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?

Examples of directing money towards evil:

• Illegal Drugs
• Weapons
• Gambling
• War
• Excessive Alcohol
• Prostitution
• To dominate others
• To make you think you are better than other
• etc.

Though it will not guarantee it money CAN buy happiness.

Money has two roles when being used in a positive manner. It is either an expense or an investment.

An expense is anything that uses up your money, but does not give you any value beyond what you paid for it. An example would be food, household expenses, personal car, personal cell phone and the like.

An investment is something that gives you a greater return then the money you put in. Examples would be stock and business investments, commercial real estate, and education.

Now that you have some basic ideas of the nature of money and what it can do. Lets discover how money can buy you happiness.
As you might have guest its about investing your money. No I’m not going to start giving you stock tips, and the truth is, if you are not a educated investor, stock tips will take away all your money and happiness.

The two areas of investment are “Yourself” and “Others”

Investing in yourself.

The body is your temple. Keep it pure and clean for the soul to reside in. ~B.K.S. Iyengar, Yoga: The Path To Holistic Health

You buy a brand new $150,000 sports car, you dream of taking it out on the roads and enjoying to exhilaration of pure speed, power and performance.
You get to the gas station to fill up the car and decide that the the premium gas is just to expensive so you put in the low grade. You don’t pay attention to the scheduled maintenance, so instead of changing the oil every 3 month or 5000km it ends up being every 5-6 months or 6500km, you delay in changing the breaks, and tires, and constantly for get about the filters and other fluids. One sunny morning about a year after you bought the car, you hear on the news that they just opened up an Autobahn in your city. Excited you grab your keys and head to the new highway. You get to the on-ramp, grip the wheel tightly and floor it. 100km..110km..125km…13…BOOM. All at once your front tires, enging and transmission blow, and to top it off your breaks give out. You fly off the road sending the care in to a roll, crash into a concrete light post and barley make it out alive.

You come into the world in pure and perfect, if you don’t care for your Mind, Body and Soul, when the potential for success and happiness arises you might find yourself crashing (disease) and barley making it out alive.

Make these three key investments in yourself.

Invest in Knowledge and Awareness.

Buy:
Books
CD
Videos
Take courses and seminars.

There is a vast world of knowledge out there. Study topics that will improve your relationships, perspective and skills. Study books on self awareness and meditation. Study books on healthy eating and lifestyle. All complex machines come with an operators manual. You are the most complex machine in existence, become a student of life to understand how to operate at your best.

Invest in exercise and healthy eating.

Whether its an exercise video or a club membership get active. At the least you should be physically active three times a week, but 6 times is more ideal. Also incorporate 5-10 min. of light stretching in the morning and evening. Eat healthy. I won’t say much more on healthy eating because this is not my expertise, but the quality of the fuel that you put into your body determines how well your body performs.
I personally enjoy the books by Dr. Andrew Weil, and the “YOU” Series of books by Dr. Mehemet and Oz.

Invest in a personal coach.

“Working with Rob, I accomplished things that otherwise would have
remained unfinished ideas. Instead of getting overwhelmed by day-to-day
tasks, he guided me to take measured steps that helped me achieve my
longer term goals. A compassionate and attentive listener, Rob is able
to get to the heart of the matter in a single question. He was always
generous in sharing information about resources I wouldn’t have known
about, and educating me–without ever preaching–about helpful small
business concepts and useful technology.”

Avrum Nadigel, MSW, RSW, B.Comm
Adolescent Therapist and Consultant
http://www.nadigel.com
http://www.nadigel.com/blog

We are not solitary beings, we can’t go it alone in this world. Even the greatest sea captains would use the north star to find their way.
Coaching helps you increase your self awareness so you can chart your course in life. A coach helps you to become aware that your are fully capable of achieving your dreams and goals, and that there is an incredible abundance out there in the world just waiting to be shared.

This is stage one. When you invest in your self, your mind, body and soul, you begin to open up to the world of success and happiness.

I will post stage two “Investing in Others” soon.

Rob

Asset allocation is a term used to refer to how an investor distributes his money (assets) among various classes of investment vehicles (e.g., stocks and bonds). Depending on the persons goals and desired level of risk, the asset strategies can be quite varying. Even if an investor is going for aggressive growth and high risk, he will often spread his money over a number of investment.
The logic being that not all your eggs are in one basket. If one investment crashes you don’t loose everything.

What about your personal assets?

Your strengths and skills are the assets that make it possible to earn a livelihood.

Most people have one source of income, a few have some investments that give some dividend revenue, or are set up as a retirement fund, but those are often set up for when the person retires and no longer has their main income source.

If putting all of your financial asset in one investment is a foolish idea, is it not equally foolish to invest all your personal assets in only one job/career/source of income?

Job security is a thing of the past. Todays ever changing world requires strategies for ensuring that you always have a continual source of income.

The strategy.

Effectively allocating your personal assets to create multiple streams of income.
When you know your strengths and skills you can effectively direct them to opportunities that will generate income (active/passive) for you.

A good example of personal asset allocation is Dave Gordon. Dave is a skilled writer and speaker. He as used this ability to:

Become a freelance journalist.
Create a University based news paper.
Work as an editor for the National Post.
Set up a blog.
Start is own radio show.
Write a book.
Note taker for University Grad Students

I’m sure there are more, but seven streams of income mean that Dave always has money coming in. He could loose half his income portfolio and still be financially sound.

The starting point is discovering your strengths and skills. There is a site called Authentic Happiness.
On the site there are an assortment of free assessments that you can take. The “VIA Signature Strengths Questionnaire”
measures 24 character strengths, and is a good starting point to help gain awareness of where to focus your energies.
After beginning to get an idea of your strengths and skills, you can put a strategy together to allocate your assets.

Two books by Robert G. Allen are worth reading.

Multiple Streams Of Income

and

Multiple Streams Of Internet Income

Both of Allen’s books give you some great ideas on how you can direct your talents.

Placing all your personal assets in one basket(job), is a recipe for disaster. Were will you be if that source of income is cut off.

Taking control of your abilities can lead you to enhanced control of your income, your life, and your freedom. Your future is defined by the actions you take now. Begin to discover your strengths, skills and passion. Then play with the possibilities, where else can your value be realized.

If you hit a wall feel free to contact me. I would be glad to assist you in reaching your highest potential.

Have a great weekend.