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Reclaiming Your Authority & Making Your Map
Imagine • Align • Focus • Communicate • Engage • Succeed
The following is a perspective on steps to making a map from where you are, to where you want to go, using personal authority that you may have given away, your sense of appropriate action, and your powers of deliberate choice. It may work for you to think of your sense of appropriate action — in thought or deed — as your "internal compass."
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Imagine
Imagine what you want, and where you want to go, and think about it often. Try different scenarios using active imagination, and project into the future.
What is your "future self" like in the scenario you are considering? How does this course benefit you? How does it benefit others? For example, how does it benefit your employer or your clients? How will friends and family react? Overall, do you feel freer, or more constricted when you place yourself in this vision? Will it fit with your values and the rest of your life?
Make no judgements yet! Gather information: you'll use it in later stages of this process (alignment, communication, engagement).
If you can't imagine it, or at least how it feels to be there, odds are, you won't achieve it. Begin with imagination.
Worried about "living in the moment" or "being present"? The present is for appreciation, inspired action, and working with the present results of previous imaginings.
If you want to change the future, begin with imagination. ©2008-2012 Mark Petruzzi (SuccessWaypoint, LLC)
Align
What are your habits of thought? What do you pay attention to? Why do you want what you want? Are you truly connected with your direction, or are you doing it because you "should" or only because someone else suggested that you do it.
What beliefs conflict with or add to your momentum in achieving your dreams? Do you have any conflicting objectives or desires? Do you have beliefs that regularly cause you stress? Who would you be without those beliefs?
If you are a leader, check the alignment of your vision with that of your employees, community, and stakeholders.
Use the Desire Engine technique, or journaling, to sort through conflicts of thought and choice that might take you off your course. You might consider hiring a coach, or mentor, to help you through this process.
Life and work alignment will reduce stress, and release more energy toward where you want to go. ©2008-2012 Mark Petruzzi (SuccessWaypoint, LLC)
Our destiny changes with our thought; we shall become what we wish to become, do what we wish to do, when our habitual thought corresponds with our desire.
Orison Swett Marden
Focus
This process can run concurrently, or after the Align step.
Focus. Continue to evaluate your alignment, and bring focus back to those choices, thoughts, and actions that align with your direction, your dream.
Reduce or eliminate distractions where you can, and where appropriate. This doesn't mean ignore friends, or skip vacations! It means we consciously choose where to put our energy. We take time for family friends and self, and carefully prioritize business/work activity to maximize our momentum in our chosen direction. Focus includes nurturing our health and wellbeing. ©2008-2012 Mark Petruzzi (SuccessWaypoint, LLC)
Communicate
Are your listeners understanding you? How well are you listening? Communication can make or break realization of a dream, vision, goal, or project.
Become a student of communication. Seek ever greater understanding about the often diverse ways in which different personalities and cultures transmit and receive communication. Practice, practice, practice.
This practice will benefit your personal branding, your engagement, your appreciation of diversity, but there's more.
To a practiced eye, styles of communication reveal the variety of perceptions and preferences of others. We thus gain the opportunity to enrich our own views, and to better reach those who we are seeking to reach. ©2008-2012 Mark Petruzzi (SuccessWaypoint, LLC
Engage
Communicate. Network. Share. Blog. Participate in communities and associations where you will find support, and where you can contribute on the way to your objectives. Seek out like-minded others, and diversity too. Appreciate both, and seek richness in your relationships.
Planning a transition? Dig in to your current work.
Why? Isn't that a distraction?
No.
Appreciating what you have now, and delivering your best value there, will lend energy, and relieve stress, and benefit both your current work, and your new direction.
Dig into your life. Appreciate it. Begin each day considering those things that mean the most to you, and who and what you appreciate. Now consider the value that you will bring to your life, and the lives of others. Engage. ©2008-2012 Mark Petruzzi (SuccessWaypoint, LLC)
Succeed
The succeed step is about realizing your goals, objectives, dreams, sure.
Celebrate! Rejoice!
That's great, but then you need a new goal, objective, dream to keep going, right?
We put "Succeed" at the end, but really, it is also the beginning. True Success (big S, as in "my life is a success") is about feeling great about where you are and where you are going. That means success is more about habits of thought, than merely goal achievement, or how much abundance you have in a particular area of your life.
We all can appreciate and abundance of wealth, time, health, love, etc., but let's not confuse abundance with success. There are many who are wealthy in one or more of these areas, yet report not feeling successful at all.
Success involves enjoying the process of getting there as much, or more, than arriving. Success includes appreciation of past "failures" and "mistakes" as well as our wins.
Success is more about attitude, than arriving. It's a plane that's climbing, nose up, and turning the headwind of adversity into extra lift. Success is about embodying a growth mindset—one that enables us to take the contrasts of life in stride, using them for our continuing expansion.
Achieving this kind of successful outlook may mean adjusting some habitual thoughts and beliefs, and the payoffs are well worth the examination and change!
As with the other steps, you might consider hiring a coach to help you with this all-important process. ©
We can all benefit by reclaiming authority that up until now, we’ve practiced giving away in order to gain the approval of others — or for this or that imagined reason.
It's true that we increase our chances of happiness and success by making more of our choices based on what inspires us; from the inside out; with more focus of attention and "presence" than we are normally accustomed to.
There's real power in the knowing that our happiness and success are not about someone else's actions or solution, but about finding what works for us, and practicing that with focus and positive expectation.
What do you want? What are the thoughts you habitually think? What are the kinds of choices you make, and how do you make your choices? What you are willing to do to make your wants happen?
Imagine, align, focus, communicate, engage, succeed.
©2008-2012 Mark Petruzzi (SuccessWaypoint, LLC)
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Effective communication is incredibly important to achieving desires and objectives, and simplifying our lives as well.
