One day or day one
So, how do you get started on changing your life? Good question. I once bought this book from my sister-in-law which in beautiful gold plated letters on the front says: "Success planner". Opened it a few times, didn't really know what to do with it, put it on a shelf. Never far away but always just far enough to not look into it any further. I was always scared to write anything down in it, since that would mean that I had to stop and think. That I had to make concrete changes. Take action. That "one day" would have to shift to "day one".
I had already taken it off of a shelf and carefully placed it on my desk, as if subconsciously I knew this would hold the key to whatever was bothering me. But it had been wandering around in the area of my desk for months. Still as unused as it had been for the past years.
Until yesterday. Yesterday, in a way, I heard this book calling for me. I picked it up and I just started writing in it. There were two sections that really helped me a lot, which are the ones that I want to highlight here to explain what made me shift my mind and changed my perspective of today, on day one.
The first one, was a breakdown from 5 years in the future to 1 month in the future. Although I'm not yet up to date on the science behind it, the principle seems simple enough. You write down what you want to be / achieve in 5 years time. Then you do the same but in 3 years time, in 1 year, 6 months, 3 months and finally 1 month. So you start with setting vague, high level endgoals that you have probably already dreamed about at some point in time. And 5 years is a very long time so you can dream big. By decreasing the size of the time you have but having the longterm goals in front of you, it's easier to start zooming in and focussing on what that would mean that you have to start doing now in the next month to reach it.
The second technique that really helped me was the wheel of life. You take a circle and divide it in into 8 parts, like a pie of according to the analogy we're making, a bicycle wheel. You then draw circles from the centre numbering them 1 to 10, 1 being the inner circle and 10 the most outer one. You come up with 8 areas in life that are important to you: Career, family, relationship, friends, health, personal growth, ... and write them down at the top of every part. Finally, for every part you give the category a score of 1 to 10 on how well you think this is going for you right now and mark the line in the part according to that score. If you now color the scored parts, you'll see how well-balanced your life is, or isn't, and what the categories are that are important to you. If you are having a hard time picturing this, simply googling images for "wheel of life" will hopefully clarify a lot.
So I did all these self-evaluations and techniques and went to work with making an actual planning for my first month and week. Day one was a good one. It's been a while since getting out of bed was this smooth. Will day two be as easy or is this beginners luck?
