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.

Day 3: Write a Mission Haiku

Stephen Covey says, “The first principle of ethical power is Purpose. By purpose, I don't mean your objective or intention- something toward which you are always striving. Purpose is something bigger. It is the picture you have of yourself-the kind of person you want to be or the kind of life you want to lead.”

Purpose and mission statements are popular with organizations, but they are also useful for individuals. I'm using Purpose to mean your overarching idea of who you are and what you want to contribute, and Missions as your various big projects or directions in life.

After all the work you've done in the last weeks, you probably have an inkling of your purpose in life, and some ideas of missions. Today I ask you to choose one mission or leading to examine closer, and write it as a haiku that gets to the core of your mission, and gives you a framework for your actions. You might be surprised by what surfaces in this process, so give it a try!

• Start by ranking your missions in life: If you discovered today that you had just six months to live, what would you focus on? How would you rank your goals by priority so that they would be accomplished before you die?

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 5: Choose Awareness Practices

Today you will make a plan to renew and nurture your spirit or soul - that inner voice of your true nature. Your spirit is not your brain and it's not your emotions; it's your Better Self, or moral compass, and your Essential Self - the part of you that longs for purpose.

Your Better Self allows you to be responsible and honorable, and to reach beyond selfishness in order to serve others. Aristotle said that virtue is a habit like any other, and that we gain integrity by doing virtuous things. Every time you practice the virtue habit, you settle your soul in a nobler direction.

But your soul is also your Essential Self, which thrives on understanding your purpose and intentions. It’s like a rheostat of consciousness: As your level of awareness grows you are lit up ever more brightly, and can see and understand aspects of yourself and the universe more clearly.

Spiritual growth is the basis for a better and more harmonious life, a life of calmness, clarity, courage, and inner strength. It has (at least) four parts: 

-Awareness practices, such as meditation or journaling, or any practice that keeps you in the present moment or brings greater clarity to your daily life.

-Virtue habits, those little and big behaviors and characteristics of your personality that can improve with practice.

-Soul searching, which is the ongoing quest to understand your purpose and intentions. (We've been working on this already, since Chapter 1, and hopefully you are getting a clearer picture of your purpose in life now, and that is already filling the well of your spirit.)

-and opening to God or a higher power. If this is a wall for you, try to just open to the possibility that there is something outside yourself that might love you.

A note about religion: Religion is one way to practice spiritual nurturance, and, at its best, will include all of the above listed parts, plus a community of support. You don't have to have religion, though, to nurture your spirit.