Imagine if every morning when you awoke, there was a card table with a mound of jigsaw puzzle pieces on it. And your job every day was to put those pieces together to create a finished puzzle. And tomorrow morning when you awoke, there would be another new mound of pieces to add to today’s.
Only, you have no idea what the final picture is supposed to look like, because they didn’t give you the box with the finished picture on it! How would you proceed? How would you know how far you had to go to get done? How would you know when you were done?
This is life without a plan, life without a Preferred Future. And the law of this life is this: “If you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing, you’ll never have enough time to get it done.” Our personal life and our work are both a series of choices – choices of activities that we will perform next. The activities that we choose to perform determine our results. And the choice we have is between a future and a Preferred Future. If the culmination of the activities we perform is automatically a future, why not have those activities culminate in a future we prefer?If life is like assembling the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, why not have the final picture be something we’d like it to be?
We can.
The secret of achieving your Preferred Future is this: “Focus on your Preferred Future, but respond to the present.” In doing so, you automatically identify your highest priorities, and complete not the easiest or next thing on the “to do” list, but rather the thing that will help you achieve your goals. Here are the five steps leading to your Preferred Future:
1. Clearly define your Preferred Future. Getting a new job is not clearly defined – being in charge of the hydraulic engineering department is. If you don’t know what the final picture looks like, there is no way you can assemble the pieces of the puzzle.
2. Know why this Preferred Future is important to you. Do you want the new job because of money or because of the status? If you don’t know, you might make the wrong choice for the wrong reason, and the goal is always to do the right thing at the right time for the right reason. You can’t do that if you don’t know why your Preferred Future is important to you.
3. Identify a small step that will open the door. Every journey has its first step, and each step leads to the next. And while all the steps are not the same and some are much harder than others, you have to find a place to begin. You journey nowhere without moving your feet.
4. Monitor your progress. Keep a record. Make a daily plan. Make a monthly plan. Make a quarterly plan. Make a three-year plan. And take notes. Determine what worked and what didn’t. If you don’t keep track of where you are, you won’t have any idea of where you’re going.
5. Modify your actions based on what you’ve learned. When you have the information on what worked and what didn’t, change your action steps accordingly. And consistently revise your plans. If a sailor doesn’t change course, he can never reach his goal. The better the sailor, the more frequently he monitors his actions and the more frequently he changes course.
When you focus on your Preferred Future, you are applying the pre-eminent law of body-building, and of life. That is, what you focus on gets stronger. When you create a clearly defined Preferred Future and focus on it constantly, you will discover that every day you are choosing the most important puzzle pieces in your life that will best help you to build your Preferred Future.
Brent Dees is a business coach who works with highly motivated, highly successful business owners who are ready to take their business to the next level. Based out of Charlotte, North Carolina, Brent teaches Focus Four workshops on the principals of focus, balance, accountability, and habits. Learn more at http://www.focusfour.com
Source: www.isnare.com
