the three new year

questionsGEO P GEORGE

Welcome to ‘Three New Year Questions’.

2013- another new year is knocking at the doors of our lives with a lot of expectations, and we simply can’t afford to sleep-walk into it. I am sure you have begun your preparations and planning, but I also thought of helping you as I can for those preparations. This program is a series of articles based on three simple questions which can help you brainstorm and put your New Year preparations on the right track. This is not an instructional program; this is a material through which I am trying to facilitate your thought process. You are in charge here and you are going to do your own pushups.

To get the maximum out of this program I suggest you to take enough time to read and think over these articles (have a note and a pen, thinking with pen and paper always works better)

So then lets begin.

HOW ARE YOUDOING?

Q1:

The very first of the three questions is “How am I doing?”.

Hit the scales as often as possible if you want to maintain a healthy weight, they say. If we want to change or make anything better we need to measure it first. Niels Bohr once said that nothing exists until it is measured. The same is with life too- until and unless we measure it, we simply cannot own it enough to change it or better it. Although “How am I doing?” is a very simple question it can act as an accurate scale to measure our lives.

What’s more important than hitting the scales frequently is hitting the right scales frequently. What are the wrong scales? Any scale that asks us “How do they think you are doing?” is a wrong scale.

They do not measure the reality but the psyched up image that we project in front of others. Often we misunderstand the question “How am I doing?” with “How do they think I am doing?”. And often rely so heavily on the how do I make them feel about me than how am I really doing. As a result, we rely heavily on what we make others feel about ourselves, rather than how we are really doing.

The only person who can evaluate or measure my life correctly is me. Because even when everything seems great from another person’s perspective, I know how my life is really going. So the right question really is “How am I doing?”.

With  your notepad and pen, answer the following questions:

What makes you happy when you think about the last year? List these things down.

What disturbs you the most about the last year?

After listing these questions, now ask yourself “How am I doing?”

Write a honest answer- this itself can make a massive transformation in your life .

Routine

“Our lives improve only when we take chances and the first and most difficult risk we can take is to be honest with ourselves.” Walter Anderson When you are finished with it, go to the next question. Don’t hurry! Let’s go nice and slow …

HOW SHOULD IBE DOING?

Q2:

The second question is “How should I be doing”. We can’t stop there at “How am I doing?” but we need to take the next step and look at how we should be doing. We should create a compelling vision to take us forward in life; to better our lives. The Bible tells us “The people without vision will perish ”. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?""That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.""I don't much care where –""Then it doesn't matter which way you go.” - Lewis Carrol, Alice in the Wonderland “A path to somewhere is a path to nowhere” – Anonymous Clarity around how we should be doing is essential in improving the quality of our lives. Clarity in this can bring about great power to our lives. Of course, we should make little changes in our routes if there are traffic jams in between - but that doesn’t mean we don’t need a destination!

RoutineGet a paper and a pen, and consider this-if I were perfectly fulfilled in my life how should I be doing?  If I had a perfectly fulfilling life, what would it look like? I will  have a perfectly fulfilling life if ………………………..?

Then, focus in on this year and answer “How should I be doing in 2013?” Jot the thoughts down one by one.Join the similar thoughts and make them into themes.Prioritize the themes, ranking them into order of importance to you. Finally, write these down neatly into a paper.

When it’s done, go to the next article. No need to hurry!

“If you know what you want, how will simply show up” – Les Brown

WHAT CAN I DO ABOUT IT?

Q3:

Most people stop at ‘How should I be doing?’. Having a vision is the same as having no vision at all- unless we start walking towards it. Here are two main reasons why we don’t start walking towards our vision: One is ‘learned helplessness’. Somewhere, somehow, we are all conditioned to the response of quitting even before trying. We put our hands up in surrender and say “I can’t do anything about it”. This is our greatest enemy when it comes to acting on your dreams.

We have to find some way to do something about the dreams we have. “Start by doing what's necessary; then do what's possible; and suddenly you are doing the impossible” said one of my favorite saints St. Francis of Assisi.

The second reason is what Brian Tracy puts as “Someday Island” vacation. He says that most of us after putting our goals and expectations before us take a trip to the Someday island. If you haven’t understood it yet , here are some examples: someday I will lose some weight , someday I will get out of my addiction, someday I will do what I really love, etc . This is our second biggest enemy. Get into a 30 day no procrastination plan and tell me if I am wrong.

