Sunday Night Success

The second issue of the SNS Personal Geography newsletter went live today!

Use this post to discuss your feelings and ideas around using only two broad categories to explain the idea of personal geography versus using multiple specific categories to flesh out the concept.

I look forward to sharing our ideas.

If you aren’t receiving the Personal Geography newsletter yet, and would like to join in the creative process you can sign up below, or you can read more about the Personal Geography newsletter here.

“Geography is destiny in medicine” Jack Lord, MD
Have you ever thought about how where you live can have an effect on your health?

I was watching a TED presentation by Bill Davenhall today, the topic: “Your health depends on where you live”. It is just under ten minutes long and well worth watching:

By design if I wanted to have a heart attack I lived in the perfect places

This is the conclusion that Bill comes to part way through the video after mapping out his geographical location over the course of his life. Watching this video started up the gears in my brain (special thanks to Andrea Lee and Thomas Leonard as well), as TED talks generally do, and got me to thinking:

If physical geography has such a huge impact on my health, how does my overall personal geography affect my life and my success?

Forming an idea: Personal geography

I love to talk about environmental design and how it affects the success that we have in our lives. So, what if I took Bill Davenhall’s idea of environment affecting health and applied it to a review of my own personal geography. Instead of limiting the question to how does this personal geography affect my health, expand the question to how does personal geography affect all aspects of my life.

What does the physical space of my home look like? My office? My car?
How much time am I spending in the natural world?
Am I taking care of my body?
What important relationships do I have?
How does my job/business affect me?
What am I reading? Watching? Listening to?

How are each of these different environments, which build up my personal geography, affecting my success?
How is my personal geography helping me to live the life I dream about?
How is my personal geography holding me back? Pulling me forward?

Mind moving fast

Admittedly, this is not the most cohesive blog post in the history of blog posts, but that is all right. I am excited. My mind is activated. I am just trying to get the ideas out and on “paper” so I can start to work on them.
And I could use everyone’s help. As I start to develop this idea of personal geography I would love feedback and comments from all of you. Let’s start with:

What is your first impression of the idea of having a personal geography (personal life geography?)?

Functional Environments

When your various environments are functioning correctly they should be supporting you in being successful. A functional environment, when in place, helps make completing your actions and reaching your goals simpler. The environment, by just being there, provides the structure for success and because of this you need to put less energy into the tasks that you are attempting to accomplish.

Example of a functional environment

Marketing websites and marketing newsletters were two of the environments that I leaned on heavily during the summer. These sources of information provided me with a background in marketing I did not have, and with the support I required to move forward. By not having to come up with all of these ideas on my own, I saved energy.

These two environments supported me in being successful.

These two environments were functional.

Dysfunctional Environments

When environments are no longer supportive and no longer saving energy they have become dysfunctional. The problem is that we do not always immediately realize that our environments have become dysfunctional, and end up continuing with environments that are eating up energy and actually hindering success in some way.

Example of a dysfunctional environment

The marketing newsletters that I received over the summer are an excellent example of a dysfunctional environment that I did not identify immediately, and because of this, they ended up taking energy from me on a fairly consistent basis.

During the spring I read every marketing newsletter sent my way. I would eagerly scan through the information and pick out the pieces that I thought would work for what I am doing. I enjoyed reading the newsletters. However, during the summer I began moving the newsletters to my “Marketing” label in gmail without even reading them. I figured these newsletters were still a supportive environment; I would just need to read them later.

I was being delusional.

Flooded inbox

I finally realized my marketing newsletter environment had become dysfunctional after returning from a three-day camping trip with my family. I opened my gmail account to 45 email messages, of which 41 of them were marketing newsletters and four were from actual people that I correspond with.

I realized I would never have the time to properly read all of them, so started moving them over to my “Marketing” label once again. This required thought, which required energy, and none of this energy was moving me forward.

Wasted energy = dysfunctional environment.

Repairing Environments

Once you have identified a dysfunctional environment you will need to alter, eliminate, or replace this environment in order to stop losing energy.

I repaired my marketing environment through elimination. If I opened and read a newsletter it stayed on my list. If I moved it to my “Marketing” label without opening it, I removed myself from the subscription list.

Nice and simple: I don’t read it, I don’t get it anymore.

What is one simple action you could take right now to clean up one of your dysfunctional environments?

For more on environmental challenges check out this post on quitting environments that work.

A different approach this week

As I move into the second week of my gapping challenge I decided to combine my accountability and action setting posts this week as I am still working off of my big list that you can find here. Next week will be back to normal as I will have reached the deadline I set for creating my coaching website.

Lots done. Lots to do.

Taking a look at my gapping list I managed to accomplish a lot last week. I spent a great deal of my time working on the technical side of starting my coaching website and not nearly enough time on writing the content for the site. I think this happened for a couple of reasons:

1. Writing the content was a lot more challenging than I thought it would be. Writing the “Homepage” content was a process that spanned three days as I wrote, edited, and revised. This content will be the first time potential clients interact with me on the web and I really want them to understand who I am, why I want to help, and how I can help. The importance of this page really slowed me down as I attempted to get it just right. It still needs a bit of work, but it is going to go live later today, it is time to put myself out there.

