you think you’re spending most of your time right now?

Think about the answer in the meantime. In my next post I’ll reveal how to make the 4 Quadrants an even more useful tool for leading your life.

Getting Your Life On Track Series

Getting Your Life On Track Part 1
Getting Your Life On Track Part 2
Getting Your Life On Track Part 3
Getting Your Life On Track Part 4

Recommended Reading

First Things First : To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy

Getting Things Done : The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

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!

At the same time, a book I bought and began reading, Coaching Into Greatness, challenged me with a few new and interesting ideas through the week.

The Illusion of Struggle

One of the things that Kim writes about in her book is the illusion of struggle, and this week I had the chance to get my own beliefs about struggle challenged.

In modern day culture, and also prevalent in personal development literature, there’s the popular notion that if you aren’t busy, you probably aren’t getting anything done. Lately, I started to question that belief with some of my own.

Does achievement always have to be a struggle?

I noticed this pattern in my own work: when things became easy to do, I began to doubt my work. There was this belief that if I didn’t have to work hard at it, that means it wasn’t good.

This belief was finally challenged when I did a piece of work I loved, and I was proud of, and it was easy and it only took me a day.

When I noticed this feeling of uneasiness, I started to question myself; what if achievement isn’t always a struggle? After all, the better I get at something, the easier and better I’m supposed to get at it, isn’t it? I then asked the pivotal question:

How would I feel if I achieved a lot easily and comfortably?

And when I felt the sense of uneasiness increase, and the boundaries of my mind pushed back a bit, I knew I had hit upon the limits of one of my beliefs. Then I challenged myself further:

How would I feel if I made twice the money I do now while putting in half the effort?

That was when a lot of other major beliefs started hitting back; whoa, you can’t do that! It takes hard work to earn money! What are you, lazy? Hey, good work only comes from hard work!

And then I started looking around and asking, what if a whole company of people believed that the only way to achieve was to struggle? Is that what causes the difference in company cultures and results? And what would happen if you got caught up in an environment that radiated that belief?

This was a major challenge to my current belief systems, but a good one I suspect.

Inspiration is Not Motivation

Another gem I brought back from the book is that inspiration is not motivation. I’d never thought about that but it’s so true, in my own work whenever I’m motivated to do something, it’s great, but it’s usually because of extrinsic rewards.

But whenever I’m inspired, it always comes from an internal drive, and it’s not so much as fulfilling outside expectations, but my own, and it feels easier and less of a struggle to work through inspiration than motivation.

The Illusion of Not Enough Time

I was having this conversation the other day with my friends when we brought up the point about having leisure time. Most of us were very driven people with our own goals and directions, and none of us could imagine finding ourselves wasting time or having nothing to do.

At the same time, there was another radical idea floating around: what if we purposely dedicated time to do anything we wanted, even nothing, to just ‘waste’ it away?

We all had one thing in common: we never seemed to have enought time to do what we wanted to do, even though we were doing as much of it as we could. I was wondering, would living like that continuously infect the mind with the idea that there was never enough time?

What if instead, we set aside time that was completely free to whittle away with as we please? Would that teach our minds instead that there is an abundance of time without the need to horde every single moment of it?

Taking Time Off to Recharge

In the spirit of telling my mind that there is more than enough time to get things done, that I could take time off, and to recharge so that inspiration and not motivation was what was pumping me I decided to experiment.

I spent the last couple of days away from writing, and doing what I’d normally thought were frivolous things away from work: napping, reading, watching videos, having afternoon tea with my folks, and taking care of my body with cycling and stretching.

And Still Having Enough Time To Do What I Wanted

At first there were lots of doubts; if you don’t update Life Coaches Blog enough, your readers will leave! and there’s no time for napping, forget that you’re tired and just push through it! also why are you wasting your time reading that fiction book of yours!

Instead, even though I spent all that leisure time, I still found time to achieve what I set out to do this weekend: I consolidated this month’s personal accounts, I submitted an entry to an Ipod design competition, I tweaked and solved a couple of problems on the new Life Coaches Blog design, and I’m writing this post now.

Not bad!

Of course, I didn’t do everything I wanted, but I did what I set out to do and what I found the main difference was, that while holding the belief that there is enough time, I didn’t experience the low level anxiety running in the background that there wasn’t.

And also by holding the belief that achievement can be easy, I found myself zipping through the Ipod design relatively fast and was quite happy with the way it looked.

Interesting.

The takeaway from this is: we all know that our beliefs affect the realities we create around us, and this week I’ve been challenging some of my beliefs. I’m very curious about this abundance mentality that Coaching Into Greatness talks about, and I’m actively exploring what it would be like to live with those beliefs and what kind of a reality that would create.

P.S. This is the Amazon link directly to the book Coaching Into Greatness : 4 Steps to Success in Business and Life, and this is the Coaching Into Greatness website.