You are not helpless and you should do something about your ‘How should I do’s” today and not some day.

If you can commit to these two statements above, I will promise you a miracle very soon.

start thinking “so what can I do about it?”.write it down.

Our next 3 sessions will be on putting that into action.Again let us be clear- “it’s not what can others can do about it”, it’s “what you can do about it”

Routine

PLANNING NOTES

Planning note 1: Identify high priority themes.

Edison was once asked what his secret of effectiveness was. He responded “Everyone wakes up every day and does so many things, but I wake up every day and do just a few things.” It’s an obvious truth that the less things you do, the higher the chance that you will be successful in what you do. Many times, the main reason behind ineffectiveness in our lives is having too many priorities. Too many themes makes execution very difficult. In such cases, we are super-confident and overestimate our capacities. If you want to have a serious result this year, decrease the number of themes in your top priority. I invite you to select some of the themes that are very important for you (if you’re not sure what a theme is, please refer to Question 2). This may contain 80 – 90% of your idea of who you should be. List themes high-priority themes. As I said earlier, the lower the number of themes, the better the result.

Now brainstorm how you can give your maximum investment to these themes. In our lives, we invest resources. The resources in our lives include time, energy, money, knowledge and more. To make your listed “high-priority themes” high-priority themes in reality, we need to find ways to channelize the maximum share of your resources to them and then commit to the strategy. “Always remember the priority theme of ours is not what we say our priority theme is but to what we allocate the major share of our resources”. Please go on to the next page when you are ready!

Planning note 2 : set your values right

Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. If we want different or better results we need to make changes in what we do. We can’t do the same things again and again and expect to get different results . We need to make our actions better or different for that. We navigate our lives using values. Values are simply those choices which we consider more important than our circumstance .This means that no matter what happens, I am doing to do a certain thing. These values shape the track of our lives. So if we want to reach another destination, we need to get on another track! Look at the paper on which you have written “What should I be doing?” and make some commitments, some values, some choices that you will hold on to no matter what happens. Simply put, if you need more you need to give more ; and also, you need to give much more before you can actually earn what you need. “The only places in this

world you get something before paying for it are restaurants” Robin Sharma put so well. Write it down, all those values you commit to hold on to in a special way this year. I think this is the most important step when it comes to accomplishing any dreams- changing your directions and your track. This is because if our tracks are not correct, it doesn’t matter how fast we move -all that’s going to happen is that we are going to reach nowhere twice or thrice as fast. Think hard and get your values aligned with how you should be!..

Planning note 3: write the goals and make it into steps and get the important dates

Go through the work we went through over the last few days. Now set the goals for this year and break it into small steps. Write those in a table and make another column to record the expected duration necessary to get those steps done. Write the detailed strategy to execute these steps. Write down the important dates too, such as he important days of your dear ones, company days, vacations etc . This is the shortest of all the notes we have had till now. But it is the one that will take the most time.

Planning note 4 next mile planning

Get your planners and agendas ready! Make the printed sheet of your values the first page of your planner. Block those important days you have this year. Mark the step by step dates for your goal executions. Write strategies on Sticky Notes and stick it on the beginning days of the steps. After finishing this step, get the next mile planned. I always believe in planning 100 days each one time. I do the next 100 days after my 95th day of the first plan. I call this practice The Next Mile Planning Technique. I suggest you that do it too. This way, you will have space for new urgent events that come up and the dates won’t look so long. I found this short chunk-planning improves the efficiency of activity management. And always, make sure you are walking towards your ‘promised land’.

“If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward” – Martin Luther King Jr.

Before concluding this e book I would love to thank all who was instrumental in bringing this out, my very special thanks go to Mimi Pukkulakatt who edited the content and made this e book great to read. Friends, thank you so much for being part of this important journey with me. And now we are friends so keep in touch! Send me your reviews, experiences and suggestions at threequestions@live.com . Feel free to share this material with your dear and near ones . Share it, post it, tweet it or e-mail it to your friends. Let's all make 2013 our best year yet. Lots of love,

Geo P George

LIVE YOUR ABSOLUTE BESTwww.facebook.com/geopgeorge.page