Obtaining Wisdom in a Chaotic World (Continued)....

In a previous post we began the discussion of wisdom - what is it and how to obtain it. We are going to continue this discussion as we add some more steps to the process...

In the previous post we defined wisdom as the ability to see the big picture. (As we will see it goes far beyond simply seeing the big picture, although that is the foundation.) Then we began discussing the first two steps to obtain it: 1. Defining your values and ordering them and 2. Setting goals and ordering them.

Step 3. in obtaining wisdom is to now take your list of priorities and goals and take a look at them EVERY morning BEFORE you begin your day. This constantly reminds you to see things in perspective.

• 3a. It's always a good idea to evaluate your priorities (see previous post) and goals lists and ask yourself, "Are these the noblest of priorities and goals that I could possibly have? Are these really what is important? In the whole scheme of things, are these the really important things?" Make sure everything has congruity and that it will bring you the most satisfaction. If you need to change anything then do it at this time. If you are satisfied with your lists as it is, then...


• 3b. If you haven't already, break your long term goals down into more specific attainable intermediate goals by asking yourself how and when you will obtain them. Write them down.


• 3c. Begin dwelling on these list and lay out your day according to them. Make out your "to do" list according to the priorities and goals lists and what you want to accomplish in your life.

Now, you will begin to see things from a larger perspective. When something comes along that could distract your attention, somehow it doesn't seem so distracting anymore, because you have a bigger picture. Life all the sudden makes sense.

Step 4 in obtaining wisdom is to raise your level of consciousness. Become conscious of everything you do. In laying out your priorities and goals you are already well on your way with this step. Become conscious of everything you are doing. When something distracting comes along ask yourself, "How does this affect the big picture? How does this fit into my values and priorities?" If it has no relation to them, then you can just dismiss and continue on with the direction you want things to go. " Will this matter next week, next month, year or next decade?" is another good question to ask. With these questions you will easily be able to see what is important or what is simply urgent, but has no real importance.

Step 5 in obtaining wisdom is to focus on value. Before doing something, ask yourself, "Does this provide value?" "Does it provide value to those I love, the world or to me?" Will it make a real long term difference?" Really, if you have laid out your priorities well, this one has already been answered for you ahead of time. But, if a situation arises and you are wondering what to do, this is another great question to ask.

Step 6 is to train your mind to think about consequences - good or bad. When trying to decide whether or not to do something ask yourself, "How will this action affect that or what will it lead to? If I choose to do that, what will be the outcome? What will be the consequences of this action?" Will it produce good results or consequences or will it produce negative consequences that you will have to live with for the rest of your life? In other words, look at it from every angle and determine what the outcome will be.

For more information:
Refer to Jonathon Meade's post on urgent verses important matters at Pick the Brain and/or read Time Power: The Revolutionary Time Management System That Can Change Your Professional and Personal.

As someone who used to be the most indecisive person in the whole world, I enjoy learning new questions to ask myself....What questions do you ask yourself to help make wise decisions?

Ingredients for Inner Peace - How to Get Your Priorities in Order

Would you agree that we are all looking for inner peace in our lives? Whether people realize it or not, that is really what we are all seeking - a way to do away with the chaos in our lives.

It is only when you align all your actions with your priorities that you will experience peace and success in all endeavors and be all that you can be.

This has been a lesson that I have learned the hard way and one that I have to continually remind myself of.

You have probably all heard me rave about my favorite book, Time Power: The Revolutionary Time Management System That Can Change Your Professional and Personal by Charles R. Hobbs. It has changed my thinking and my life in so many ways. It helped clearly define my priorities and put them in order. It has been amazing! Even though the book is about "time" management it really is about "life" management. It takes a lot of time to go through the book, and I am still not finished with it, but it is well worth ALL the time I have put into it! The book is now out of print, but a few used copies are still lurking around.

I thought I would take some time to share with you why I love this book so much:

Why is this book so transformational? What does it teach?

Well, first of all, if you want to get your life together and have any kind of control over it instead of it controlling you, Hobbs suggest these things:

1. Make a list of what you value most; identify your highest priorities in life.
Hobbs calls these unifying principles. Do you value honesty, integrity, family, God, leadership, responsibility, friendships, etc.? What about faith, humility discipline. Make a list of all the things that are most important to you. Be thorough and honest. Some people start our with only a few and add more in the coming weeks and months, while others write down many upfront. It depends on you and what works for you.

2. Since the priorites you make a list of are broad, the next step is to rewrite each principle as an action statement. For example, if you wrote down "honesty" as a unifying principle, you would now write something like "be honest." "Family might become "support my family." Whatever it means to you and causes you to rise to action.

