5 Steps to The Good Life v1.1
About a year ago I wrote my first article on LinkedIn. This wasn’t about strategy or operations or about structuring or restructuring global companies — what I had been doing for a while for work. Instead, the article was about using the same tools and mindset that I employed to do my consulting work but applying these to the “problem” of how to live a good life. I’d been pondering this for the couple of years since I got married, and whether subconsciously or not the topic came up again and again in conversation with my road-warrior colleagues and clients and various people I encountered whilst shuttling around the world to do my work.
What pushed me over the edge to write it was a feeling that the ship we were all on was heading in slightly the wrong direction. It felt that lassez-faire market economics principles and social media chatter were framing the discourse and therefore setting the paradigm and direction of what a society should be about - rather than humanity being what should drive society, and its institutions and mechanisms of organisation. It seemed at the grass-roots level that if I could help professionals to “tune in” to what a good life was on their own terms, then the ripple effect of this trend and experience would trigger the right kind of discussions and actions to get the collective hands back on the steering wheel of the ship.
Nothing in the past year has year has convinced me that this is the wrong path. In fact the Presidential race in the US (where I currently live) has convinced me that we need to look long and hard at who we want to lead our society — and of course to take the personal responsibility to lead ourselves and to do what is right.
Given this I thought I’d re-publish the original article with annotations in italics for the Medium.com community. This is kind of like a directors commentary — you may prefer to just read the original article here.
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Quite often, in my work and personal life, I come across professionals seeking a tip or trick to make their lives perform differently or with greater meaning.
This article uses the idea of The Good Life (TGL) as a framework to explain how to set up foundational areas of your life for success. The Good Life is simply a philosophy and practice of living aimed at achieving an enriched experience of, and outcomes from, life through knowing and following what is important.
(I’ve called this approach The Good Life intentionally for the double-meaning of good — for you and society. This is also a prompt to ask… what is Good really? Is being in debt for a fancy house and car the good life? You have to decide. There is a process of knowing what is important — your personal direction and values etc — not necessarily what society says is good or you should do. Certainly not what people selling products and services, or with other vested interests say you should be or do. Then the tricky part is actually following what you say is important. There are actually quite a few obstacles to living a simple life, particularly if you work as a professional and your life isn’t simple now.)
The steps in the approach are:
- Build Core strength
- Define what Good looks like
- Project the future
- Act with energy, in time
- Iterate and improve
Let’s look at each of these in more detail now.
Step 1. Build Core strength.
If you’ve ever spent time at a gym or with a Personal Trainer then you’ll be familiar with the idea of Core strength. Working on core muscles in the abdominal, back and pelvic regions helps you to do a wide range of physical activities and sports, and also helps you to achieve balance and stability.
Extending this idea to The Good Life, core muscle groups are: meaningful work, personal relationships (family, friends & community), spiritual base, physical and mental health, and activities around expression and growth. Each of these groups support each other, and enable you to perform at a high level in life overall.
(This analogy is on-purpose — not surprisingly to be centred and have a solid foundation we have to push reset on the many things we’re chasing and reconnect with the simple basics. Like any top athlete you must drill the basics and develop your process to connect what is important with you internally with how you express that externally in the world)
The reason that each of these “muscle groups” is core (and not the countless other things we could focus on) is that each of these generates intrinsic satisfaction by itself. Intrinsic satisfaction comes from within, is not relative to external comparison and is a life’s work. For example the joy you get from spending time with friends and family is natural and absolute — it is not diminished by meeting someone else that also spends quality time with their family.
By comparison Extrinsic satisfaction is driven by factors outside of you, and is often heavily dependent on social comparison (pride & Ego). These factors are things like: incremental pay, status, vanity possessions which do not provide nutrition or sustainable meaning for your life in themselves. For example, if you earn $100 and meet someone similar to you that earns $101 then your happiness will likely be diminished.
(I didn’t invent the terms intrinsic and extrinsic, and you can also think about these simply as internal and external satisfaction. It is simplistic to say that one is good and another is bad — but quite often chasing external satisfaction comes at the expense of internal satisfaction. The cliche of the burnt-out executive who’s getting a divorce and health issues is a cliche because it’s true — yet nobody wants or consciously chooses this for themselves.
Ego can be a powerful supercharger to achieve things — but are you trying to achieve the right things? Isn’t it funny that we’d be uncomfortable if someone was bragging about how much time they spend with their friends and family, or how well they took care of their health. We don’t seem to have the same reaction to people bragging about how hard they work or their new promotion etc etc.)
What motivates you, where do you focus your time and energy to get results, what is success?
