"ABSOLUTE" is the way to LIVE !

Living a complete and satisfying life is everybody's dream but not many of us manage to achieve it. At times, many of us just meander through life and mistake it as "going with the flow", whereas in reality it's a dilly-dally approach that we seem to adopt to suit our convenience. But this convenience in no way an assurance of a comfortable life. A comfortable life is not about living/ operating in our "comfort zone" but about taking risks, trying new things so that we align with the unpredictable nature of the VUCA (Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, Ambiguous) world we live in. One approach to identify what ails us in preventing us from living a good life, is to map our life on a YES-NO continuum and identify where we spend maximum of our life. We may be surprised to note that a big part of our life operates along the continuum but never touches the end points of YES and NO. Living like this may be fine as long as we feel okay being mediocre, confused and stressed in our lives. The cacophony inside our head may never let us realise that decisiveness is the key that open doors of opportunities for us and we need to take action to bring clarity in life.

Believe it or not, taking action to build the much needed clarity in our life, is as simple as deciding what we want and don't want in our life. Here, in this post, I share about a strategy that aids us in this process of bringing clarity in life. This strategy is both effective and very simple to implement. The strategy is "Absolutely YES -NO List" and is based on the context of "YES-NO" continuum mentioned in the previous paragraph. I read about this strategy for the first time, in the book Life Makeovers by Cheryl Richardson, where she mentions about creating an "Absolutely" Yes list. There are quite a few variants of this "Yes-No" list proposed by many other life coaches. I provide here my own variant with an aim to simplify the strategy further.

When we talk about goals and resolutions, we make use of techniques like prioritisation and scheduling to make the process of achievement smoother for us. But any technique is useful only when we have the right list of items identified. This is where the "Absolutely Yes-No List" strategy comes to our aid by suggesting making of two different list of tasks/ things -  1. YES List, jotting down everything that you want for/ in your life, and 2. NO List, jotting down everything you do not want in life. The objective of the list is to come up with 5-7 key items that need to be acted upon immediately, whether to be added in our schedule (YES list) or to be removed from our schedule (NO list). This may sound simple but it involves a series of steps to make the strategy work in our favour. Let's look at the seven steps that will help you achieve your desired goals 

• Identify Core Values - First and foremost, we need to identify our values/ core values. These can be thought of as guiding principles of our life. Once we have our core values defined/ identified, a framework is established for operating our life. Identifying all the possible operating values that we can think of and then boiling down to top 5-7 would be helpful. Below is the my list of top 5 operating values (the circled ones). I started off by identifying all the possible values i related to and then boiled down to top 5. There are plenty of downloadable list of core values available on the internet and those could be used to do this exercise 

• List all the daily tasks undertaken - There's always plenty that keeps us busy all through the day. Somewhere, Busyness has overshadowed Business (Related Article : BUSYNESS - The Utopian Paradox) . Listing down everything in front of us brings it all in our line of view. We just need to list down everything that consumes our resources of time, effort, energy, etc. For example, my list of daily tasks include exercising, writing, commuting, reading, family chores, meetings, social media time, etc. ( Related Article : BRAIN DUMP - Declogging a Cluttered Mind )

• List the resources available - We always operate within some constraints and therefore knowing the resources available to us in terms of time, knowledge, skills, etc. helps. We need to be aware of the effective time that gets available to us to focus on and do what we want to and this may easily be calculated by taking in consideration the commute time, sleep hours, important chores, etc. It may happen that from the 24 hours that gets available to us every day, only 9-10 hours turn out to be the effective available time. So, getting to know how much we can invest helps us to become more judicious about investment of resources at our disposal.  

• Identify the current Focus Areas of Life - Life is a composite entity and therefore we should  always perceive it so and look at it in terms of multiple areas like Family, Work, Health, Friends, Finance, Personal Growth, etc. But remember that not every area needs the same level of importance all the time. Different periods of time require us to focus on different areas, based on what's creating imbalance in our lives at that point in time. A good way to select the right focus areas is use the WHEEL OF LIFE tool. (Related Article : WHEEL OF LIFE - Creating a Balanced Life)   

• Establish relevant and appropriate Goals - Once we identify the Focus Areas, we can establish appropriate goals pertinent to that area. This is where we need to refer back to our core operating values to pick up the relevant goals. Few of my own goals are 

• Get Fitter - Growth
• Upgrade my Coaching Certification - Vision and Growth
• Be more disciplined in Blogging - Being the Best
• Read 100 books this year - Personal Development
• Write 2 self-help books this year - Vision
• Establish a Life Coaching Forum/ Helpline - Making a Difference

I have mapped each of my identified goals to my operating core values

• Create Action Plan for the Goals - Achieving every goals requires a set of actions. In this step, we list down all those steps that we need to execute to move closer to our goals. Related to some of my above mentioned goals, few action steps could be

• Get Fitter - Run/ Exercise, Eat Healthy
• Be more disciplined in Blogging - Join Bloggers Community, Create a Blogging Plan, Attach with a Blog Buddy
• Read 100 Books - Join reading challenge (Goodreads), Join Readers Group, Join Book Club

• Match Action Plan with the Daily Task List and Resource Availability to arrive at the final Absolutely Yes and Absolutely No List. It should look something like this ( see the image below ) 

Live ABSOLUTELY to Live COMPLETELY !