The M.A.P. Maker

Forecast your future with a letter to yourself

You've probably heard of the idea of writing a letter to your future self as a goal-setting tool. It's a way to say, "Hey future me, here's my intention for what I want to create in (1/5/10/etc.) years time. Here's the life I'm aiming for."

One of the challenges, of course, is remembering the letter once you write it. You know how it is. First it gets tucked safely away. Then it gets put somewhere else in a fit of organization. Then you move and it's somewhere in a box in the back of a closet. Then you forget about it entirely.

One way around that is FutureMe.org. You can write yourself an e-mail, set the date you want it delivered, send it on its way, and sit back and wait.

Imagine sitting down and writing yourself one to be delivered in one year, and then another in five years. What would you say?

The great thing about this kind of exercise is that it isn't just about goal setting. It's also about self-exploration. It forces you to sit down and say, "OK, what is it really that I want to create? No vagueness - get specific!"

And to do that, unless you just pull random ideas out of the air, you have to have a good understanding of what's important to you. Who are you, and who do you want to be? What do you want to achieve? What do you care about enough to turn it into your future reality?

Give it a shot. Who knows what you might discover!

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Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Open the door to insight with random journaling

Want a fun way to generate invaluable insights and ideas you never realized you were looking for? Try random journaling.

The basic idea is to use something random as a point of departure for exploration. For example, today I happened across this random word generator. I generated a word, and up came "blocking."

From there, you can start the random journaling off with some questions. For example:

• How is this word (or this concept) relevant to my life?
• Where is this happening in my life?
• How is this showing up in my life? Are there any patterns where this is relevant?
• Could this be a symbol for something happening in my life?
• What are the associations with this word? How are they relevant in my life?

So I might explore where the blocks are in my life. How am I throwing up my own blocks? What kinds of habits, or beliefs are blocking me? What kinds of external obstacles am I encountering? Or I might look at from an American football perspective and think of blocking in terms of someone helping remove obstacles so I can run towards my goal. I might spend some time exploring what those obstacles are and who those people might be.

There's potential for all kinds of good juicy insight there.

Blocking was an easy one to explore. What about my next one...liver? Well, I started thinking about what a liver does. Its function is to remove toxins from the blood. Interesting. How could that apply to my life? Is there anything in my life that is a toxin that I need to remove? Anything that is having a negative effect on me that I need to change?

The beauty of random journaling is that wherever it takes you is completely unexpected. It lets you just flow and see where the exploration takes you. It encourages you to think laterally, and be creative in the associations you make.

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Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Explore yourself through other people's eyes

When you're looking at a new direction in your career - whether a wholesale change or a refinement of your current direction - it helps to have a good solid understanding of what makes you tick. Helping people understand "who they are" so they can make decisions that align with that is a big part of what I do in my coaching work.

Usually that involves a lot of introspection and self-exploration, but sometimes it can help to look outwards. This article suggests getting a better understanding of who you are by getting a cumulative picture of how others see you by interviewing multiple people who know you well - family, friends, co-workers, etc. 

To set up the interviews, create a short questionnaire (six to eight questions) with questions like:

* What are three things I do really well?
* What are three things I don’t do so well?
* Based on what you know about me, what job or experience have I liked the best in the past?
* Based on what you know about me, what job or experience have I liked the least?
* What are three things you can imagine me doing?
* What’s something you can’t really imagine me doing?
* How do I get in my own way?

The beauty of this approach is that for many people, self-exploration doesn't come naturally. It's not that they don't have the ability. It's just not something that gets taught, encouraged, and reinforced in our culture.

Asking others what they see is a great way to get a jumpstart on insights about oneself. A caveat though that the final say of whether any given piece of feedback really applies lies with you. Gather the information and then run it through a you-filter. "Is this really me? Does this really resonate?"

The more you know about yourself, the easier it is to consciously make choices that will lead you to an energizing, fulfilling life.

Whee-ha!

[Hat tip to RezBlog for the article link]

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Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Harness the power of great questions

When it comes to creating the life we want, I'm a huge believer in the power of questions. Questions can shine a light on things we've been missing, jolt us out of an un-thinking rut, and help us look at the world in a whole new way.

This article on asking empowering questions is a great place to start exploring what the might question mark can do for you. I especially like the list of empowering questions you can start asking today.