Many professionals inherit a somewhat arbitrary definition of success which is heavily skewed to more easily measurable extrinsic factors. Intrinsic factors, whilst important, are neglected or become something to focus on after the work is done, or when there is a crisis.
The first step to enriching your life is to move from a hope of achieving intrinsic benefits through a focus on extrinsic ones, to focusing on intrinsic areas, and enjoying the likely extrinsic rewards that come from having strong foundations.
(The thing is that as professionals we can easily get into the mindset that anything non-standard is a risk. Even though as a society we tend to idolise people that break the rules, and we also know that it’s easier to see in others when they stay too long in a bad situation. The path to the good life may be with your current job or organisation or it may not be.
Why shouldn’t you be the next success story of someone that has chosen to live life on their terms?)
As with physical exercise Form is important too — your exertion must be aligned from your core values and beliefs, and towards an overall purpose or vision for you to get results. You must also pick the right load / activity to exercise each group, and work different groups in a joined up way to avoid overexertion or injury!
(Yes, people are different, but most of us want to live authentically. Have you ever sat down to see what that means specifically for you. What do you stand for? Where is the evidence of that in your actions?)
There are many good exercises available electronically to enable you to help uncover your core values, beliefs, passions and strengths so I won’t cover them here. The second reason I won’t spend a lot of time on this is because it’s important that you don’t get lost or stuck at this stage in a theoretical voyage of self-discovery — dissipating energy on the past instead of creating your future.
We learn about ourselves through action, and interaction with others. After a short, sharp burst of self-knowledge, your deep insights and transformation will come from taking actions in areas that you prioritise or are drawn to. A quick-win for professionals around self-knowledge and purpose could be through doing skills-based volunteering or joining the board of a charity. Many report a reinvigorated sense of meaning and self-knowledge by applying their professional skills and relationships to the greater good. They also report being able to apply and build professional skills and relationships in a broader context, helping them at work. As with all of the steps in this process there is no need to “reinvent the wheel”, just to utilise avenues and resources already available to you.
(So some self-insight is critical… but not too much, and also some thinking / planning is good — but meeting people and experimenting in areas you feel strongly about is even better. It is impossible to fully anticipate the benefits of trying something new or meeting people that already have the skills or interests that you want to work on. Please re-read the last sentence again. We often sit at our desks with all sorts of what are, with hindsight, wrong assumptions about what a thing is that stop us from taking the action we need to improve our lives.)
Step 2. Define what good looks like.
“That light you follow
can save you
or enslave you
if you don’t see true”
(this is from the poem Whale Beach I wrote in Sydney visiting family last year. Swimming in the strong surf I got turned over by a wave, and tumbled again and again. I literally didn’t know which way was up and was close to having a life-flashing-before-eyes moment. Underwater, I remember trying to swim towards the light from the sun, but in the next moment my face was in the white sand. Later, watching the surfers at Whale Beach, I reflected on what had just happened — that I had and was experiencing the true nature of life unfold before my eyes. The Good Life is not just a quick fix for some short term happiness — it is a way to touch life and stay connected to it.)
In consulting we often ask the question “what does good look like?” (e.g. from a strategy, project, process or communication point of view) to cut through potential uncertainty and infinite options towards a concrete direction. The question challenges us to be specific about the few critical outcomes and characteristics or measures of success in any endeavour and, by necessity, to prioritise these into two or three items or a short statement. This works in our personal lives too, but we rarely ask ourselves this question!
(there is something immensely empowering about saying “this is how I want my life to work” based on your own definition of good — after all who else’s definition should you use? Implicitly we kind of expect someone to come and say “you can’t have that” and “that’s not how life works” but in fact they don’t. Since writing the original article I’ve now left my old job… and once people hear what I’m trying to achieve they, from the bottom to the top and even my former clients, are supportive in a really genuine way, like they’ve been waiting for someone to do what I’m trying to do. Perhaps this story will eventually lead you to Do It Yourself.)
Asking high quality questions around the core life dimensions discussed in Step 1 is a practical way to make progress on improving them. You can do this overall i.e. “what does good look like in my life in 10 years”, or for an individual dimension “what does good look like for my mental and physical health this year?”.
(Some of the most well-adjusted people I know do an annual planning process with their partner to align on where they’re going. This allows decisions to be prioritised and key principles to be established. This idea seemed awkward to me until I tried it. After all strategy is about making decisions about what you’re going to do, and not going to do. If you want to try this then you could use the headings of the core muscle groups / life dimensions above as a starter.)
