Designing My Ideal Life By Raymond Aaron
Transcript
Designing My Ideal Life™ By Raymond Aaron
The Monthly Mentor™ Program, a division of The Raymond Aaron Group™ 2 - 9225 Leslie Street, Richmond Hill ON Canada L4B 3H6 1-888-50-goals [email protected] www.MonthlyMentor.com © 2000 – 2009 The Raymond Aaron Group™
DESIGNING MY IDEAL LIFE™ A Lifetime of Mentored Progress By Raymond Aaron Hello. This is Raymond Aaron and I welcome you to one of the MOST important presentations you’re going to hear because it’s entitled, Designing My Ideal Life™. What could be more important then designing your own ideal life? The subtitle is, “A Lifetime of Mentored Progress”. What I’ve noticed in my life is the absolute necessity to having it mentored. Some of you know I have a mentor in my spiritual life, I have a relationship mentor, I have a weight loss mentor and I have a business and life balance mentor. When I decided to run a marathon the first thing I did was get a marathon mentor. It is the way that I run my life. It is the way that I ENCOURAGE ALL my Monthly Mentor™ Members to run YOUR life. That is, instead of going out and attempting to do something yourself, find a master, find someone who is SO excellent in that particular regard that working with you and helping you can give you a far greater ability to achieve that success. It doesn’t have to be some very expensive international expert; it could be your neighbor who is an extraordinarily organized person. Call in that mentor in order to help you have a more organized kitchen, office or filing system. In other words, what I do in my life and what I am teaching in this program called, Designing My Ideal Life™ is to seek as the first step in any task, A MENTOR. Instead of when you want to clean your desk, what I PROPOSE is that if you wish to clean your desk, find someone who is completely organized. You might say, “Oh my gosh it may only take me 5 minutes to clean my desk but it may take me an hour to find somebody who can clean it. It doesn’t make sense”. The problem is if you are not organized, if you would traditionally have a messy desk and, even if it got cleaned, it would become messy again. Then the problem is the several minutes or the half hour it would take you to clean your desk is practically wasted, because within a short period of time your desk, your filing system, tax receipts and everything else is going to get completely messed again. What you NEED is somebody organized, who will set up a system and then continually monitor that system and run that system for you so that it STAYS neat. My home is neat, my office is neat, my relationships are organized, and my marathon training is coming. I’m spiritually balanced because I keep going to my spiritual mentor and asking advice. I have life and balance mentors so that I can keep running my life and my business in balance. Instead of attempting to do it myself, I find the masters. Reciprocally, in an area in which I am a master, an area in which I know how to run a business well, for example, people come to me with a question that they’re in a complete quandary about and I simply know the answer. I know EXACTLY what they should do. Why? Because I know about ten different solutions to that problem and because I know THEM specifically I choose the one of the ten that is best for their needs.
Designing My Ideal Life™
1
Well, let’s think of it from their point of view. They may not know ten solutions, they may actually not know ANY solutions, or they may know one solution but not necessarily the best one for them, and so you can see either from using a mentor or if you’re a mentor and somebody else is using you, you can see the validity of the mentored approach. However, simply saying you should have a mentor isn’t sufficient. What we have created, which actually took a great deal of work, thinking and designing over the last several months, is this program called, Designing My Ideal Life™. The purpose is to have a personalized lifetime system to continually get the most out of life. I want to discuss each PORTION of this because it’s so important to have a PERSONALIZED lifetime system. Let’s talk about this. I am not going to dump on you a mass-produced procedure that you have to follow as if you’re a cog in a wheel. ABSOLUTELY not. It is a PERSONALIZED system. When we go through this PROCEDURE, you will notice you will be personalizing it to yourself. When I say a certain thing should be done every day or every week you could say to yourself, “Aha, I think I’ll do that every Friday or twice a week or I’m only going to do that once every 10 days or two weeks”. You will be personalizing it for yourself as we go. It’s a lifetime system. This is not something you do ONLY while you’re a member of The Monthly Mentor™ Program, or only for the first month or two that you’re in the program, or only for the NEXT month or two after you’ve heard this and got all excited about it. It is a LIFETIME system that I do for my entire lifetime. If you want to start to have the kinds of success and balance I have in my life, if THAT’S of interest to you, if I am your mentor, this is the system that I follow. You might say, “How can this possibly be the system you follow when you told me you just developed it?” The answer is it is the system that I followed but I’ve been doing it unconsciously; I’ve been doing it WITHOUT awareness. After a great deal of work on behalf of myself, my staff, a consultant we retained and a graphic artist, I’ve been able to bring it from my unconscious, from my habitual world, up to my conscious world. Now that I can SEE what it is that I do, I’m actually able to follow my own procedures a lot better and a lot clearer. You will have a personalized LIFETIME system to CONTINUALLY get the best out of life. We’re not talking about if you have a particular problem now, how to crack that problem and then you say, “Ah it’s done. Thank you very much Raymond, I’ve used your system it works. Good-bye”. No, no it’s to CONTINUALLY get the most out of life. We all have issues for all of our life. The only time people have no issues are the people who are already in a cemetery. They’ve got no issues. But for all of the rest of us living, we have problems, we have issues and we have concerns that come up. There are obstacles that we face no matter who we are, no matter what our income is, no matter how happily or unhappily we are married. There are problems, issues and obstacles that will come up for our entire life and we need to CONTINUALLY solve them, enjoy them, get the most out of them if they’re good, get rid of them if they’re bad. This is a system for continually getting the MOST out of life. Some people go through life having a reasonable life, or an average life, or a good life or a mediocre quality of life. I don’t WISH that on you. I see the EXHILARATION that I feel from getting the MOST out of my life. I don’t want to be so pompous to say, “I get the MOST out of
Designing My Ideal Life™
2
life”, but I have a big life. LOTS of things happen to me and with me and for me. I have MANY things that occur, DEEP relationships that I enjoy, and wonderful businesses that I run, incredible staff I get to work with and MAGNIFICANT clients that I get to see on a regular basis. I have a BIG, FULL, HAPPY EXPLOSIVE enjoyable life. So, the purpose is to have a PERSONALIZED lifetime system to CONTINUALLY get the most out of life. I hope that that purpose has intrigued you to pay really close attention to what we’re going to be learning in this session. Hopefully you’re going to pay close attention to the GRAPHICS as well so you can get the picture.
