Day 7: Review and Plan

Take a few minutes to review your seventh week. Write about your accomplishments and what you need to work on. Did you:

• Brainstorm some goals, dreams, and exciting ideas for your future in the areas of Love, social skills, friends and family?

• Write about your personality style, how you interact with people, and about any problems you are having now with the people in your life, and ask yourself, "What one skill would most benefit me in my current relationships and situations?"

• List just a few (2-4) specific Social Skills Goals for this next month (30 days) and add them to your Month Map and your priority grid?

• Make an informal analysis of your temperament and personality characteristics., and investigate your unique preferences and style of behavior?

• Make a list of your top-ten strengths, and some of your character limitations

• Plan a self-cultivation project by choosing the top few character limitations that cause you the biggest challenges in life, defining what you would like to change about these limitations, and framing each of these as strengths to build?

• Write about times you have used your strengths to excess, and brainstorm the kinds of situations that frequently push you into excess?

• Choose one habit of excess, plot how you could manage it, and add this one new management habit to your self-cultivation plan?

• Brainstorm a list of all the virtue habits you would like to practice sometime, choose one or two virtue habits to work at now, and write a definition for each that speaks to you?

• Make a virtue chart and use it to evaluate your growth in your virtue habits, or use your Love Journal to track your virtue practices?

• Write about people in your life who are difficult partners in the relationship dance, pinpoint factors that seem to push those people into excess, and list a few steps you could take to smooth out the dance? 

Schedule your next week, Step 1: 

·    Thursday - Adjust your Priority Grid for the month: Check off what you have completed, add new items you have thought of, and move anything down lower that no longer fits.

·    Friday - Block in your schedule for the next week: Add events and blocks of time for your priority categories (such as an hour for committee work on Tuesday and Thursday).

·    Saturday - Fill in the details: Schedule a daily time for all of your daily priorities, like exercising; choose days and times for the one-day tasks like sending that birthday card;and schedule in the chunks of those big task-driven projects. 

 

Evaluate your Ducks in a Row: If situations are constantly moving you away from your priorities and you feel dissatisfied and out of balance, make a note about why that is. Also, make a note of which of your priorities are getting left out of your life. 

Brainstorm new goals, dreams, and exciting ideas for your future.

Summary

Acting with Love (kindness, equanimity, generosity, etc.) is like any other skill: It gets better with practice. It's easier to build Love skills if you are totally honest with yourself about your strengths and limitations, and take time regularly to improve your social skills and build new strengths. It also helps to understand what pushes your partners in the relationship dance into excessive behaviors and how you might be contributing to their stress.

 

Going forward, you will:

• Work at your self-cultivation project - daily, in whatever way works for you (your love journal, or a values chart, or ?)
• Use your Love Journal to plan ways to smooth out your relationship dances - daily, for as long as it seems useful, and for at least one month a year going forward. 

Week 8 Needs:

• Your journal notebook
• Your Love Journal