The sum total of what good looks like becomes the direction and your personal “light” to follow or as others would say a “stake in the ground” or ready-reckoner to measure where you are now, where you need to be and the actions and decisions you can take to move forward. Something magical happens when we’re clear on what we’re trying to achieve and why. Our minds can fill in the gaps of “how” and “when”, and positively guide the thousands of decisions we make every day.
(I am terrible at golf, but decided to have a few lessons a while back. One of the first pieces of advice I got was “have a target to aim for, don’t just blast the blast the ball out there” at the driving range or the green. I can’t think of any better advice for life too. Each day is a new chance to hit the ball from where it fell yesterday.)
So, what does good look like in your life (at the end of this year, in 10 years’ time?).
Why not try to answer the question now, keeping in mind all of the life dimensions we’ve discussed so far.
Your initial answer will likely be broad or incomplete. Can you see how beneficial it would be to you to try to be able to have a good answer to this question for each of the dimensions and overall?
If your vision is not yet that clear, then what hunches do you have about the types of things that you’ll be doing or will have done? Even if you’re drawing a blank this can be an effective trigger to do some online research, attend a local interest group or event and perhaps try out a few different ideas to find out.
(I find that for most people the vision starts of as being some variation of being on a tropical beach, or fishing, basically anything that doesn’t look like what they’re doing for work right now. Then it moves on to what you want to have — i.e. I would like a big house and a red sports car. The self-help industry has a lot to answer for here since that is almost always their singular advice. Yet these things don’t make you happy, they’re just sometimes cool if you’re already happy. Instead your vision should start around what you want to “have” in personal relationships, spirituality, vocation, health etc or in other words what do you want to be, or to become?)
You can refine and test the answer of what good looks like by asking the question “why” several times as you iterate each successive answer. For example: if “losing 10lbs” is something good from a health perspective, then why, for you? You could answer “to have more energy”, then ask why again, “to be able to play with my kids”, and why, “because being healthy and around for my family is really important to me”. Often the “whys” will lead you to a better understanding of what is important to you, or even a paradox or insight!
How would you think and act, if you had achieved your personal vision? What criteria would you use to make decisions, how would you view risk of acting, or not acting?
(Put yourself in the shoes of the person you want to be or become, and begin to use that mindset in your life now. Simple.
This next part of the article helps you to be even more clear and precise in how your vision applies to each life dimension…sometimes it’s easiest to do this on a scale from bad to good and what is slightly better or worse from where you are now or by adding things and taking things away.)
Let’s continue by looking at an example for a life dimension. How would you rate your satisfaction at work from 1 (lowest) to 5 (highest). Think of a number, and ideally write it down before moving on. Now evaluate how well the work part of your life aligns with your values/core — if the answer is “well” or “badly” do you need to revise the score you gave initially? Next write down a few bullet points to explain to yourself why you gave the score you did.
What would be the characteristics of top score of 5 / 5 for work be? What would be the impact on your overall life if you lived at a 5 / 5 level for work? Finally, challenge yourself to see if you’ve really thought broadly enough about what is possible. Have you restricted your thinking because of constraints in the present, or assumptions about the future?
For example, is “work” only about earning a salary from an organisation? What if work was a portfolio of all the activities where you exchange your skills for a financial or non-financial return? Skills based volunteering could therefore be work, mentoring is work, developing your networks is work and sharing your knowledge is work. As humans we need work almost in a spiritual sense, for: socialisation, personal growth, contribution and fulfilment, as well as paying the bills. We should be creative in how we think about work in order to get the most out of it.
(In general we tend to hold up a lot of constraints and unspoken assumptions about how we should or could live our lives… this Good Life process is about seeing and challenging those constraints to allow you to identify and create new possibilities.)
Repeat this process for each of the core life dimensions we mentioned above (health, spirituality, relationships etc).
Now we’ve been through the quick exercise why not try to define again what good looks like from a total life perspective in 5 or 10 years from now. If you haven’t done the exercise then please stop and do it now or find a time that you’ll return to it. There is no way of shortcutting this step — you can’t live The Good Life without defining or at least understanding “good”!
Step 3. Project the future.
This step deals with creating both the motivation and mechanism to close the gap between the current state you identified in Step 2 and your overall future vision.
Rating your life dimensions on a scale from 1 to 5 is a simple tool to help you make distinctions between where you are now and your ideal future, and the stepping stones to get there. The fuel to make you take the steps comes from feeling the gap between where you are now and your desired future state.