The Four Big Blobs The first thing I want you to look at is ‘The four big blobs.’ I don’t know a more technical term so we’ll just enjoy life and call it a ‘blob’. The first blob is: 1. ‘The Big Picture’ In ‘The Big Picture’ what we’re going to be looking at is what is the overall direction of YOUR specific life. Not necessarily the direction that it’s going in right now, but rather what is the grand vision of your life? What is it that you WANT your life to be, not what it happens to be at the moment. So, the purpose of ‘The Big Picture’ is to give you the grand vision of the specific life you want to have for the entire upcoming year. Once you HAVE that vision you then move down to the next blob, which is called, 2. ‘Ideas in Waiting’ The purpose of ‘Ideas in Waiting’ is to be a WAREHOUSE of BIG dreams and little things you may want to work on in your future. Let’s understand this. The first thing you do in the ‘First Blob’ is get a BIG picture of your LIFE and the coming year. The direction you set for yourself. Now that you’ve set that direction, immediately ideas will come to you as to what you want to do. Some of them are going to be HUGE dreams and some of them will be little ‘to do’ items. The ideas in the ‘Waiting’ blob; the place where those ideas, big and little, are warehoused so you never have to worry about whether you are going to remember them. They’re warehoused there. You now have a big picture and we have a warehouse of ideas. 3. ‘Producing Results’ We go into the third blob, which people think is the most important, and that’s the ‘Producing Results’ section or blob. But, it’s not the most important. You can’t just go out and randomly produce results. That’s indeed what people do when they don’t have a mentored life. They may jog two or three days this week and then they’ll forget to jog for the next month. Maybe they’ve always wanted to write a book, so they’ll write another page or two of their book. Maybe they’ll go out to a restaurant and eat too much, and they’ll gain a few pounds. So they’ll be producing all these somewhat random results, and their life won’t seem to have a DIRECTION, it won’t be
Designing My Ideal Life™
3
going where they want it to because they’re just looking specifically or shortsightedly at the little things that they’re doing. Producing results needs to be seen in context of the big picture. Once you get down to producing results as the THIRD step, then it’s completely consistent because once you’ve designed what your year and your life wants to be, and you’ve got all these ideas in waiting, then you simply SELECT from the ideas you have in waiting, the actual ones that you’re going to produce that month. 4. ‘Acknowledgment’ Lastly, and this I think is actually is the most important one, is the fourth and final blob and that’s ‘Acknowledgment’. Don’t you dare think you can achieve results, and that results themselves are going to be sufficient. No, we are human and as humans we personally need to be acknowledged. We need to acknowledge OURSELF, and we need to have others acknowledge us, AND we to acknowledge others. All of these must occur. I have heard that acknowledgment from the outside shouldn’t be necessary as long as we feel strength within ourselves. I’ve heard that. It’s a wonderful fantasy. I don’t buy it. In my life and in the lives of every single person I know, as strong as they are, as strong as I am, as high in self-esteem as they are and high in self-esteem as I am, I LIKE to have other people notice that I’ve done something. I LIKE people to come back to me and say, “Raymond thank you for doing that specific thing for me. I like that. I want that. I feel uplifted by that and I think so does everybody”. So this ‘fantasy’ as I call it somewhat derogatorily that you don’t need any acknowledgment from the outside, may be some wonderful grand master can do that but I can’t. I’ve noticed that I don’t know a single person who can achieve that. I feel we need it. Once you’ve produced a result, you need to acknowledge yourself. Yes, that’s part of it. By filling out a form in which we remind ourselves of the successes we’ve had so we can pat ourselves on the back. There’s also an opportunity for others to acknowledge us, and there’s the reminder of how important it is to acknowledge other people. Those are the four major aspects or blobs of Designing My Ideal Life™. 1. Overview – The Big Picture. 2. Ideas In Waiting. 3. Producing Results. The subtitle of that is “A structured way to get what I want every single month’. 4. Acknowledgment, which is a celebration and rejuvenation. You have the vision of the four steps: 1. The Big Picture 2. Ideas In Waiting
Designing My Ideal Life™
4
3. Producing Results 4. Acknowledgment
Let’s go DEEPER into those ‘four blobs’. Now that you have that in mind let’s go DEEPER and deeper into those four blobs. The first thing I want you to do is draw your attention to the arrows. You will see that the arrows on the left start going down, giving you the impression that you move from ‘The Big Picture’ to the ‘Ideas In Waiting’. Once you have a warehouse of them you move down to ‘Producing Results’ because you choose from those ‘Ideas In Waiting’ the results you wish to produce. Lastly, you move down from the ‘Producing Results’ to the ‘Acknowledgment’ section, where you feel good about what it is that you’ve done. Then you notice it’s not a one-way street that the arrows on the other side start going up and what can that possibly mean? From ‘Acknowledgment’ the arrow goes up to ‘Producing Results’ and what that means is once you’ve acknowledged yourself and feel good about achieving a particular result, it’s as if you’re standing on a new mountaintop and from there you can see other mountaintops. It immediately gives you an idea of what you want to produce next month. If you just organized your entire office, you then might want to organize your garage because you can now see the beauty, joy, relief and the clarity that comes from doing one thing, so you can move on to the next one. You may have just acknowledged your entire staff in a really nice way, and seen the benefit and joy and decided ‘Gee I would like to acknowledge all of my suppliers, clients, my best salesman or my family’. So you move up from ‘Acknowledgment’ to ‘Producing Results’ by SEEING the beauty and joy of what you’ve done, and wanting to do more of it. Now the arrow goes even up further from ‘Producing Results’ back up to ‘Ideas In Waiting’. What could that mean? What that means is once you have enjoyed an acknowledgment OR once you’ve produced a certain result in both of those cases they will remind you and twig your memory into realizing there are OTHER things you want to produce in your life but not necessarily this coming month. What do you do? You WAREHOUSE them in the second blob, called ‘Ideas In Waiting’. Lastly, the arrow continued to go up to ‘The Big Picture’. Why is that? How can an ‘Idea In Waiting’, or ‘Producing Result’ or an ‘Acknowledgment’ create a ‘Big Picture?’ The answer is this. We are biofeedback mechanisms. We are not robots that go through life programmed once, and we keep doing that task for our life, we are a biofeedback. We do something, and we get a response from the universe. We do something else, and we get a response from the universe, and each of these responses or feedbacks from the universe teaches us something and slightly changes us as a person. As we get slightly changed as a person, low and behold by the end of the year, our ideas actually have changed a bit. Maybe our major mission in life, like for me to be a teacher, maybe that doesn’t change, maybe that’s going to stay for many many decades, but OTHER little aspects of it will definitely change. So it’s a circle.
