Day 7: Review and Plan

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

• Brainstorm some goals, dreams, and exciting ideas that might help you to transform your world?

• Write about what you want your life to stand for - how you wish your world could change, what would make it better for everyone, and big and little problems in your life and in the world that you would like to see solved?

• Write a list of the choices and options you have for transformation now and in the future?

• Examine your Truth with a vision walk, to help expand your understanding of life, and give you greater clarity?

• Write a haiku mission statement for one project or goal that is rising to the top of your priorities?

• Prepare to seek clarity with a few others, either in a formal clearness process or an informal discussion, by writing a short essay introducing your mission, and a list of questions?

• Open the door to transformational love and accept that you will find the strength to carry out your mission?

• Map out your mission, set an intention, make a backwards calendar, and a full effort plan?

• Try a creative awareness process, using observation of your encounters with uncertainty, leaning in to encounters with uncertainty, your love journal to review encounters with uncertainty, and touching the river of Transforming Power to step out of the safety zone and make a shift to peace, strength, and joy?

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

You transform your world when you get clear on your missions, test your leadings, and open the door to creative risk-taking. No matter our limitations, we can produce the energy of love and extend it to the world so that it grows out in ripples.

 

Going forward, you will:

• Examine your Truth - often, in whatever way works for you (your journal, vision walks, a clearness process, ...?)

• Open the door to transformational love  - daily, for as long as live. 

Day 5: Open the Door

At the start of this second section I asked you to center your living in love. Our main purpose on earth is to grow in love; our world needs more love. With more love, we could do away with war- we would have no prejudice, oppression, or violence of any kind. Everyone would have enough food because we would feed each other. We would care for the environment because we love our planet, and the animals, and our children too much to harm it.

How, then, do we create more love in the world? We simply need to open our hearts wide as often as we can, wider and wider, calmly throw open the door to love. 

If you have a leading to act in love, and you have gone through all the stages of discernment, you might be clear on your next steps. That's where we are often stuck, though - we might hear the Truth, but still have doubts about its absoluteness; we might hear the Truth and see our path forward but struggle against apathy, or mind-numbing fear.

Ed Bacon says, “But however Truth comes, it bears with it just enough of its own sense of rightness to overcome the fear of risk taking. While genuine risk plays a crucial role in all of the Habits of Love, it is perhaps most keen in the Habit of Truth. At too many forks in the road, anxiety stops us from following Truth's suggested direction. What will happen if I say yes to Truth as I recognize it? That question can arrest us in our tracks."

Whatever your biggest mission is now - personal growth, healing, service, relationship revival, activism, or something else - you need to find the strength to open the door. This is your growing edge: To accept that you will be carried beyond yourself; to accept that you will find the strength and creativity to take the risk, walk your path, and speak your message out loud. 

Today you will draw on your organizational skills from the first part of this book to open the door to transformational love. 

• Map out your mission: On a plain piece of paper, start a Mini-Map with this priority mission in the center. Looking at your Base Map, follow the connecting lines to all the values (and other priorities) that relate to this one priority, and add them to the Mini-Map. Have a little chat with yourself in your journal, or just make a list of the values (and other priorities) that lead you to action for your mission.

• Set an intention for your mission using the action + deepest reason model.

• Make a backwards calendar: Brainstorm a list of all the supplies, information, people, skills, and steps you need to take to complete your mission. Group all the tasks into chunks. Organize chunks into the order they need to happen. Plug your chunks of action into the weeks of this month on your priorities grid.

• Make a full effort plan for how you will lean in and spark full and energetic effort day-by-day, for your mission: Brainstorm a list of the things that have worked to motivate you in the past and form your Full Effort Practices into simple steps.

Week 7: Act in Love + Day 1: Journal & Set Intentions

We've been occupied with love the last two weeks, coming at it from different angles. We've looked at the habits of kindness, generosity, and equanimity, and we've looked at nurturing yourself. You've been working towards Maitri, an honest and direct friendship with yourself: You pay attention to yourself the way you would a good friend - with curiosity, compassion, and gentleness. The next step, then, is to try to understand yourself even better, to be honest and clear-sighted about your strengths and limitations. What is it about you that drives and informs your values and your goals? What makes you behave the way you routinely behave?

We each have distinctive styles of how we interact with other people and our environment, and different motives, habits, and needs. This week we will look closer at your temperament and your personality. 