(One thing I often have to tell clients is that “a gap is good”. We can often get defensive when faced with evidence that what we’re doing each day could be changed or improved. I certainly do, but I’ve learnt to detach myself from that reaction and look instead at how the new piece of information could be true and / or useful to me, and if so how it can be integrated into my approach or situation. Knowing a gap is good, feeling it is even better — we often won’t change unless there is a strong emotional case for doing so. For example everyone knows that eating too much and the wrong stuff is bad for them. We also know that most diet and exercise regimes fail. What’s missing is often finding an emotional connection for why we need to do something.)
In consulting we often call this identifying the “burning platform”. When does it become less risky to jump forward than to stay where you are — or in other words what is your compelling reason to change?
You need this compelling reason since there are forces of inertia, fear or even scheduling that can get in the way of implementing something that is clearly a rational idea. Continuing the exercise: what are the benefits of moving to “good” in each of your dimensions? What are the benefits to you and your family of moving to good?
Next imagine if you didn’t change — look forward 10 years in the future, what would you miss out on if you didn’t change? How would you feel in the shoes of your future self if you didn’t change and kept repeating your current patterns? Would you still be hoping for something then, that you have the power to change now? What advice would your future-self give your current-self about what is important, and steps that were key to making the change?
(This is about magnifying the emotional leverage on yourself to change. Our daily habits create our weeks, months, years and lives. Often we’ll do something for someone else that we wouldn’t do for ourselves… how often have you stayed late to finish work, but haven’t been able to find the time to exercise or spend time connecting with family and friends. We need to be clear on who our stakeholders are — many of the most important ones don’t bug you as readily to get their needs met as your boss does.
Another key thing here is about having realistic expectations. Much of self-help fails, in my opinion, because it over promises and under delivers. Any decent advice has to work in the real world, not just in perfect lab conditions. Anyone who has ever done anything worthwhile has the same advice that I will now pass on to you: “It will be harder and take longer than you think. You’ll feel like you’re off track and failing most of the time, especially just before you succeed”.)
The second part of this step is to identify principles, measures, goals and personal projects to close the gap, and to get the results. This part can often be the trickiest since we’re not used to thinking about how to measure things we take for granted like spirituality, personal relationships with friends and family, our mental and physical health — or how we’re growing or expressing ourselves creatively. Yet all of these things are important, no?
Treating your plans like a project can be a very useful tool to help you to structure and manage what you are trying to achieve, and also to overcome obstacles to changing.
(There are many good operational reasons to treat the process of moving to the good life as a project or projects — if you’re serious about it then putting some structure around it will increase your chance of success. There is also a mind trick here, if you can make what you’re trying to achieve a separate entity from you a living breathing human then you can be more objective, and handle better the negative triggers and emotions that cause our plans to fail.)
4. Act with energy, in time
How we look at and manage our time and energy can be a barrier to living The Good Life.
To get past this we need to understand how energy and focus drive outcomes, and also the difference between activities that are urgent, and those that are important. For those who are wondering where the time will come from to do this, we need to talk about offsetting. Let’s start there.
As humans we’ve devised elaborate reward and pleasure/pain management mechanisms. Offsetting is spending your time, energy and often money, involved in a pursuit that is triggered by and aims to counteract an unpleasant or painful symptom elsewhere. A simple example is procrastination, which is often a reward to counteract the fear or perceived pain of doing something. Retail therapy is a well know pick-me-up too, as is excessive focus on leisure and pleasure, or even often the philosophy of “work hard, play hard”. To change, we typically need to do some detective work around what is important to us and why (i.e. steps 1–3) and understand how we currently invest our time and energy and why?
The paradox about moving to a Good Life approach is that is not about doing more things to get more, but about doing more of less things to get more. Your return on energy and time is increased. The more time you spend crafting work, for example, to be meaningful, the less need you’ll have for superficial quick-fixes outside of work. Time invested with friends and family is its own reward, and prevents time in damage-control — in the same ways as time in health and spirituality do.
(Yes, prevention is better than cure. That is another truism, but how often do we apply it to what we ACTUALLY do? If you’re unhappy in one area of life it will spill over to other areas and also likely trigger a bunch of other behaviours that will suck up your time, energy and money in an attempt to compensate.
The key here literally is to start somewhere by putting in some cornerstone changes even if they are small. For example this could be making dinner together at home one night rather than getting takeout or working late.)
The book “First things first” by Stephen Covey, Roger Merrill and Rebecca Merrill ably makes the distinction between activities that are “urgent” and those that are truly “important”. Most of us tend to focus on things that are visibly urgent even if they are not important to achieving our outcomes. In the years since 1994 when the book was first published the amount of non-important interruptions have multiplied exponentially — with portable email and internet, text messages and social media, all further exaggerated by globalised working hours.