Designing My Ideal Life™
5
From ‘The Big Picture’, we get ideas. From ‘Ideas In Waiting’ we ‘Produce Results’. Once we’ve produced results we ‘Acknowledge’ ourselves and that gives us ideas to produce MORE results immediately, or ‘Ideas In Waiting’ for results we’re going to produce in the future, which gives us feedback of what our life should be like NEXT year, and next year and next year. We keep making corrections and keep making it better and better. This is so uplifting and exciting to me. This is TRULY designing your ideal life, a lifetime of mentored progress. The next point I would like to draw your attention to is the ‘frequency’. You will notice that to the bottom right of each of the blobs there is a suggested frequency. I want to review that right now. 1. ‘The Big Picture’ I suggest you do it ANNUALLY. On our calendar, the year traditionally starts on January 1st. So, a very good time to do ‘The Big Picture’ is November or December. The reason I include November is sometimes when people set a goal to review their entire ‘Big Picture’ in December or mid-December with all the festivities of the year-end, it sometimes slops over into January and then you don’t FEEL as good starting your year, because it doesn’t start with the cleanliness of having ‘The Big Picture’ done. You may want to start in November and have it DONE by the end of November or early December, before all the parties and festivities start. 2. ‘Ideas In Waiting’ I suggest you do that QUARTERLY. Every three months when you sit down, for example, with the Future Generator™ forms in front of you, six of them, one for each of the six pathways, you will remember what you’ve achieved and what you’ve been thinking of doing, and it will spur all kinds of ideas in your mind as to FUTURE things you would like to do, some big and some little. Every quarter is a GOOD frequency to do this. You can do it more often if you wish, but it’s probably not necessary. Every year you re-assess your ‘Big Picture’. Every quarter you update your WAREHOUSE of ‘Ideas In Waiting’ and then EVERY month you actually produce monthly results. In the Monthly Mentor™ program there are six, as you know, six pathways – M A I N L Y™. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Cleaning ‘Messes’ Making ‘Acknowledgments’ ‘Increasing our Wealth’ Doing Something ‘New’ like in the new economy ‘Learning’ something ‘Doing Something just for ‘Yourself’
Each month, in order to create a balanced life, we move forward in each of those six categories. Finally, I suggest on a daily or weekly basis you set aside some time to ‘Acknowledge’ yourself. Most of us do not do this. We think somehow it’s wrong to think of ourselves in a good way. We think we’re not supposed to notice what we, ourselves, do. Yes, WE ARE. We are
Designing My Ideal Life™
6
supposed to notice what we do. We’re supposed to take great pride in what we do. It feels WONDERFUL to know within ourselves that we’ve done something wonderful, yet sometimes people DEPRIVE themselves of that joy, because they don’t take the time to notice what they’ve done. Many times in The Monthly Mentor™ Program I will ask my clients to sit down, take 5 minutes, and record the achievements they’ve had in the last week, or the last month or at the beginning of the year. It’s your choice as to the time period over which you want to notice your achievements. What happens every single time, EVERY single time, is that people will put up their hand, or e-mail or phone me and say, “Oh Raymond, thank you for suggesting that I take five minutes to think of what I had done. I hadn’t realized I had done this. I completed this. For several years I wanted to get a certain thing done and I did GET it done. I got all that done in the last week. I hadn’t REALIZED it was such a wonderfully productive week and I had gotten so much accomplished. I should do this every day or I should sit down every Sunday night or sit down on Friday before I leave work and DO this to feel good about myself”. I say, “YES, exactly, you should” and I do, and many of my colleagues and friends do, and when we do, it has a wonderful wonderful impact and feeling for us. I suggest you redo your ‘Big Picture’ annually. In The Monthly Mentor™ Program, you will be mentored, and reminded and instructed to do it annually. I suggest you do the ‘Ideas In Waiting’ quarterly. In The Monthly Mentor™ Program, again, you will be mentored, reminded and instructed to do it quarterly. ‘Producing Results’. You will be mentored, reminded and instructed in The Monthly Mentor™ Program to complete your forms, the main one being the MAINLY™ form and the little Mini MAINLY™ form in order to instruct the universe as to what it is you want to produce by the end of that month. Then I suggest that daily or weekly, you ‘Acknowledge’ yourself. That’s the frequency. Do I always do it? Am I absolutely perfect in doing ‘The Big Picture’ every year? I am, I do ‘The Big Picture’ every year. Am I absolutely perfect in doing me, personally, the ‘Ideas In Waiting’ every single quarter? Not exactly. Sometimes it’s 2 months. Sometimes it’s 3 or 4 months but in that range. ‘Producing Results’ monthly? YES. EVERY SINGLE month I sit down and my Monthly Mentor™ members sit down and we record our goals. ‘Acknowledgment’. Do I do it every single day? No, sometimes I do but I’d sure like to do it at least once a week. Of all of those if you start doing the ‘Acknowledgment’ weekly or daily you’ll be startled, you will be startled at the changes within you. We’ve looked at what each blob means. We’ve looked at the arrows down and up to see how the flow works and we’ve looked at the frequency. I would like to now draw your attention to the wording within the arrows. You see when we go down from ‘Big Picture’ to ‘Ideas In Waiting’ to ‘Producing Results’ to ‘Acknowledgment’
