I can year you now, "Life Mapping With a White Board, Yeah Right!". I know this because I get the same response just about every time I bring it up. People ask me for advice all the time, and they ask the wrong questions. I hear things like, "You race cars, I want to do it too." or "Hey your website is making money, I want to build a website that makes money too." or "I want to write a book, you wrote a book, will you help me do it?"
My answer is always the same "You can't be me". How boring would that be anyway?
So how can a White Board help you map out a great life? To start with, the human mind is a funny thing. This little three part computer we carry around in our heads needs a little guidance from time to time. I say three parts because we have the instinctive part that is our Freeze-Fly-Fight computer whenever we encounter things we don't know or understand. Then we have the big part we use to think about problems. That big part has a conscious part and a subconscious part.
All together I count this as three parts, the amygdala or the little primitive brain, the subconscious mind and the conscious mind.
When you read books about becoming an "expert" at something, and getting those five or ten thousand hours of experience, what you are really doing is training your big brain or your mind as I like to call it to overpower your instinctive little amygdala, your little brain. The Mind fails us when it encounters something it hasn't seen or thought about and then defers to the little brain which knows to Freeze like a possum and hope nothing happens. If that doesn't work, then it moves to Fly, like a scared cat being followed by a German Shepherd, and finally as a last resort it turns to Fight, like a deer in the corner.
So how does a white board help the Mind?
My technique of Life Mapping with a White Board gives the big brain another perspective on what you really want. It is one more step to keeping the big brain in control of your life. The key is to replace fear with knowledge.
What is the white board technique?
The white board technique is a way of finding a destination if you don't have one. Even if you have what you think is a clear destination, the Life Mapping on a White Board method can help you see problems with your destination and help get your family on board if needed. It brings it all together for everyone.
Originally I used just two columns. "I Want" and "I Don't Want", and drew a line down the middle.
The first time I did this, I did it by myself. Doing it by yourself isn't a great plan because we'll say things like "I want a Ferrari", and the truth is, we don't. The Ferrari is just a status thing representing something we really want. You still might get a Ferrari but it isn't necessarily a destination of itself and your friends and family will help bring clarity here. Just keep it to direct family and very close friends.
You can do this with your business partner too.
When you involve others, be prepared to sell it a little. If you put "one million in cash by the end of the year" on the "I Want" side, you might get laughed out of your own house if the most you have made is $50,000 a year and your savings is empty. Involving others takes more internal strength too. It helps you to say out loud those things you really want and might be embarrassed or ashamed to say. By writing them down it helps you overcome that fear.
Our culture has grown to believe that "I Want" is selfish and is looked down upon. It is a big reason we are in the trouble we are in. Go back to Ben Franklin and the Founding Fathers. The Declaration of Independence is an entire list of "I Want".
You Must "Want" on the "I Want" Side
Think back to being a kid, you wanted everything. Today when you want something, you feel guilty. When I wanted a new car and put my truck up for sale I believed my dogs gave me the evil eye. I could hear them saying "NOT OUR TRUCK, DON'T SELL OUR TRUCK". Our brains are trained to avoid pain, not seek gain. We aren't taught to try and get A+'s in school, we are taught not to get F's.
My parents didn't reward me for getting A's, they rewarded me for not getting C's. A B was my standard. When I tried college for the first time, and there wasn't a carrot for the B's, I quickly got to the mental state of avoiding D's, C's were good enough.
The difference between me and the valedictorian was simple. She had a destination going into college of being number one when she got out. I didn't. My destination was to fly jets, nobody told me that jet pilots needed good grades. Lucky for me persistence beats grades once in a while.
It was the process of becoming a pilot after being told I didn't have the grades to become one that I started thinking about the Life Mapping process. It was dominated by "I Want To Fly Jets".
You Must Know What You "Don't Want" Too.
The "I Don't Want" Side is important too. If your "I Don't Want" side includes "I don't want to be at any Disney Park on a weekend or Holiday ever again" and you build a business that requires you to be there Monday through Friday for life, what happens? You have a conflict. It is these little conflicts that cause problems.
When you list out all of your "I Want" and "I Don't Want" items and life style choices, you start to see problems and conflicts. Dreaming up the Wants and Don't Wants is fun, now comes the work.
The work is to look at the conflicts and set priorities. In the example above, which is more important, the business, or time at Disney on a weekday. Which one gives and how? For me and my wife it was easy, we chose to work weekends and play on weekdays. Easier to do when you don't have kids, and it can be a hassle when family wants to visit.
The New Third Column - The Mission
Recently I added a third column to my board, and it is my "mission" listed in three major goals. I look at them two and three times a day. They are also in a card in my wallet. My goal sheet used to have ten different things on it, and I realized that ten was too many. I wasn't doing any of them.
Gary Keller in his book "The One Thing" suggests that you only have one goal at a time. I think we have more power than that, but this book is a great starting point.
The way I see it, we should have the primary goal and two on the bench. When we hit an obstacle with the first goal, we have something to take our minds off it, and let the subconscious mind work on it. While we are focused on the primary goal, the back of the brain is working on the other two in its off time.
When I reach a primary goal, it gets removed, the other two move up, and I start looking for a new one.
The big white board with the "I Want" - "I Don't Want" - "Goal Column" is revisited every time a major goal is achieved. I make sure the major goal fit my "wants" and "don't wants" and then use those two columns to work on a new third goal.
When I come up with a new third, I let it sit at least a week and look at it again to make sure it fits. It it does, I change it from black to blue, indicating a change from a "penciled in goal" changing to a "real goal" and the process starts over.
Just like flying jets, things change in life constantly. Weather changes just like life changes, so you can never put away your white board and forget about it. Every month or two my wife and I sit down with a nice glass of wine and a cheese plate and look at the white board, we review our "wants" and "don't wants" and talk about progress towards the primary goal, and if the other two still should be on the bench.
We don't change or mission or goals often, in fact it only happened once. If you keep changing your goals, you are changing direction, meaning you never get anywhere. You don't need to Life Map on a White Board to go nowhere, you can do that quite easily without trying. People do it every day. The reason you are reading this is so you don't become one of those people.
We do change "Wants" and "Don't Wants" from time to time. Why? Simply put, life changes. We learn. Something that sounded good at first ends up being wrong. For instance we wanted to be more "water conservative". Following that we bought a very nice low flow toilet for our bathroom downstairs. Quickly we found out that it didn't always flush everything and at a party our guests were embarrassed. Not embarrassing guests, outweighed water conservation, so the toilet hit the curb. Funny little things can tweak your list. The trick is to make sure those little things don't guide you away from your destination.
Setting Priorities.
When you get the white board filled up with wants, don't wants and goals, now is the hard part, setting priorities. You have to remove all of the conflicts first. All of the wants, don't wants and goals that aren't consistent with the overall scheme.
Next is to list the "Wants" from most important to least, then do the same with "Don't Wants" and "Goals".
With that done, sit back and ask yourself "Where is this taking me? Is this really where I want to go?" If you did it right, what you have is a clear picture of where you are and the tools you have, and a pretty solid description of the place you want to go.
Just like flying a jet, every time someone asks you about doing something, you look at your list and ask a very simple question, "Does what they want me to do help me follow my list, or does it conflict with my list?" When it conflicts you simply say "No Thank You" and move on. This takes practice, and as you see results don't stop.
What you have just created is your own magic compass that points at what you really want. When you get knocked off course or a storm is in the way, look at the compass on your white board, go around or over the obstacle and keep going to your destination.
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Thank you for your insights.