Meaning Portfolio

One easy step in choosing how to create meaning in your life is to write down a list of the areas in your life that you find hold significance for you. It may look like the following:

• Family
• Career
• Health
• Painting
• Meditation
• Volunteering

What does your list look like? Take a minute and develop one for yourself.

Once you have a list you can think about which areas have  Meaning Goals and which do not. Then you can start planning your Meaning Investments.

When you are done you have a view of how you plan to invest time (and therefore meaning) in your life.

Here is an example for my life. I set up my spreadsheet to give me 8 hours a day for sleep. I lumped in my coaching with my normal day job as career.

	PORTFOLIO
Areas Of Significance	Meaning Investments (in Hrs.)	Meaning Goals
Family	20	College Driving Relationship
Friends	10
Health	10	Eat well (1900 Cals.) Exercise
Writing	15
Meditation	7
Career	50	Support Family Goals

Meaning Investments

Once we have discovered an area of significance in our lives, we can develop Meaning Goals. Given a particular goal, we need to decide how much investment we need to make (in terms of time, money, energy, etc.) to achieve the goal. It is important to get the right balance of investment for the goal. We want to invest enough to achieve the goal, but we may not want to invest more than is required. For instance if my goal for health is to lose twenty pounds this year then I may need to invest an hour a day in exercise. However, I may not want to invest four hours a day because that may pull from my ability to invest in other areas as well.

Some areas will have no goal. You may decide that every minute spent in meditation results in joy and peace. If you have three hours a day free, then spend one on exercise and two in meditation.

Some things to ponder:

• What does your meaning pie look like?
• What meaning goals do you have?
• What is your currency? Time, Money?
• If you have a meaning goal, how do you know when you are done?

Meaning Goals

When we take the time to inquire into how we create meaning in our lives, we discover (if we are lucky and/or persistent) an area or two that hold significance for us. In some of these areas we may derive relevance by just participating in an activity. An example of this might be camping. We are joyous merely by being-in-nature.

However, sometimes, we invest meaning in achieving particular goals. For instance a writer may have a goal of writing a novel. This goal may include publication. This is termed a “Meaning Goal.”

It is important to identify our meaning goals because they can give us direction, a path forward, even entire projects to work on. By looking at our meaning goals we can begin to plan our Meaning Investments.

Creating Meaning: The Artist’s Way

Colleen Blackard creates meaning in her life by creating the universe from the tip of a ball point pen.

Exploration: Embracing Distraction

Some people find A.D.D. to be an affliction, but I think of it as a life style to be embraced. Why does this work for me? I am an explorer. I create meaning in my life by charting new territories, this may mean hiking, kayaking, or surfing the web. One day I read Sartre, the next a textbook on biochemistry. In between it all I am developing maps from one place to the next and noting connections that may turn out to be of benefit.  Of course there is a balance to be struck between following new pathways and being totally scattered. Here are three questions to consider.

• Do you complete your projects? If your answer is no, then you may need to develop habits for noting areas to investigate. If you are not worried about losing a connection that occurs to you then you can return to your current activity right away and stay on it to completion.
• Do you spend most of your time context switching? Many people think they are multi-tasking when in reality there are always in-between tasks rather than making progress in any of them.
• Do you spend the first 10 minutes of each business meeting coming up to speed? This may be a hint that you have too many items on your plate at once, and you may be pulling your colleagues down. Only attend meetings where you are ready to add value on minute one.

If you find that you do complete projects and do add value in meetings and spend more time on task than not (even if the number of endeavors is high) then you may be managing the different threads of your life just fine. In this case you are a functioning trail blazer. If not, a few tricks of the trade can help you embrace your inner explorer.

Anti-Patterns: Choosing our behavior

In the last post I talked about removing habitual forms in our life, and the importance of awareness in spotting our ways as they arise. The point was to see the behavior we don’t want, and then actively pick a different action.

In pattern replacement the idea is to swap one pattern for another. Analyze the form that holds us back and create a new activity that achieves our goal. For example if you are trying to lose weight, look at your eating habits. Do you tend to eat lots of salty snacks? Do you drink soda at work? Do you have a mid evening snack of cookies and then a late night snack of ice cream? It can be very difficult to make the right choices at the moment of hunger.

Rather than stare down that pint of Haagen-Dazs at 10:30 pm, you can set yourself up for success at earlier points.

• Replace the early evening snack, with a fast paced early evening walk for thirty minutes. This will burn calories rather than ingest them. Further, exercise reduces the desire for snack food.
• Don’t buy the food you don’t want to eat, rather replace that buying pattern with a buying pattern that supports your goal. Buy fresh fruit, the kinds you really love, and will gladly eat. It is easier to beat a craving at the grocery store on Sunday morning than in the freezer on Thursday night.
• Soda at work breaks the cardinal rule; don’t drink your calories. Drink water or unsweetened ice tea. Diet soda has been linked to weight gain (Swithers & Davidson, Science Daily 2008)
• Replace late night television with sleep. It will boost your energy, enable more time to eat a good breakfast or get in a morning walk. If this means losing a show you don’t want to miss, invest in DVR.

As with Pattern Removal, Pattern Replacement is about choices. We have the power to change our own lives. Nobody else has can or will do it for you. Practice awareness, see your actions, own them, and make your wise choices.

Awareness and Pattern Removal

The key to removing patterns is awareness. We need to be able to recognize our behaviors as they occur. For instance if we feel that we are not good enough, we must see these feelings of inadequacy as they arise. One tool is to recognize the effects on your body. Does your face become flushed? Do your shoulders droop? Do you lower your gaze? Another device is developing the intent each morning to become aware of the moment that you fall into the pattern. A watchdog that barks at the right time can signal a need for a better choice.