Designing My Ideal Life™
7
basically what you’re doing is creating a focused mentored journey. It’s your OWN because you decide what it is that’s important to you, and what ideas are in waiting and what the results you are going to produce, and to acknowledge yourself. It is your OWN FOCUS. ‘Focus’ means it just doesn’t OCCUR. You don’t just do whatever comes along. You’re focusing on what it is you want mentored. Why mentored? Because you didn’t create these forms. Your mentor, if you’ve chosen me, has created these forms for you, and will remind you annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily to do it. It’s a FOCUSED mentored journey. When I say, ‘journey’ I don’t want you to think of it as a classroom because although there are some aspects of classroom in it, because you are learning, it’s a journey. We’re all in it together. Many times Monthly Mentor™ Members will contact me and give me some feedback, and that will twig my thinking in order to develop a program for YOU, so we’re learning together, we’re walking TOGETHER on this journey. There is no one who is better or worse then anyone else, we’re walking together. I may have some skills that allow me to be your mentor in this regard but you have many skills that are far more advanced than ME, in which case, I can learn enormously from you. We’re just journeying through this life together. As we go down the page it is your own focused mentored journey. What is it as we go up the page? It is your owned ENHANCED REFOCUSED mentored journey. What does that mean? It’s your own, of course, it’s your own because when you acknowledge yourself for producing a wonderful result that gives you an idea to produce another wonderful result it’s you, YOU’RE designing that YOURSELF. You’re choosing the things you want to produce. It is your ENHANCED journey because when you get the joy of producing the focused results you want going down the page, and then you decide you want even MORE of it, you now have an ENHANCED and REFOCUSED that means, a more CLEARLY focused, more beautifully focused, more importantly focused mentored journey. I should even say, ‘re-mentored’ or ‘enhanced’ mentored because as you proceed through this, what I suspect will happen to you because it happened to so many of my Monthly Mentor™ members that they say, “Oh Raymond, I’ve enjoyed being mentored by you so much this particular lesson that you taught or that particular lesson that you taught made such a huge impact on me that I want to now have a mentor in lots of areas in my life”. EXACTLY. That’s exactly how I do it and exactly what this form is intended to help you do. We’re now at the stage where we’re going to look inside each blob in order to look at the PROCEDURES that have been developed by The Monthly Mentor™ Program for you. Within ‘The Big Picture’, this is the first blob you do annually, there are three specific procedures. 1. Annual Love Letters™ A list of your current loves. The purpose of it is so you are AWARE of your own loves so that you have balance and fulfillment in your own life. Many people say they want to do what they love but when I ask them what they love they say, “What I love, what I’m good at” and maybe they’ll think of 1 or 2 items but they won’t have a written list. There is a SPECIFIC way. You can’t just sit down and make a list of
Designing My Ideal Life™
8
your loves. It won’t work. When you do the program called, “Annual Love Letters™” you will actually get an uninhibited, uncensored list of your own CURRENT loves. When I say, ‘current loves’ it’s because they CHANGE every year. If you keep a record of your annual loves as I do, you’ll be quite startled in that certain things stay the same, stay constant through your life, and certain things you think will be there forever actually aren’t any longer. ‘Annual Love Letters™’ – you know what you love. 2. My Life Missions™ Preventing regrets and the icon for it, is a tombstone. The purpose of it is so you’re aware of what is truly important in your life so you’ll get what you want this lifetime. This is a very exciting procedure that we do each year in order for you to understand what it is that you really really want to produce this lifetime. I will give you an example for myself. On my tombstone, and I mean somewhat metaphorically now, really what I mean is I want to be known for. I want to be known for being a great teacher and a great dad; I want to be remembered for that. I want to be remembered for being a great teacher that’s what I want. I don’t want people on my deathbed to talk about how many vacations I’ve had or how wealthy I am or how many cars I owned, if I happen to own more than one, that’s really not what’s important. I’ve decided what’s important…when I do my ‘Ideas In Waiting’, ‘Producing Results’ and ‘Acknowledgment’, I look to SEE how consistent they are with the two ultimate goals I have in my life. You can see the importance and see why it’s in ‘The Big Picture’. 3. Annual Backwards Goals™ Finally, and this is a very exciting thing, is the ‘Annual Backwards Goals™’. It’s next year’s goals or the upcoming year’s goals as if already achieved. It’s a funny way to write goals. We write them backwards. We write them as if we’ve already achieved them to plant in our mind the idea that it’s already achieved and once our mind thinks it’s already achieved strangely enough it’s easier to produce it. It’s as if you’re doing it the SECOND time because your mind already thinks you’ve done it the first time. The purpose of the ‘Annual Background Goals™’ is to create a path along which your own monthly efforts are directed towards supporting your annual goals. It’s very exciting. When you put together your ‘Annual Love Letters™’ and your ‘My Life Missions’, that means, the ‘Annual Love Letters™’ and the ‘My Life Missions’ is what you truly want to produce this lifetime you make it annual by completing your ‘Annual