Your temperament is your unique style of responding to external events. The traits of temperament are those you are born with, probably inherited from your parents, and these become the foundation for your personality, which begins to develop in your early years. Personality includes your temperament, and also behaviors and preferences that you learn by experience.

It's helpful to analyze yourself a bit, and get the ducks of your personality in a row! Then you can accept your personal style, and look closer at the specific habits you need to cultivate in order to improve your relationships, and act in love.

Day 7: Review and Plan

Take a few minutes to review your sixth 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 your health, lifestyle, finances, bad and good habits, things you'd like to learn, things that bring you happiness, and your spiritual life?

• Write about your present relationship with yourself, your inner judge and your Inner Guide, challenges and successes, and how your values, beliefs, and priorities support self-love?

• List just a few (2-4) specific Self-Love Goals for this next month (30 days)?

• Use your Love Journal each day to get to know and understand yourself better, look for ways to practice friendship with yourself, and note times when you might need to draw on generous, open-hearted kindness, or extra time, attention, and nurturance for yourself?

• Brainstorm some small generous acts you might do this week for yourself, as practice, that will challenge your growing edge?

• Practice a Love Meditation, and send the "pink light of love" to yourself?

• Discern the top self-care habits that will most help to renew your physical self, and add a few to your priority grid?

• Discern the top 1-4 subjects of learning that will make the biggest difference in your life now, and add them to this month's priority grid?

• Discern and choose the top 2-4 awareness practices that will nurture your spirit, that might make the biggest difference in your life now, and add some combination of awareness practices to this month's priority grid?

• Experiment with building an explosion of inner synergy intentionally, for a particular project, in order to infuse that project with vision and passion, and engage with full effort?

Day 6: Create Inner Synergy

Stephen Covey says "Fulfilling the four needs [spiritual, mental, physical, social] in an integrated way is like combining elements in chemistry. When we reach a "critical mass" of integration, we experience spontaneous combustion-- an explosion of inner synergy that ignites the fire within and gives vision, passion, and a spirit of adventure to life." 

"Inner synergy" is when your body, mind, spirit, and heart are all cooperating to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects. I love the image of "an explosion of inner synergy", and I've experienced that passion, but I wondered if it was possible to harness that energy when I want it and need it. 

Can we create inner synergy purposefully and on demand? Can you build it intentionally, for a particular project, in order to infuse that project with vision and passion, and engage with full effort?

I thought it was possible and designed an experimental plan, which I've been testing for a few years now to good effect. Give it a try, over the next few days:

• Choose a high priority project, that connects to your values and principles, something you want to do soon; something challenging but within your abilities.

• Each step below has multiple ways to engage. You can take as much or as little time with the steps as you like - you might want to stretch it out over a few days, repeating each step a few times in different ways, building a little more energy each time. Or you can speed shift through the steps, and explode into action today!

Day 5: Brainstorm Generosity

The work this week is to define and set intentions for cultivating the habits of love, at your own growing edge.  Today we will give attention to generosity, the habit of being open-hearted and open-handed with any undertaking that involves a commitment of time, effort, and/or money.

When we are generous, we share what we have freely - money, food, help, or time- without expectation of reward or return. We put full effort into looking after people. We are open-minded, give people the benefit of the doubt, and grant them our attention and life force. We are of service to the world.

Generosity begins in your heart. It requires extravagant love and alertness to other’s needs. It also requires courage, in order to step outside of your comfort zone and be generous to all kinds of people. Consider your growing edge with respect to generosity: How can you increase the flow of blessings in the world? You might need to push past feelings of reluctance and fear to a place where generosity is spontaneous and fun. Or you might need to get creative with generous acts that fit into your schedule.

(Please note that generosity is not a habit that has come easy for me! I am not by nature an openhanded or open-minded person; I like to hold onto my marbles, and I don't "suffer fools", as they say. But I've worked at this habit for a long, long time, and can attest to it being learnable.)

Take out your Love Journal:

Recap of 4 Weeks and Sample Calendar

You have been getting your ducks in a row for one month now, and it's time for a recap and re-group before we launch into Part Two.

In week one, you created a Base Map of your possible life path that you can carry in your back pocket. You figured out your core values, the compass that shows you the direction to proceed down your path, and your priorities, that give your days focus and help you to decide how to best spend your time.