How about you? Do you have any favorite questions you like to ask?

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Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Which would you rather? (Binary self-exploration)

This morning Anita Bruzzese posted about a game her family played in the car recently, instigated by her young son, called, "Which would you rather?" The basic idea is that two alternate scenarios are posed and you choose between the two.

Some of the questions were predictably silly, but others were more serious and forced her to pause and ponder before answering. Looking at the experience, she was surprised at how much she learned about herself over the course of the game.

That got me thinking what a great self-exploration tool this could be. Simply pick two things from opposite sides of any spectrum, and ask yourself which you would rather have.

For example...

• Which would I rather have, work with a lot of flexibility or work that offers a solid structure?
• Which would I rather have, work that lets me focus deeply on one thing or work that lets me get my fingers into a broad range of things?
• Which would I rather have, work where I have a lot of quiet time to myself, or work where there is a lot of stimulus and interaction with others?"

It's not done there, though. When you pick one, follow it up with one of the most powerful questions I know..."Why?" What is it about that that is preferable? How does that make things more interesting, more energizing, easier, etc.? Why does that fit with who you are? Asking why lets you dig below the surface to really understand the preference.

 The beauty of this is how simple it is to. No muss, no fuss. No soulful navel gazing. Just brainstorm a list of opposites relating to just about any aspect of work (or life in general, for that matter). Pick the one in each pair that resonates most with you and hey presto! You have a bite-sized, focused, and personally relevant piece of information about yourself that you can dig into. And once you have that focus, it's easier to go deeper.

To get an even broader, more diverse range of pairs to evaluate, try getting a small group of people together and have each of them come up with ten. And if you want to turn the self-exploration into a getting-to-know-you experiment, have everyone e-mail their answers to the others.

Have some suggestions for "which would you rather" ideas to consider? Post them in a comment. I'd love to hear them.

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Get started with 101 Ways to Get Wild About Work!

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by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Making a difference with your kids

If you are a parent, you have a powerful opportunity to make the world a better place through the values and beliefs you instill in your children. It's a world-changing role.

Every child has the potential to absorb the message that doing good is an important part of life. And for every child brought up not just to believe that, but also to act on it, the future gets brighter.

It starts with a conversation

One of the many things I have long admired about Kevin Salwen (you may remember him as co-founder and editor of the sadly departed Motto / Worthwhile magazine) is the way he and his wife Joan have focused on that very thing with their kids.

I remember one post on the Motto blog where he talked about a conversation his family had around the dining room table. "What if we suddenly had a million dollars to give away to a good cause? How would we spend it? Where would we spend it? What issues are important to us?"

I always thought it was a great way to engage the kids to really think about what's important to them.

Taking action (in a big way)

It was only a theoretical conversation to get them thinking, but something about it must have sunk in...and sunk in deeply.

Fast forward a couple years from that post, and you'll find the Salwens selling their beautiful old mansion (it's still on the market for $1.8 million) to move into a house half its size and half its price, and donating the difference to The Hunger Project. The idea was sparked by his teenage daughter, Hannah. They have a site detailing the idea called Hannah's Lunchbox.

You can see more about their project on these clips from The Today Show and CNN.

Something for everyone

What I love about the Salwens' story isn't the scale of it, though that grabs your attention, to be sure. It's the part that is available to each and every parent, whatever their situation. Playing out on a jaw-dropping scale isn't what's important. What's important is blending exploration, respect for the kids' ideas and opinions, and family action.

In a nutshell, here's what I took away from the Salwens' story (I should note that I have no kids myself, so this is purely from what I have observed and not from any personal expertise - for those of you parents out there, I would love to hear your take on it).

1. Engage in conversations: Having conversations about exploring what feels important and what feels meaningful is where any seed gets planted.

2. Give the kids a voice: The conversations about what's important aren't just about dictating values. They're an opportunity to really open it up for discussion and exploration. What do they think, and why?

3. Explore the possibilities: As you get a better sense for what feels important, you can use that to start exploring possible ways to make a difference.

4. Do it together: The last part of what I find so powerful about the Salwens' story is that it was a family project. Whatever difference you decide to focus on making, there is an opportunity to ratchet up the personal benefit as well by doing it together. Along those lines, here is an interesting study on the benefits of family volunteering (pdf file).

For those of you with kids, how do you engage them around the idea of making a difference in the world? I would love to hear your stories.