3. Make sure your unifying principles are the noblest of ideas and mutually compatible. If you write down "become wealthy whatever the cost" that will be in conflict with your other principles, because when faced with the decision to be wealthy or honest or have a good family the honesty and family will be the ones that suffer. What will happen is you will push aside everything that is really important to you and lose them. That will leave you more empty than you could have imagined. Simply make sure they are all compatible and can work together.

4. Write a paragraph of clarification under each unitying principle you wrote down. Be clear about what it means.
An example of one I wrote out is:
"Be a woman of integrity. Be honest, trustworthy, consistent, dependable and reliable. Be someone that people can count on to be there for them. Always do what you say you will and make your actions in line with your values and priorities." Doesn't that make me accountable!

5. Prioritize the list. This one took me quit a bit of time to do, but as Hobbs says "your list of unifying principles is the most important list you will ever prioritize. The order you select can make a huge difference in how you perform." Will you love yourself before you neighbor or vice versa? Take some time to think about these things.

In his book he gives a series of questions to ask yourself to help you priortize them in the best order.

6. Evaluate your performance over the past few weeks and months. Have you lived up to this order? You probably have in some areas and not in others. That is very typical. That is the purpose of doing this exercize. It will bring you in touch with reality. This will show you what you need to work on. This is the point where I saw that I was mostly doing the opposite of what was really important to me and saw the need for real change in my life.

For example, if one of your unifying principles is to be honest, you might ask yourself if you have been totally honest. Have you stretched the truth any to try to get your way or make yourself look good?

7. Bring your performance in line with your unifying principles. The best way to accomplish this is to schedule some time to yourself every morning when you completely cut yourself off from everything. At this time read over your unifying principles and focus on what is really important to you. This will help you to achieve concentration of power in your life.

Do you own a business? First lay out your personal unifying principles and then lay out the ones for your company. Personal priorities must always come first.

Well, maybe this will help you as much as it did me and give you a taste of why I love this book so much.

What is your feedback? Was this list helpful to you? What have you found helpful in keeping your priorities in order?

Quiz: How mindful are you?

This post directs you to a blog called the Happiness Project. Gretchen Rubin does an excellent job with this blog. I have been a part of for a while now and really enjoy it.

I love this quiz.... Do you see the big picture? Are mindful? It will tell you...

This Wednesday -- Quiz: How mindful are you? I'm not very.

How do you score? I have to admit I answered yes many times.

How to Make Your Day More Productive

Daily Evaluation
Do you ever feel like your day is spinning hopelessly out of control? I can identify! I am currently going through a book, Time Powerby Charles Hobbs, that is making me really think about things and do some major needed changes in my life. While he doesn't mention it specifically (or hasn't really yet anyway), this idea I'm going to blog about, it has certainly made me think a lot about it. The idea, the thought, is: evaluating your day at the end of each day.

Time Powerhas caused me to evaluate my entire life more than I ever have or knew that I could. I think it will be the most life changing thing I've ever done in my adult life. He has you to evaluate everything about your values and the way you live, but more on that in another post.....

Important or Urgent?
So this idea of daily evaluation..... Since I am now evaluating my life more, I have been thinking more at the close of each day about how I have spent my time, my day. I have come up with a list of questions to use to evaluate my day at it's close. I hope they are helpful to you as well. I think I am going to start ranking each question on a scale from 1-10. Here are the questions:

Was it productive and efficient?

Did I do what I set out to do at the beginning of the day?

Did I waste my time?

Did I let fear and procrastination get the best of me?

Did my thoughts, attitudes and actions reflect my values and the significant people and things in my life? (Were my actions throughout the day a reflection of what is truly important to me?)

Did I spend my time working toward my clearly defined goals?

Or did I waste my time on things that were simply urgent, but not even remotely important? Did I rush around like a crazy person who has no control of time or her life in any way, "putting out fires" as some put it?

Or did I sit around watching TV all day or doing something meaningless like that?

For me, my struggle is putting out the insignificant fires - the things screaming for my attention that are urgent but not important. Many people get caught up into these things. If you feel like your life is spinning out of control asking yourself these questions can help get you focused.


What Next?
After ranking each question, the next question to ask is: "How can I improve? How can I make tomorrow better? Be specific and write down the answers to this question. Then at the beginning of each day, after you have gotten dressed for the day, look over this list of how to improve, along with your life goals. Then make a specific list of how to make your day match up with your goals. You may just be amazed at how much time you waste. I know I am amazed!

Time Power

Remember this quote by president Dwight Eisenhower: "Most things which are urgent are not important, and most things which are important are not urgent."

Urgent or Important?