In week two, you learned how to discern and plan for one month at a time - how to take the Big Picture Base Map you developed and plot it out into manageable chunks, by choosing your top action goals, organizing your goals into a priorities grid, and scheduling your weekly priorities.

In week three, you learned how to make a pledge for action by setting intentions for your core values and for your top priorities. When you are intentional with your actions, you choose your path on purpose.

In week four, you planned ways to give full effort for your priorities, a mental discipline that requires attention, a spark of energy, and balance.

The ideas and techniques you've covered this month are only half of the picture. A calendar for this might look like:

Day 7: Review, and Plan

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

• Set intentions for the week: List the strongest, most compelling reasons you want to do your next week's priorities, and list challenges?

• Create an intention ritual or habit that will remind you, every day, of what your intentions are?

• Practice remembering your intentions throughout the day, every day?

• Make a plan for how you will lean in and spark full and energetic effort day-by-day, for your priorities, and practice this plan?

• Set yourself some targets for acting on your priorities "regularly"?

• Practice being flexible but discerning during the day and touching in with your Inner Guide?

• Begin to recognize your successes at the end of each day and acknowledge that you had a day that was meaningful and satisfying?

• Evaluate and record how well-satisfied you are with your "ducks in a row"?

• Identify "low-status" priorities and values, and create a beautiful reminder of why you want each of these in your life that will help you to give them the equal status that they deserve?

Day 6: Evaluate, and Make a Poster

Yesterday I said that when situations shift your plans, it's often best to be flexible. On the other hand, if situations are constantly moving you away from your priorities it's time to examine both your priorities and your situations! If, at the end of the week, 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. 

Unfortunately, not all of our priorities share equal status. For some reason, some of the actions that we hold very high in priority just don't get the attention they need. I call these my "low-status (oxymoronic) priorities"; exercise usually fits into that category for me, and sometimes (unfortunately) artwork - for some reason, when flexibility is required, it's my health and creative priorities that suffer.

The same goes for your values and principles, because if you aren't letting them guide your path you cannot feel satisfied. (We will look at this more closely next month).

Choose one day each week to evaluate and record how well-satisfied you are with your "ducks in a row". If things continue to be out of balance over a few weeks, you need to regroup: 

-Maybe you need to lower your expectations for a while because you are running on low energy. 

-Or maybe you need to sideline a committee that is draining too much of your time. 

-Or maybe you can initiate a Home Focus Day to catch up on housework, or a Family Focus Day to give attention to your family.

Today, look again at your list of priorities, and ask yourself which do you spend the least time on, and typically don't really treat like priorities in your life? Also, look at your values and principles and do the same evaluation. 

Create an eye-catching poster that captures why you value each of your low-status priorities and values, and will help you to remember to give them the equal status that they deserve:

Day 5: Keep in Balance

The third step towards giving full effort for your priorities is balance. I'm not talking about "Work-Life balance" (as if work is not a part of life!); this is about feeling fulfilled and satisfied with your life, having a good mix of work and play, effort and rest, and steadily accomplishing the things that give your life a sense of purpose. 

Balance has two parts- 

-You want to give regular attention to each of your priorities each week, and not create any "low-status" priorities.

-And you want to hold your intentions lightly in the complexity of life. If you are driven to complete everything on your list at all costs, you may miss an opportunity to open your heart, or to grow, or find peace within.

Remember that your vision, mission, values, beliefs, and principles are your compass, and how you want to proceed down your path. I'm talking now about finding the kind of balance where what you are doing leads where the compass is pointing, and you feel relaxed and unstressed as you travel that path. You create this kind of balance with good planning, by remembering your intentions, and also by being flexible but discerning when life offers you choices. 

For example, even though I might start the day with reasonable expectations to do x-y-z, when my daughter calls to ask if she can drop the baby off for a couple of hours I (of course) say "YES!" My family is a priority, and some other priorities can wait for another day.

Or perhaps I just don't have any energy. I decide to take a bath and a nap, and don't wake up until 4 p.m.! I obviously needed to take care of myself - my health is a priority. Such is life. I'm not going to waste energy feeling disappointed with myself.

Balance and Full Effort can seem to be counter-intuitive... How can you sustain personal motivation and determination, and also be flexible and hold your intentions lightly? How can you maintain full effort while also leaving yourself such a large loophole?