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Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

--

by Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst

Can regret help you create a career you love?

Too often in our lives, we encounter regret only in hindsight. But what if we used it with foresight to help us create the future we really want? Over on the U.S. News blog today, I wrote a post exploring how you can use the question, "What would I regret?" to help you create a career that lights you up. Check it out.

And if you want to read my other posts over there, go here.

Enjoy!

   

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Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

Word-paint your self-portrait for an energized life

My Passion Catalyst work is about helping people manage the Gain to Drain Ratio in their lives - bringing more of what gives them energy into the picture and jettisoning what drains them. It's all based on my definition of passion: The energy that comes from bringing more of YOU into what you do.

With that in mind, I loved what Howard Behar (former President of Starbucks International and Starbucks North America, and author of the book, "It's Not About the Coffee") had to say when I interviewed him for the most recent M.A.P. Maker Podcast. Behar's description of bringing more of you into what you do is "one-hat living." 

One-hat living is being totally in synch with who you are as a human being...what are your values? What matters to you? How do you want to live your life?

And you’ve got to write those things down, because if you don’t, then it’s just talk. And they’re not written in stone just because you write them down, but it’s kind of like painting a picture of yourself in words.

When you put all these words together and they paint a picture of yourself, then you should be looking for things to do, places to work, wherever you’re going to live your life, your significant other in your life, that fit with that.

Because that’s how you’re going to have a happy, productive life. If you’re constantly in conflict with your values and how you live your life, where they don’t match with each other, it’s a recipe for disaster in life. You will see problems, and you will have problems, and you will be unhappy.

I love the idea of painting a word-picture of yourself. If you don't have the clarity about who you really are - not just a vague sense of "I know it when I see it," but a really solid understanding of what makes you tick - it's next to impossible to consciously bring more of that into the picture.

You can start painting your own word-picture right now by asking yourself some questions...

• What do I already know I want in my career?
• What do I love doing? Why? (Don't limit yourself to career-related activities - you're interested in the underlying reasons why you love it, not the activity itself.)
• What do I care about?
• When am I at my best?

The more you know about yourself, the more you fuel you have for creating an energizing, inspiring future.

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Time for a career change? Launch it with...
The Occupational Adventure Guide:
A Travel Guide to the Career of Your Dreams

Who would you be with no praise or criticism?

One of the biggest sources of career misery, stuckness, or just plain lack of fulfillment is giving external factors too much importance in our decision making. Two of the biggies that get in the way are the pursuit of praise and the fear of criticism.

In his excellent book, It's Not About the Coffee: Leadership Principles from a Life at Starbucks, Howard Behar, former President of Starbucks International, touches on the importance of discovering who you are without those two factors in the picture. In a chapter titled, "Know Why You're Here," Behar writes:

In my thirties, I heard someone ask the question, "If there was no praise or criticism in the world, then who would you be?" This is such a powerful concept...I learned that when you discover the answer to that question, you've discovered your greater purpose and the path you need to take.

I love that question! Think about it. If there were literally no praise and no criticism, their role in your decisions would cease to exist. And if they didn't exist, they couldn't distort your decisions.  It would be like speakers that had been blasting muddy, distorted sound suddenly becoming crystal clear.

What music would you hear? What decisions would you make? How would you act? Who would you be? Would your path be different than it is today? How?

Of course, praise and criticism do exist, and to some degree they will always play some role in the choices we make. But the better you understand what's at the core, the easier it is to focus on a path that is energizing and inspiring, and the less likely those external factors are to lure you into making choices that aren't right for you.

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Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM

How to use flickr for self-exploration, part 2

A few weeks ago I wrote about using flickr as a self-exploration tool (using images as a point of departure for the exploration process).

I suggested two approaches. One involved doing a search on specific words that relate to something you want to explore. The other involved putting a completely random spin by  opening a book, poking your finger onto the page, and searching for the word it comes down on. 

I just came across another great option for the random approach, the random word generator. Just visit the site and then search in flickr for the word that comes up (or, if you absolutely hate it, just hit refresh). 

They say that knowledge is power, and nowhere it that more true than knowledge of ourselves and the paths we're taking. Who knows what kind of insight might come out of this if you give it a shot?

Happy self-discovery! 

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Curt Rosengren, Passion Catalyst ^TM