Designing My Ideal Life™
9
Backwards Goals™’ and you now have a ‘Big Picture’ of your life and the upcoming year. Once you do ‘The Big Picture’ you go into the ‘Ideas In Waiting’. There are two forms or procedures in that one. 1. Priority Organizer™ What this does is help you prioritize what it is you want to do. It helps you clarify what’s important and what’s urgent so you know what to do next. Many people are kind of flustered or a bit lost in the life because they have so many things yelling at them. “DO THIS DO THIS DO THIS”. Some are important but not urgent, some are urgent but not important, some are important and urgent, some are neither important nor urgent but they do them. The ‘Priority Organizer’ is a wonderful procedure and a procedure you can use to decide what it is you need to do next taking into account your ‘Big Picture’. 2. Future Generator™ The ‘Future Generator™’ is a just a DELIGHTFUL form that is an inventory of your future ACHIEVEMENTS. Isn’t that a nice way to say it? It’s not an inventory of things to do. It’s an inventory of you FUTURE achievements. You don’t have to do them immediately but you want to record them somewhere so that you never forget them. The purpose is not JUST to help you remember them, it’s so that you never have to worry that you’ll forget them; they’re written down. Any time you get an idea, you rush over to the ‘Future Generator™’, you write it down and then you know you can relax knowing you’ll never forget about it. The purpose of the ‘Future Generator™’ forms is to have a place to record your own ideas as they come to you so that you’ll feel comfortable that you’ll never forget something that you once wanted to work on. We now have ‘The Big Picture’: • • •
Our ‘Loves’ Our ‘Life Missions’ Next Year’s Specific ‘Annual’ Goals
We’ve moved into the ‘Ideas In Waiting’ where we have a ‘Priority Organizer™’ that helps us determine what we should do next and we have SIX pages of ‘Future Generator™’ forms; one page for each of the six Monthly Mentor™ pathways – M A I N L Y™. So, when you record an idea you want to remember you chose the pathway that it’s in. If there are some colleagues of yours that you wanted to send a nice birthday present to, well then, you would write it in the ‘Acknowledgment’ in the ‘Future Generator™’. If there is some tax filing that has always been a ‘Mess’ then you would record it in the ‘Mess’ in the ‘Future Generator™’. Whenever you’re thinking in any month what it is that you want to produce and you say, “I
Designing My Ideal Life™
10
should clean a ‘Mess’” all you do is pull out the ‘Mess’ in the ‘Future Generator™’ and you’ll KNOW the result you want to produce that month. Now, we have moved down to the third blob, which is ‘Producing Results’. The TWO major forms in this one are the MAINLY™ form and its accompanying, Mini MAINLY™. The MAINLY™ form has its purpose to record your own monthly goals in an easy yet powerful way so they actually get achieved, sometimes ‘automagically’. The Mini MAINLY™ form, which is the wallet-size summary of the large MAINLY™ form has, as its purpose, to remind you throughout the month what you wish to achieve. Some people put this in their wallet or purse. They put it in a place where they’re going to bump into it each day or a few times a day. The more times your mind is REMINDED or your memory is JOGGED on the things you want to produce, the greater is the chance that the universe will somehow bend and produce that result for you sometimes magically without appearing to have needed any effort on your own. The two other forms or procedures that are in the ‘Producing Results’ blob are called: 1. The Total Ingredients Process™ 2. Overcoming Obstacles™ They both have as their LARGE intent to help you achieve a difficult goal and do it in two different ways. The ‘Total Ingredients Process™’, which is subtitled, “Achieving Very Tough Goals” is to break down very tough goals into manageable parts so that you have a step-by-step process to know exactly what will help you to complete the goals. It basically turns a very tough goal into a menu or an ingredients list of things that you need. The other procedure for achieving very tough goals is called, ‘Overcoming Obstacles™’, which is subtitled, “Transforming Brakes Into Fuel”. It has as ITS purpose to transform your obstacles into the very thing needed to actually achieve your own very tough goals. So in the blob called, ‘Producing Results’, we have the MAINLY™ and the MiniMAINLY™ form plus we have two totally different ways to help you achieve VERY tough goals that have plagued you for a while.
Recent Successes™ Finally an ‘Acknowledgment’, which is the ‘celebration’ and ‘rejuvenation’ blob there is one beautiful form called, ‘Recent Successes™’ subtitled, “Acknowledging Progress”. It has three important purposes: 1. To note you HAVE achievements so that your self-esteem and self-confidence can rise.
Designing My Ideal Life™
11
2. Acknowledge yourself for your own achievements so you get ADDICTED to the joy of HAVING achievements. If you get addicted to the joy of having achievements you’re going to have more and more and more achievements almost effortlessly. 3. Build on your own achievements so that you have a self-programmed path of getting more of what you want. That is, designing your own ideal life. That is how to create a lifetime of mentored progress. I have a very interesting item of homework for you. Take this form, ‘Designing My Ideal Life™’ and take a specific project you have in your life, whatever it is, a specific project, and start from the top. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Do ‘The Big Picture’, the three programs of ‘The Big Picture’. DO the ‘Ideas In Waiting’. DO the ‘Producing Results’ and then ‘Acknowledge’ yourself for it.
