Saturday, July 18, 2009

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

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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.