For example, those of us who do emails first thing in the working day rather than thinking through a critical project are focusing on urgent not important. First thing in the morning is a time that many professionals commonly report feeling most alert and focused, and having least distractions. You can use this “golden” morning time to look at the important activities across work and all of your key life dimensions.
(I hate to say it but this is another example of what we know, but don’t always do. First make sure you’ve completed the steps above so that you understand the direction you want to head and are working on the right and important things. Then you can pick up a book like “Getting things done” by David Allen which has been around for a while, to see if his productivity system can help you.)
Rethinking your morning routine is most likely a quick win to being able to move towards The Good Life.
You can extend your search of golden hours of productivity into any time of the working day and even weekends. To put more rigour into this process you could complete a quick time “audit” for a period of a week or two. Record in 30 minute blocks your energy levels, what you are doing, and obstacles that come up which upset your plans. Is your time and energy used on-purpose? Review this and look for 1–2 improvement areas.
Quality is more important than quantity in time management. Spending a few minutes a day on something that is important to you (that has been neglected) can transform your perspective on the quality of your life. It is through action and interaction with others that change is made. Don’t forget as you take action to place yourself in the shoes of your future self and act “as if” you are already there.
For example — How would the healthy you determine what to have for lunch, how to manage their calendar or how to invest their increased energy levels? A practical way to begin acting “as if” i.e. taking on the identity of your future self is to meet people already doing what you want to do (in each of the core groups). A quick win here is to find an interest / meet-up group or event in your local area that you can attend within the next 30 days.
5. Iterate and improve
A colleague of mine likes to use the expression “you can’t get there from here, but you can get here from there” to convey the point that we can’t get to a different future by using the same thinking and actions and paradigms we have now.
Working backwards from the future suggests not only the actions you need to take now, but can assist you with the mental breakthroughs required to become the future you. What decisions can you take now to move you towards The Good Life?
One of the challenges we have as professionals sometimes is to be willing to try something new that we may not be good at straight away. Just as the prototyping approach has increasingly made its way from IT into mainstream business, so too there are benefits to trying rather than pondering (analysis paralysis) in our own lives.
I hate running but love cycling. You may find that traditional religious practice works for you — yet others have found different ways feel grounded spiritually, or even different ways to engage with traditional practice, after years or decades without this. You may want to try to find different ways to (re)engage with your friends and family, or to explore a hobby that works for you. Finally you could look for the “Zen” in your chores, and do them during the week, saving the weekend for progressing what is really important to you.
Creative expression and activities that develop and challenge us are essential to remaining authentic — to yourself and others. Activities in both of these areas challenge us not to stay static, to remain current and aware of our strengths and weaknesses (and opportunities and threats) and to break down walls between our core and our intellectual selves (helping to stay grounded).
(Not everyone wants to be an artist, but I believe that everyone needs to learn how to express themselves honestly — it’s cheaper than (retail) therapy. I don’t mean you need to over-share or babble or be a self centred bore — but to find an effective way to get the inside out — to be able to hear your inner voice again. This could be through conversations with your partner, friends or community group. It could be through a hobby or what you do for other people.
I’ve found though that just writing a short private journal regularly can work well — especially if you haven’t ever done this since you were a teenager. It doesn’t matter what you write just that you put down whatever is on your mind without self-censorship. If you’ve not done this exercise before then do it every day for a month. If you like you can alternate and every week try to write a short rhyming poem, or even try to describe what you see at your desk or at the coffee shop in a paragraph and what you feel about what you see.)
Conclusion
We become what we focus on — and often that which we find ourselves focusing on has become out of step with the intrinsic and timeless drivers of a rich and full life. Although there are many mysteries and twists and turns in life itself, there are some practical steps that we can take to move us towards the promise of a more authentic and purposeful life right now.
These steps involve setting direction through connecting with and working on the core, fleshing out what you are aiming for in terms of “what good looks like”, and finally in getting the motivation to start, and the project mechanisms to turn this motivation into outcomes.
We need to take control of our time to focus on what is important and move, beyond offsetting, to action in the present towards our future vision. Lastly we need to remain humble and flexible in our approach, being aware that we may have to experiment to find what works best for us across each of the life dimensions.
The results are surely worth the undertaking of the steps?
Good luck with your journey to and in living The Good Life. Safe travels!
(One final point is to look for opportunities to Role Model or to Lead… whether you are in a leadership position or not. My experiment thus far has revealed that this is a hot topic that we’ve not yet completely addressed. It is urgent and important for us, and the world. Please let me know stories of how you’ve applied this and what result you got).