As you MOVE down from the very top to the very bottom you will find that you achieve whatever project you have in mind whatever it is. You might say, “Well if I want to produce a certain result, if I want to train for a marathon, why should I start right at the top in listing my loves then deciding what I want to produce in my life and listing my annual goals in all of the six categories that kind of overhead seems like an AWFUL lot of work just to run a marathon. I should be out jogging”. It may seem so but the reason you haven’t been able to produce that result, whatever it is; organizing your office, running a marathon, or doubling your income, or getting out of a relationship that’s been bothering you, the reason you haven’t been able to DO it is because you’ve been trying to do IT, you’ve been trying to do just that one little isolated thing. You don’t necessarily know how it’s going to fit into your life, how it fits into the BALANCE, overview, and concept and purpose of your entire life. When you start from the top and move down and do the FLOW from ‘The Big Picture’ to the ‘Ideas In Waiting’ to the ‘Producing Results’ to ‘Acknowledgment’, you will find out exactly where you’re stuck. You will find out exactly what you’ve done and haven’t done and how far you’ve gone down on the path. When you find out where you’re stuck, you can then work at that point and break through BREAK THROUGH the logjam, and get down to the bottom and ACKNOWLEDGE yourself, and WOW what a flood of excitement will come when you acknowledge yourself for having done that difficult job. And then the arrows start moving up. You start getting ideas for other results you want to produce, other ideas you want to put in waiting and it gives you a new and clearer picture for the next year of ‘The Big Picture’ in your life. There is another piece of homework that you may want to attempt, and that is, “this is what a mentored life looks like.” What I do is teach people how to have a mentored life but YOU have
Designing My Ideal Life™
12
your own business. Whatever business you’re in, sometimes you’re in business, sometimes you’re doing a major charity, and there are people who volunteer their time in a charitable organization. Whatever it is that you devote your life and your time to, your business or a charity, see if you can DESIGN that business or charity in the same kind of flowchart that I’ve done here in order to see what YOUR business looks like. To see what your PERSONAL work is in your life. What are the steps of the personal work in your life and how do they flow into each other and what is it that you need to do in YOUR business or your charitable work annually, quarterly, monthly and daily? What are the different aspects? What are the different steps? Break it down. Notice what are the specific aspects you like and don’t like, and delegate what you don’t like and do more of what you do like. You don’t even have a chance to see the overview unless it’s written down. The first item of homework is USE this program, Designing My Ideal Life™ in order to achieve any project you specifically have, and also see if you can design you OWN business or charitable work according to this. Also, please actually DO the work that it suggests. Do those three steps ‘annually’. Do those two steps ‘quarterly’. Do those four steps ‘monthly’ and do that one step ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’ and WATCH what happens to your life. I wish you the best of success. I ACTUALLY do these. They’ve not come from a book I’ve read or some theory. They’ve come from inside me. They come from what I do. Many of my students, my mentored students, are already doing this but not with as much clarity as they can. NOW we have this beautiful graphic to support us. I thank you and I wish you the GREATEST of success in designing your own ideal life so that you can have a lifetime of mentored progress. Thank you.
Raymond
Designing My Ideal Life™
13
Designing My Ideal Life™ By Raymond Aaron
The Monthly Mentor™ Program, a division of The Raymond Aaron Group™ 2 - 9225 Leslie Street, Richmond Hill ON Canada L4B 3H6 1-888-50-goals [email protected] www.MonthlyMentor.com © 2000 – 2009 The Raymond Aaron Group™
DESIGNING MY IDEAL LIFE™ A Lifetime of Mentored Progress By Raymond Aaron Hello. This is Raymond Aaron and I welcome you to one of the MOST important presentations you’re going to hear because it’s entitled, Designing My Ideal Life™. What could be more important then designing your own ideal life? The subtitle is, “A Lifetime of Mentored Progress”. What I’ve noticed in my life is the absolute necessity to having it mentored. Some of you know I have a mentor in my spiritual life, I have a relationship mentor, I have a weight loss mentor and I have a business and life balance mentor. When I decided to run a marathon the first thing I did was get a marathon mentor. It is the way that I run my life. It is the way that I ENCOURAGE ALL my Monthly Mentor™ Members to run YOUR life. That is, instead of going out and attempting to do something yourself, find a master, find someone who is SO excellent in that particular regard that working with you and helping you can give you a far greater ability to achieve that success. It doesn’t have to be some very expensive international expert; it could be your neighbor who is an extraordinarily organized person. Call in that mentor in order to help you have a more organized kitchen, office or filing system. In other words, what I do in my life and what I am teaching in this program called, Designing My Ideal Life™ is to seek as the first step in any task, A MENTOR. Instead of when you want to clean your desk, what I PROPOSE is that if you wish to clean your desk, find someone who is completely organized. You might say, “Oh my gosh it may only take me 5 minutes to clean my desk but it may take me an hour to find somebody who can clean it. It doesn’t make sense”. The problem is if you are not organized, if you would traditionally have a messy desk and, even if it got cleaned, it would become messy again. Then the problem is the several minutes or the half hour it would take you to clean your desk is practically wasted, because within a short period of time your desk, your filing system, tax receipts and everything else is going to get completely messed again. What you NEED is somebody organized, who will set up a system and then continually monitor that system and run that system for you so that it STAYS neat. My home is neat, my office is neat, my relationships are organized, and my marathon training is coming. I’m spiritually balanced because I keep going to my spiritual mentor and asking advice. I have life and balance mentors so that I can keep running my life and my business in balance. Instead of attempting to do it myself, I find the masters. Reciprocally, in an area in which I am a master, an area in which I know how to run a business well, for example, people come to me with a question that they’re in a complete quandary about and I simply know the answer. I know EXACTLY what they should do. Why? Because I know about ten different solutions to that problem and because I know THEM specifically I choose the one of the ten that is best for their needs.
