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Imagine buying the latest best seller and when you open it up you see a bunch of hand written pages. Incoherent structure, spelling and grammatical errors, illegible words.
How about watching a movie or play? To many characters, to few characters, confusing story line, no ending.
Or how about building a house of the architects first drawing? Can you say money pit?
Would you fly in a plane that was built using the first draft? Do you think it would get off the ground.
If in all of the above examples it’s a no brain-er that we would want to benefit from the polished copy, with all the editing, testing, and corrections made.
So why in our own lives do we settle for living it in Rough Draft?
- You wake up one morning and decide that you want to get your days in order. You spend 30 minutes, deciding how your days should run. You finish it, feel good about your effort and start implementing it. Barely a month passes and your life still feels chaotic and you are not accomplishing your life’s goals.
- Do a search in your email account. Is it full of easy online business opportunities. You’ve put the money in, some of them might be on monthly auto-pay and you don’t even realize that your credit card is being billed monthly. A pile of half finished un-followed pointless businesses. Are they making you any money? Did you really want to be doing them? Were they someone else’s dream?
It’s Time To Edit:
When it comes to editing written works. We take out our or spelling, grammar and structure tools.
With buildings an machines we take out our math and physics tools.
So what tools do you take out to edit your life?
In Coaching, some of the main life editing tools we help the client develop are the tools of:
- Values
- Strengths
- Meta Goals
- Inner Critic Awareness.
When you are clear on your values and strengths, it helps you to clearly define your meta goals.With the awareness of your Inner Critic you are able to become more conscious of when you are sabotaging yourself and moving out of alignment with your life’s objectives.
Though it is difficult to properly cover all these tools in an article. If you are interested there is a questionnaire designed by Dr. Martin Seligman on Authentic Happiness . Under the heading Engagement Questionnaires: there is the VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire.  The survey helps to give you a sense of your top 24 strengths and is a useful tool in creating strategies to accomplish your goals. I often ask my clients to fill out this survey before we begin coaching.
When you are about to get into a business or organize and area of your life, you can use these four tools to help you decide your next steps.
Using these tools, you can take the Rough Drafts of your life and edit them to polished perfection.
Coaching Questions:
Do I know what my top Values and Strengths are?
What are MY Meta-Goals?
How might my Inner Critic be interfering with my goals?
Does my current plan align with my top Values?
How can I design a strategy that works to my strengths?