I have come across this quote before. I find it disturbing almost and I think I should. I think it's meant to be disturbing - to make us think about what is really important and where our priorities are and what we should be spending our time doing. What do I need to reevaluate in my life???......

"Most things which are urgent are not important, and most things which are important are not urgent."

- President Dwight Eisenhower

The 80/20 Rule of Time Management and Life

I came across this information and am not sure where it came from, but it most certainly sounds like Brian Tracy's information since it mentions the phrase "eat that frog" which Brian Tracy talks a lot about.

I found this to be a very eye opening and informative article on time and life management that I am going to consider and practice now. It really makes you consider how you're spending your time and life.

APPLY THE 80/20 RULE TO EVERYTHING

The 80/20 Rule is one of the most helpful of all concepts of time and life management. It is also called the “Pareto Principle” after its founder, the Italian economist Vilfredo Pareto, who first wrote about it in 1895. Pareto noticed that people in his society seemed to divide naturally into what he called the “vital few”, the top 20 percent in terms of money and influence, and the “trivial many”, the bottom 80 percent.

He later discovered that virtually all economic activity was subject to this principle as well. For example, this principle says that 20 percent of your activities will account for 80 percent of your results, 20 percent of your customers will account for 80 percent of your sales, 20 percent of your products or services will account for 80 percent of your profits, 20 percent of your tasks will account for 80 percent of the value of what you do, and so on. This means that if you have a list of ten items to do, two of those items will turn out to be worth five or ten times or more than the other eight items put together.

Number of Tasks versus Importance of Tasks
Here is an interesting discovery. Each of the ten tasks may take the same amount of time to accomplish. But one or two of those tasks will contribute five or ten times the value of any of the others.

Often, one item on a list of ten tasks that you have to do can be worth more than all the other nine items put together. This task is invariably the frog that you should eat first.

Focus on Activities, Not Accomplishments
The most valuable tasks you can do each day are often the hardest and most complex. But the payoff and rewards for completing these tasks efficiently can be tremendous. For this reason, you must adamantly refuse to work on tasks in the bottom 80 percent while you still have tasks in the top 20 percent left to be done.

Before you begin work, always ask yourself, “Is this task in the top 20 percent of my activities or in the bottom 80 percent?”

The hardest part of any important task is getting started on it in the first place. Once you actually begin work on a valuable task, you will be naturally motivated to continue. A part of your mind loves to be busy working on significant tasks that can really make a difference. Your job is to feed this part of your mind continually.

Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time

Motivate Yourself
Just thinking about starting and finishing an important task motivates you and helps you to overcome procrastination. Time management is really life management, personal management. It is really taking control of the sequence of events. Time management is having control over what you do next. And you are always free to choose the task that you will do next. Your ability to choose between the important and the unimportant is the key determinant of your success in life and work.

Effective, productive people discipline themselves to start on the most important task that is before them. They force themselves to eat that frog, whatever it is. As a result, they accomplish vastly more than the average person and are much happier as a result. This should be your way of working as well.

The 6th Time Management Law

As a continuation of of the last post we'll take a look at the 6th law of time management and quiet possibly the most important.

Evaluation - We talked about analyzing things as you go throughout the day, but let's take that a step further. At the end of each day take a look at your list of time wasters and evaluate yourself on how you did. Mentally go through each part of your day and see how you can make improvements. Commit to do better each and every day and becoming more and more conscious of time management and eliminating time wasters and replacing them with things that work toward your goals until it is second nature to you.

What we're talking about here is replacing bad habits with good habits. The result will be peace of mind and extra time to do the fun things in life and not feel guilty about them.

Goals! How to Get Everything You Want--Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible

5 Laws of Time Management

It seems as though everyone struggles with time management. There just aren't enough hours in the day we often say. Try these laws to keep you focused.

1. Know where you're going.
Write down a mission statement, goals and priorities. Keep these with you at all times. Review them at least twice daily. Without a plan, every moment will be a waste.

2. Recognize that each and every moment is a gift from God that is to be used toward your mission statement, goals and priorities and for His glory.

3. Analyze everything you do as you go throughout your day.
Does each thing fit into your mission statement, goals and priorities? If so great. If not, do away with it and replace it with something that does.

4. Become conscious of time wasters.
Most everyone participates in them. They will be different for each person. The little ones all add up to make a large chunk of time. Lingering in the shower or at the breakfast table, deciding what to wear, reading junk mail, or email forwards are just a few some people participate in. Make a list of yours. Work to eliminate them once you recognize them.

5. Be wise, but don't structure your life to that you don't enjoy the little things.
Take time to smell the flowers, soak in the sunsets, and spend time with family. It will rejuvenate you to work toward your mission statement, goals and priorities.

Goals! How to Get Everything You Want--Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible