So, if you’re trying to change your life and turn around, where do you start? I guess a list of what you want to change would be first, right? What if the answer to that is “Everything”? After stewing for a couple of weeks, I finally just brainstormed a list of what the “Ideal Me” would look like. Over the course of a few weeks I refined it to a mission statement and 4 initial goals. During the process, I went to the Franklin Covey website (http://www.franklincovey.com) and used their Mission Statement Builder (go to the Resources and Tools tab and then it’s the first thing listed under Tools) to get a jump-start. It really did help. After that, I used the results to identify three major goals of my life:
1. I will travel the world doing family history research, writing books about it, enjoying all of the cultural and artistic venues the world has to offer. Learn everything I can about the history of the places I visit, maybe write novels, but definitely write histories of the people whose lives I’ve been researching. I don’t really care if any of them get published, I’m in it for the family.
2. I admire these characteristics in others and want to incorporate them into my own life.
a. Acceptance. I will accept and respect others for who they are: Children of God, and the divine potential they have as such.
b. Leadership. Lead by example; inspire others to do their best.
c. Perseverance. You can do anything you want if you put your mind to it. Never give up. Never, never, never give up! (Winston Churchill)
3. Constantly renew myself by focusing on the four dimension of my life. I will start with the following:
a. Physical: Lose weight and get the diabetes under control
b. Spiritual: Commune daily with God by reading my scriptures and praying daily.
c. Mental: Keep learning new things. Start with the history of the Smoky Mountains
d. Social/Emotional:
i. Get my house in order so it stops stressing me out.
ii. Make some friends
iii. Make time for creativity.
From there, I condensed it into a short, numbered list of what my life is about and then wrote that list out into the following mission statement:
I will strive every day to fulfill my potential as a royal daughter of God. I will do this by learning everything I can and use that knowledge to help and inspire others. This help could take shape not only through coaching others, but through writing and/or other artistic methods.
That may seem to be a generalization of the goals, but really, isn’t that what a mission statement is? A high-level, birds-eye view of your life.
About a week ago, I was thinking about what I want to do with the rest of my life and found a website called bucketlist.org and subtitled 1000 things to do before you die. This was great. I used the list to spur thoughts of the things I would like to be able to do. It amounted to about 7 pages and 227 items. That should keep me busy for whatever time I have left. (I’m in my late 50s; who knows how much longer that’s going to be?)
So these are the things we’ll be focusing on in this blog. Come on along!
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