Tag: finances

Reframing goal setting

One of the books I have been reading is called “Ask and It Is Given” by Esther and Jerry Hicks and in that book, they have exercises for helping you manifest what you want with the law of attraction. One of the exercises they advocate is basically framed as:

I want “something” because “what it provides you”.

The idea is to list what you want and why for various categories of your life such as material things, career, relationships, health, etc. So naturally, I start listing shit I want such as a bigger house, a new car, a boat, and some gym equipment. Why did I jump right to listing the stuff I wanted instead of experiences, new behaviors, or being more mindful? I think much of this is the programming we receive from society and the media. Take Instagram for instance and you see all of these posts with expensive cars, extravagant homes, and private jets. We are literally being programmed to think first of acquiring more shit, when we know in our hearts the satisfaction from all this stuff has but a momentary effect on our happiness then it is off to buy the next piece of crap we don’t really want or need.

Now I’m pissed off for wasting my precious time dreaming about shit I don’t need when the things I really want have little do anything in the material realm. So it occurred to me that I needed to reframe the way I think about setting goals and what I really want in life. Let me be clear I’m not saying material things shouldn’t be on your list, but there is a price you pay for pursuing those things often at the expense of goals such as cultivating a more mindful existence. Let’s say we flip this paradigm upside down and our goal categories become something like this:

  1. Mindfulness
  2. Relationships
  3. Experiences
  4. Knowledge
  5. Health
  6. Career
  7. Finances
  8. Material Things

What the hell, now we have some really worthwhile things to focus on, things that bring happiness and personal development, and guess what items one through five either cost nothing or are relatively inexpensive. This revelation came to me after I had completed that law of attraction exercise and still felt uninspired. I need to go back now and rework my list to look something like the one above and dig deep into each category and focus on those things that will really enhance my life and not just drain my bank account.

To be continued………..

Namaste


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Personal freedom

FreedomQuote_Robert Frost.jpg

I have spent the past 35 years working in information technology after graduating from college. My career has been a good one, where I have had a number of different roles, which made it interesting for many years. Even though things have been good I would say that my interest level has steadily declined over the past 5 years, and I began searching for other ways to express myself. I found blogging and Twitter a couple of years ago and this has helped me find a way to express myself, but I was always looking for a way to increase what I am calling my personal freedom. If you are like me the thought of spending another 10 years in a cubicle has become totally unacceptable. Lately I feel like the plot just keeps playing itself out over and over, and it feels like no matter who I work for I am just reinventing the wheel over and over again.

Personal freedom as I define it, is about having a choice on how I spend my time on this earth. To have personal freedom means having more control over your destiny including how you spend your time, who you spend your time with, and overcoming the limits inherent in working for someone else. It may be that it took me longer to realize what I wanted because I was learning, making a great living, and getting enough fulfillment from what I did that I felt no great need to make a change, but that satisfaction has dissipated over the past few years . I’m sure the fact that I am getting a little older was also an influence, as I began to realize that time increases in value when it becomes more limited. I guess we all just reach a tipping point in our lives, when it is more difficult to stay the course than to choose a new one. If you feel like each day you go into work that it seems to be sucking the life out of you, and you count the hours and minutes until it is time to leave, and you are thouroughly uniterested in the endless corporate babble; then you are getting close to that magical momement where you are ready to make a change. I’m not advocating that you quit your job tomorrow, but if you feel like I do, you know that you need to make a plan to transition out of the drudgery that may be your existence and find some personal freedom.

In my next post, I would like to talk about some things that I have been doing, and how you can set some goals and take action to go from dreaming about personal freedom to actually realizing it.

Namaste