2. Technical disasters. I signed up for my web hosting service on Thursday of last week, then spent the three days with their support staff getting everything to work. Yesterday the entire site imploded into cyberspace and I had to start all over again. Everything seems to be working now, I have learned a great deal about how wordpress works and some of the tricks of the trade; so, although it was a frustrating experience I am counting it as a win. I am a different person because of the experience and that is one of the purposes of attempting to gap this goal.

Upcoming week, not giving up hope

During my phone call with my action partners last night I mentioned that, with the technical difficulties, I didn’t have much hope of achieving my website goal. However, as I write this it is a new day, I have my website up and running, and I am feeling optimistic again. So, full steam ahead and I still have my eye on achieving my gapping goal by the deadline I set for myself.

Stay tuned next week to see how far I got and whether I succeeded in reaching my goal.

What do I mean by “gapping my goal”? Check out this post for an explanation.

The idea of gapping a difficult goal intrigues me as I discussed earlier this week. It didn’t seem to make sense to write an article on gapping goals and not make an attempt at doing it myself. So, today I begin my gapping challenge.

The S.M.T. system

1. Pick a goal: I will be working on creating my coaching website.
2. Specific Result: I will create a heart centered coaching website using the thesis theme.
3. Clear measurement: I will be successful if: all content is live, autoresponder is functional, and free product is ready for download.
4. Short Time Period: I will complete this goal by September 6, 2009.
5. I will accomplish this goal by focusing on all of the actions for this goal in my weekly action list; setting aside other actions so I can maintain focus.

Summary

I will build a heart centered coaching website with the thesis theme including an autoresponder and free product by September 6, 2009.

I have created a page of the small actions associated with this goal here. I will update this page as I complete the different small actions and move forward towards bridging the gap and creating my coaching website.

If you have a goal you would like to gap let me know about it in the comments.

“The broader the gap, the more challenged you are to get creative and committed.” – Thomas Leonard

SMART Goals

One of the more commonly used goal setting strategies that people use is known as SMART:

S: specific
M: measurable
A: attainable
R: realistic
T: timely

Many people have clearly explained the concept of the SMART system, so I am not going to review it here. For more information on how to use SMART to set your goals check here.

Is SMART always smart?

For the majority of your goals it is a good idea to follow the SMART system. However, at times, maybe it is better to ignore the “A” and “R” steps of this goal setting system.

What is wrong with making a goal attainable and realistic? Nothing. By making a goal both attainable and realistic you increase the likelihood of that goal being accomplished successfully.

What is the advantage of making a goal non-attainable and non-realistic?
You open yourself up to the process of evolution.

Thomas Leonard

I first came upon this idea while reading some of the written work of Thomas Leonard, the father of coaching. In his writing Thomas introduces the concept of “gapping”, which, in my interpretation, means to ignore making a goal attainable and realistic and “shoot for the stars”.

Gapping involves setting yourself a challenge that, chances are, is impossible, or almost impossible for you to succeed in accomplishing. The goal may involve skills you do not have, knowledge you are missing, or may have a time line that is too short to guarantee achievement. Some aspect of the goal makes it very difficult to achieve.

So, why attempt to gap a goal? I will let Thomas’ own words provide an answer:

” Take on an exciting goal or project that you cannot possibly accomplish. When the gap is this wide, mutation occurs.” – Thomas Leonard

Mutation and Evolution

By setting a possibly unreachable goal you push yourself. To have even a chance of succeeding in this impossible goal you will have to experiment, learn new skills, take risks, and go beyond your limits. Once the process is over, once you have tried all of these things, you are a different person: you have changed in some, and possibly many ways.

It does not matter if, in the end, you achieve the overall goal, what matters is that you made the attempt and improved yourself in the process. Not only will you improve yourself, but this evolution of who you are will have happened in a far shorter time span than you ever thought possible.

How to gap

Thomas’ writing did not go into specifics on how one should go about gapping, but I can see the process looking something like this:

1. Pick a goal that you have been putting off because it does not seem attainable or realistic: you don’t have the necessary skills, you are missing needed contacts, you are missing important information, you don’t have the time to complete it.
2. Set a specific result for the goal so that you are clear on what you are trying to achieve.
3. Set a clear measurement for the goal so you know when you succeed.
4. Set a short time period to achieve this goal so you stay focused on this challenging task.
5. Do whatever you need to and work as hard as you possibly can to achieve this goal in the time period you have set.
6. Determine how you have evolved from the experience, whether you were successful or not.

Does gapping work?

I have no idea. I have never tried it before, but I am going to give it a try now. Check back Friday when I pick the goal that I am going to attempt to gap, and then watch my progress in the coming weeks.

Even better: pick your own challenging goal that you would like to gap and add it to the comments section on Friday and join in on this experiment in goal setting.