Day 4: Lean In with Eagerness

Urgency of Now banner

The second step towards giving full effort for your priorities is leaning in with eagerness. You must create a spark of energy, connect to your excitement for life, and sustain it long enough to accomplish the important things.

If you are remembering your priorities throughout the day, you are probably already building energy. When the time comes to act on one of your priorities - to write your book, or exercise, or paint a banner - you will want to block out distractions, focus your full attention on this one undertaking, and lean in to it with excitement and curiosity. You need to tap in to your personal motivation and determination.

If you feel resistance ("I'm just not in the mood"), or hit a snag ("I can't find the exercise mat"), try to breathe through it, stay with it, and remind yourself of your deepest reasons. Lean in to the discomfort or complexity of the moment- put your shoulder to it. You need persistence and tenacity.

Personal motivation is complex; it's shaped by our internal will but also influenced by our history, and by the expectations and prejudices of those around us. In order to successfully break free of a pattern of weak or incomplete effort, use the notion of "leaning in" as a body-mind-heart training. 

Try it right now - Stand up, picture an intention you have for today, and: 

Day 3: Remember Your Intentions

Your daily intention review ritual is valuable, but you still need to hold your intentions with gentle awareness all day long. Picture each intention as a gem you are carrying in a safe place - your pocket, or your heart: Take each one out to look at several times a day, then carefully put it back. Remembering your intentions throughout the day is a mindfulness practice, and it will create energy and excitement for your priorities.

Take care to hold your intentions gently, not obsessively. If you begin to worry about whether or not you will complete your intentions, or think about them in an aggressive way, back off a little. Even though you fully intend to take these actions, life might shift under your feet; and it is not anyone's intention to feel anxiety or self-loathing - or to be resentful of your loved ones for thwarting you. 

Here are a few ways that might help you to remember your intentions. Choose the ones that interest you, and try them out this week:

• Turn your top intentions for the day into a short, catchy mantra to repeat throughout the day: "Write a chapter; Sew a bunny; Visit a friend".

• Take your intentions for a walk and speak them out loud to the trees.

Day 2: Create an Intention Ritual

The first step to full effort is attention: You remember your intentions - what it is you want to do and your deepest reasons why - and also notice your emotions, energy, challenges, etc. 

You have already defined and set some intentions for the week. Now you will design a ritual or habit that will remind you, every day, of what your intentions are. You will review your top priorities for the day (most) every morning or evening; it might take 5-10 minutes. (This is an extra 5-10 minutes, above the 20-30 you have reserved for the exercises in this book.)

My preference is to review my intentions in the morning; that's when my head is clear and I am most creative. But the evening has the advantage of allowing you to sleep on your intentions. Whichever you choose, set a reminder for the same time every day so that this habit becomes routine.

Make your intention review into a little ceremony that will become a soothing routine. Here are some ideas - choose those that suit you:

• Get your morning coffee or evening tea and your journal and sit in your favorite chair. Light a candle.

Week 4: Give Full Effort + Day 1: Journal & Set Intentions

Now that you see your priorities clearly and have begun to set intentions, you just need to act on them... But how do you find the inspiration to do that with persistence and vigor, day in and day out?

Full effort (sometimes called exertion) is one of the steps of mental discipline on Buddha’s eightfold path. Buddha urged full effort for awakening the mind, and meditation is the essential practice towards that end.

I'm not going to teach you meditation, though that is a worthy pursuit. Instead, you will practice being mindful as you go about your days, giving attention to your choices in the moment, and aiming for full effort on your priorities. 

Full effort requires:

Attention: You remember your intentions - what it is you want to do and your deepest reasons why - and also notice your emotions, energy, challenges, etc.

A spark of energy and determination: You connect to your excitement for life, and sustain it long enough to accomplish your priorities.

Balance: You hold your intentions lightly in the complexity of life. If you are driven to complete everything on your list at all costs, you may miss an opportunity to grow, to open your heart, to find peace within.

The big question to ask is "How do I find the inspiration that will spark full effort for my priorities, every day, over and over?"

The Full Effort Habit has several parts, which we will take one day at a time. 

A note about wasting time

I am so good at wasting time! By "wasting" I mean playing solitaire, doing a crossword, taking a long bath, reading a mystery novel, listening to music, or watching the ducks swim in their pond.