Designing My Ideal Life™
1
Well, let’s think of it from their point of view. They may not know ten solutions, they may actually not know ANY solutions, or they may know one solution but not necessarily the best one for them, and so you can see either from using a mentor or if you’re a mentor and somebody else is using you, you can see the validity of the mentored approach. However, simply saying you should have a mentor isn’t sufficient. What we have created, which actually took a great deal of work, thinking and designing over the last several months, is this program called, Designing My Ideal Life™. The purpose is to have a personalized lifetime system to continually get the most out of life. I want to discuss each PORTION of this because it’s so important to have a PERSONALIZED lifetime system. Let’s talk about this. I am not going to dump on you a mass-produced procedure that you have to follow as if you’re a cog in a wheel. ABSOLUTELY not. It is a PERSONALIZED system. When we go through this PROCEDURE, you will notice you will be personalizing it to yourself. When I say a certain thing should be done every day or every week you could say to yourself, “Aha, I think I’ll do that every Friday or twice a week or I’m only going to do that once every 10 days or two weeks”. You will be personalizing it for yourself as we go. It’s a lifetime system. This is not something you do ONLY while you’re a member of The Monthly Mentor™ Program, or only for the first month or two that you’re in the program, or only for the NEXT month or two after you’ve heard this and got all excited about it. It is a LIFETIME system that I do for my entire lifetime. If you want to start to have the kinds of success and balance I have in my life, if THAT’S of interest to you, if I am your mentor, this is the system that I follow. You might say, “How can this possibly be the system you follow when you told me you just developed it?” The answer is it is the system that I followed but I’ve been doing it unconsciously; I’ve been doing it WITHOUT awareness. After a great deal of work on behalf of myself, my staff, a consultant we retained and a graphic artist, I’ve been able to bring it from my unconscious, from my habitual world, up to my conscious world. Now that I can SEE what it is that I do, I’m actually able to follow my own procedures a lot better and a lot clearer. You will have a personalized LIFETIME system to CONTINUALLY get the best out of life. We’re not talking about if you have a particular problem now, how to crack that problem and then you say, “Ah it’s done. Thank you very much Raymond, I’ve used your system it works. Good-bye”. No, no it’s to CONTINUALLY get the most out of life. We all have issues for all of our life. The only time people have no issues are the people who are already in a cemetery. They’ve got no issues. But for all of the rest of us living, we have problems, we have issues and we have concerns that come up. There are obstacles that we face no matter who we are, no matter what our income is, no matter how happily or unhappily we are married. There are problems, issues and obstacles that will come up for our entire life and we need to CONTINUALLY solve them, enjoy them, get the most out of them if they’re good, get rid of them if they’re bad. This is a system for continually getting the MOST out of life. Some people go through life having a reasonable life, or an average life, or a good life or a mediocre quality of life. I don’t WISH that on you. I see the EXHILARATION that I feel from getting the MOST out of my life. I don’t want to be so pompous to say, “I get the MOST out of
Designing My Ideal Life™
2
life”, but I have a big life. LOTS of things happen to me and with me and for me. I have MANY things that occur, DEEP relationships that I enjoy, and wonderful businesses that I run, incredible staff I get to work with and MAGNIFICANT clients that I get to see on a regular basis. I have a BIG, FULL, HAPPY EXPLOSIVE enjoyable life. So, the purpose is to have a PERSONALIZED lifetime system to CONTINUALLY get the most out of life. I hope that that purpose has intrigued you to pay really close attention to what we’re going to be learning in this session. Hopefully you’re going to pay close attention to the GRAPHICS as well so you can get the picture.
The Four Big Blobs The first thing I want you to look at is ‘The four big blobs.’ I don’t know a more technical term so we’ll just enjoy life and call it a ‘blob’. The first blob is: 1. ‘The Big Picture’ In ‘The Big Picture’ what we’re going to be looking at is what is the overall direction of YOUR specific life. Not necessarily the direction that it’s going in right now, but rather what is the grand vision of your life? What is it that you WANT your life to be, not what it happens to be at the moment. So, the purpose of ‘The Big Picture’ is to give you the grand vision of the specific life you want to have for the entire upcoming year. Once you HAVE that vision you then move down to the next blob, which is called, 2. ‘Ideas in Waiting’ The purpose of ‘Ideas in Waiting’ is to be a WAREHOUSE of BIG dreams and little things you may want to work on in your future. Let’s understand this. The first thing you do in the ‘First Blob’ is get a BIG picture of your LIFE and the coming year. The direction you set for yourself. Now that you’ve set that direction, immediately ideas will come to you as to what you want to do. Some of them are going to be HUGE dreams and some of them will be little ‘to do’ items. The ideas in the ‘Waiting’ blob; the place where those ideas, big and little, are warehoused so you never have to worry about whether you are going to remember them. They’re warehoused there. You now have a big picture and we have a warehouse of ideas. 3. ‘Producing Results’ We go into the third blob, which people think is the most important, and that’s the ‘Producing Results’ section or blob. But, it’s not the most important. You can’t just go out and randomly produce results. That’s indeed what people do when they don’t have a mentored life. They may jog two or three days this week and then they’ll forget to jog for the next month. Maybe they’ve always wanted to write a book, so they’ll write another page or two of their book. Maybe they’ll go out to a restaurant and eat too much, and they’ll gain a few pounds. So they’ll be producing all these somewhat random results, and their life won’t seem to have a DIRECTION, it won’t be
Designing My Ideal Life™
3
