Setting Sail

Once you have established a Life Dream, a meaningful personal Goal that will fulfill your Purpose or Mission of this lifetime, What Then? (see Yeats poem, linked).  How are you to bridge the seeming gulf between where you are Now and where (and how) you wish to Be? What holds you back from pursuing or from realizing your Dream?

Before you can set sail to the destination of manifesting your fulfillment, your Bliss, you need clarity about the process you can take to bring your goal within the grasp of realization. That means you need to have a clear view of your destination and a good awareness about how you will manifest your goal. When a Dream or Goal seems too remote or unrealistic from where we are Now, we are less likely to take practical steps in the direction of ever realizing this goal.

  

I have found in working with life mappers over the past decade that it can help to conceptualize where we are at in relation to a Goal by viewing the situation from a broad overview perspective. One basic technique for ‘zooming out’ far enough to see the whole is a basic form of mind-mapping called a CLUSTERING technique.  I will present a very tailored version of this technique in Life Paths; for now, though, I invite you to use a very general approach to help you to frame parameters of your Life Dream that are relevant to developing your motivation around your Dream. For an example of his method, I recommend Mary Carroll Moore’s excellent book, How to Master Change in Your Life, as she presents a similar clustering approach there in relation to bringing about a desired change.

You may start this clustering practice simply by placing a word or phrase representing your Life Dream in the center of a blank, unlined page. Then start reflecting on this Dream. What benefit will you gain from realizing this goal in your life? Write something describing this benefit somewhere on the page (above the center to express a positive aspect) and draw a line from your Dream to this benefit. Are there outcomes or consequences from this benefit to also consider? Draw a line from the benefit to this other consideration. Are there negative sorts of challenges (e.g. cost or time limitations) that you associate with your Dream? Draw a line to a space below the center and write these considerations. For every branch extending out from the center that you connect with the considerations that arise as you reflect more deeply on this Dream, you may draw sub-branch limbs to clouds of related considerations around these. You can also connect considerations over the whole page to one another.

For every negative challenge or fear, etcetera, that you expose with this mind-mapping technique, do aim to also place a positive ‘antidote’ or solution to this challenge, as well. After you complete the clustering session, you may wish to envision and to journal or write about the insights you have gained. Has a plan of sorts revealed itself? What steps can you begin to take now in your life that can help you to overcome obstacles to your manifestation of this valuable Life Dream?

I welcome your Comments and Stories!

Realize Your Goals!

Connecting with this week’s Better Endings focus on joblessness or underemployment, our Life Mapping tool for this week can be used to envision a pathway to manifest a desired goal. As you engage with this GOAL-CLUSTER mind-mapping activity, I invite you to approach it with a childlike perspective, allowing “playful” ideas to emerge from your unconscious sandbox.

Using the template shown above, you can start by placing either a word, a phrase, or an image icon that represents a meaningful, desired goal (with perhaps a photo of yourself, smiling!) into the center of a page, with an X that segments the page into 4 quadrants around this GOAL-center.

Next, starting with the top/RESULTS quadrant, you can use free association to place words or phrases that represent what you will gain or how you will benefit  with your goal ACHIEVED. Where these benefits or positive outcomes are meaningfully interconnected for you, you can draw lines or off-shooting branches showing these connections.

Next you can start filling in any of the other three quadrant sections, again using playful free association to ‘draw connections’ between ideas either within a quadrant or migrating across them.

For example, let’s say your goal is to take a trip to visit Ireland. RESULTS might include: “touching base with my heritage”; “expanding my horizons”; or “slowing down for awhile/ getting away”. Then branching off from one of these you might add, “gold at the end of the rainbow”, and off from that: “retire there?” [okay, now I am getting my own ideas; I love Ireland!].  Now under OBSTACLES, maybe you would write: “Money?” That may lead you to the RESOURCES space, where you can brainstorm how you might afford the trip; if so, you can connect this resource to the obstacle statement. Envisioning Resources might lead you also to think of some very real Solutions, see?

After filling in this GOAL-cluster mind-map so that you feel you have fleshed out all four quadrants with meaningful and helpful ideas,   I invite you to go back and circle or use color to highlight those specific Resources and Solutions that can help you to actualize the RESULTS you desire to create in your life. You can also start a new page, placing any of the specific Results or Resources or Solutions (or Obstacles) you generated with the GOAL cluster into the center, and explore that aspect with its own, freestyle cluster mind-map.

Approaching this technique as a playful game will facilitate emergence of a mindful awareness that can stimulate “out of the box” solutions.  Remember from Denise’s Guest Blog two weeks ago: “There IS NO BOX!”