Life in Technicolor

"Whether you are just getting started with life planning or have been doing it for several years, you can improve the effectiveness of your life planning by employing these seven practices.

1. Recruit a life plan accountability partner. If you want to finish your life plan and make sure you actually implement it, recruit an accountability partner (see Ecclesiastes 4:9, 10). The best option is a coach who is trained in life planning. The next best option is a close friend who learns along with you. Regardless, having an accountability partner is an important key to success.
2. Regard your life plan as a work in process. Don’t shoot for perfect—that day will never come. Instead, complete your first draft and assume it is a living document. You will revise it as necessary, always fine-tuning, always tweaking.
3. Recognize the season you are in. Are you in a spring, summer, fall, or winter season? It makes a difference. You may not be able to do what I do. I may not be able to do what you do. The critical thing is to each be doing what we should be doing in this season of our lives, focusing on what matters most now.
4. Realign your priorities as needed. Earlier in my life, my children were a high priority. Friends were a lower priority. Community service wasn’t even on the list. Now that has changed. This is natural. You have to adjust your priorities as circumstances change. Be flexible—while remaining true to your values.
5. Review your life plan weekly. It is not a document you finish and then file away. The key to implementation is visibility. You must review your life plan on a regular basis. Daily is too much for me. Monthly is not frequent enough. In my experience, weekly is just right. I review my life plan as part of my Weekly Review Process.
6. Revise your life plan quarterly. Plans are only useful if they are relevant. Your circumstances can change quickly. Your action plans must shift accordingly. That’s why I recommend getting away for a half-day to day-and-a-half on a quarterly basis. Use part of this time to review your life plan and revise it. I refer to this as the Quarterly Review.
7. Reserve time annually for your most important priorities. This has been a huge help to me, particularly as things got crazy. I reserve the week between Christmas an New Years to plan out the coming year. I don’t plan every detail—far from it. But I do put the big rocks in the jar first by scheduling my most important priorities. I have created a tool for this called the Annual Time Block."

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10 Tips For Stepping Into Your Greatness

1. Nobody can dim your light but you.
2. Dialing it down doesn’t really make anyone else feel better. It just makes you feel worse.
3. Confidence and narcissism are not the same thing. Narcissists lack true confidence and overcompensate to make up for the lack.
4. When you step into your greatness, you attract more people than you repel.
5. The confident know they will always land butter side up. Those people take more risks, fall down more often, and wind up shining the brightest.
6.  All you have to do is your best.  Stepping into your greatness doesn’t mean achieving some unattainable benchmark. When you do your best, you let your light shine.
7. Being confident means managing your fear.  When your fears outpower your confidence, you dim your light. Stepping into your greatness requires facing your fears head on and making the choice not to let them rule your decisions any longer.
8. Within your vulnerability lies your strength. Stepping into your greatness doesn’t mean tooting your own horn. Sometimes your greatest strength lies in your flaws, frailties, and foibles.
9. It’s okay to brag. Yes, your vulnerabilities can be your strengths, but it’s also okay to shout your triumphs from the rooftops. Imagine if we all gave ourselves permission to say 'I rocked it today!' What if we started every conversation by asking 'What’s awesome in your life?' Wouldn’t life be grand?
10. You can’t claim credit for your greatness. Within this wisdom lies your humility. We are all vessels for the Divine to shine through us when we get our egos out of the way. Why would you want to dim your light when it’s merely Divine light shining through you?"

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7 THINGS I KNOW ABOUT ACTIVE LETTING GO:

1. There's always more to let go of. It's endless and it's beautiful because it's endless. Just surrender to the endlessness of it.

2. Typically, letting go is painful – in varying degrees, from wince to damn near crippling, it's gonna hurt. Fact.

3. Hard leads to soft. Imagine ripping off a bandage; dropping an heirloom off at the thrift store and resolving to not go back to get it; kissing him or her that way for the last time and tearing yourself away because you need to grow in the other direction; boarding the plane with a heavy heart… When you steel the nerve to be tough enough to let go, you crossover over a sacred line. And on the other side, Tenderness is waiting for you, and She's very proud and she's very encouraging.

4. Baby steps are okay, but you can't avoid the pain that surfaces when you commit to the letting go. (See, you just can't get around the pain part.)

5. From the mundane to the monumental, letting go hurts. Always has, always will. (Yes, a repeat of #2. It bears repeating.)

6. Acceptance is medicine. When you just accept that the pain of letting go is part of the deal, your let-go wound will heal faster.

7. Out of, say, 123 people I've talked to about letting go of all sorts of stuff - material and emotional - 88% of them wished they'd done it sooner, and 97% of them have no regrets whatsoever. Only 3% are still confused. When you let go, the odds are in your favour."