going where they want it to because they’re just looking specifically or shortsightedly at the little things that they’re doing. Producing results needs to be seen in context of the big picture. Once you get down to producing results as the THIRD step, then it’s completely consistent because once you’ve designed what your year and your life wants to be, and you’ve got all these ideas in waiting, then you simply SELECT from the ideas you have in waiting, the actual ones that you’re going to produce that month. 4. ‘Acknowledgment’ Lastly, and this I think is actually is the most important one, is the fourth and final blob and that’s ‘Acknowledgment’. Don’t you dare think you can achieve results, and that results themselves are going to be sufficient. No, we are human and as humans we personally need to be acknowledged. We need to acknowledge OURSELF, and we need to have others acknowledge us, AND we to acknowledge others. All of these must occur. I have heard that acknowledgment from the outside shouldn’t be necessary as long as we feel strength within ourselves. I’ve heard that. It’s a wonderful fantasy. I don’t buy it. In my life and in the lives of every single person I know, as strong as they are, as strong as I am, as high in self-esteem as they are and high in self-esteem as I am, I LIKE to have other people notice that I’ve done something. I LIKE people to come back to me and say, “Raymond thank you for doing that specific thing for me. I like that. I want that. I feel uplifted by that and I think so does everybody”. So this ‘fantasy’ as I call it somewhat derogatorily that you don’t need any acknowledgment from the outside, may be some wonderful grand master can do that but I can’t. I’ve noticed that I don’t know a single person who can achieve that. I feel we need it. Once you’ve produced a result, you need to acknowledge yourself. Yes, that’s part of it. By filling out a form in which we remind ourselves of the successes we’ve had so we can pat ourselves on the back. There’s also an opportunity for others to acknowledge us, and there’s the reminder of how important it is to acknowledge other people. Those are the four major aspects or blobs of Designing My Ideal Life™. 1. Overview – The Big Picture. 2. Ideas In Waiting. 3. Producing Results. The subtitle of that is “A structured way to get what I want every single month’. 4. Acknowledgment, which is a celebration and rejuvenation. You have the vision of the four steps: 1. The Big Picture 2. Ideas In Waiting
Designing My Ideal Life™
4
3. Producing Results 4. Acknowledgment
Let’s go DEEPER into those ‘four blobs’. Now that you have that in mind let’s go DEEPER and deeper into those four blobs. The first thing I want you to do is draw your attention to the arrows. You will see that the arrows on the left start going down, giving you the impression that you move from ‘The Big Picture’ to the ‘Ideas In Waiting’. Once you have a warehouse of them you move down to ‘Producing Results’ because you choose from those ‘Ideas In Waiting’ the results you wish to produce. Lastly, you move down from the ‘Producing Results’ to the ‘Acknowledgment’ section, where you feel good about what it is that you’ve done. Then you notice it’s not a one-way street that the arrows on the other side start going up and what can that possibly mean? From ‘Acknowledgment’ the arrow goes up to ‘Producing Results’ and what that means is once you’ve acknowledged yourself and feel good about achieving a particular result, it’s as if you’re standing on a new mountaintop and from there you can see other mountaintops. It immediately gives you an idea of what you want to produce next month. If you just organized your entire office, you then might want to organize your garage because you can now see the beauty, joy, relief and the clarity that comes from doing one thing, so you can move on to the next one. You may have just acknowledged your entire staff in a really nice way, and seen the benefit and joy and decided ‘Gee I would like to acknowledge all of my suppliers, clients, my best salesman or my family’. So you move up from ‘Acknowledgment’ to ‘Producing Results’ by SEEING the beauty and joy of what you’ve done, and wanting to do more of it. Now the arrow goes even up further from ‘Producing Results’ back up to ‘Ideas In Waiting’. What could that mean? What that means is once you have enjoyed an acknowledgment OR once you’ve produced a certain result in both of those cases they will remind you and twig your memory into realizing there are OTHER things you want to produce in your life but not necessarily this coming month. What do you do? You WAREHOUSE them in the second blob, called ‘Ideas In Waiting’. Lastly, the arrow continued to go up to ‘The Big Picture’. Why is that? How can an ‘Idea In Waiting’, or ‘Producing Result’ or an ‘Acknowledgment’ create a ‘Big Picture?’ The answer is this. We are biofeedback mechanisms. We are not robots that go through life programmed once, and we keep doing that task for our life, we are a biofeedback. We do something, and we get a response from the universe. We do something else, and we get a response from the universe, and each of these responses or feedbacks from the universe teaches us something and slightly changes us as a person. As we get slightly changed as a person, low and behold by the end of the year, our ideas actually have changed a bit. Maybe our major mission in life, like for me to be a teacher, maybe that doesn’t change, maybe that’s going to stay for many many decades, but OTHER little aspects of it will definitely change. So it’s a circle.
Designing My Ideal Life™
5
From ‘The Big Picture’, we get ideas. From ‘Ideas In Waiting’ we ‘Produce Results’. Once we’ve produced results we ‘Acknowledge’ ourselves and that gives us ideas to produce MORE results immediately, or ‘Ideas In Waiting’ for results we’re going to produce in the future, which gives us feedback of what our life should be like NEXT year, and next year and next year. We keep making corrections and keep making it better and better. This is so uplifting and exciting to me. This is TRULY designing your ideal life, a lifetime of mentored progress. The next point I would like to draw your attention to is the ‘frequency’. You will notice that to the bottom right of each of the blobs there is a suggested frequency. I want to review that right now. 1. ‘The Big Picture’ I suggest you do it ANNUALLY. On our calendar, the year traditionally starts on January 1st. So, a very good time to do ‘The Big Picture’ is November or December. The reason I include November is sometimes when people set a goal to review their entire ‘Big Picture’ in December or mid-December with all the festivities of the year-end, it sometimes slops over into January and then you don’t FEEL as good starting your year, because it doesn’t start with the cleanliness of having ‘The Big Picture’ done. You may want to start in November and have it DONE by the end of November or early December, before all the parties and festivities start. 2. ‘Ideas In Waiting’ I suggest you do that QUARTERLY. Every three months when you sit down, for example, with the Future Generator™ forms in front of you, six of them, one for each of the six pathways, you will remember what you’ve achieved and what you’ve been thinking of doing, and it will spur all kinds of ideas in your mind as to FUTURE things you would like to do, some big and some little. Every quarter is a GOOD frequency to do this. You can do it more often if you wish, but it’s probably not necessary. Every year you re-assess your ‘Big Picture’. Every quarter you update your WAREHOUSE of ‘Ideas In Waiting’ and then EVERY month you actually produce monthly results. In the Monthly Mentor™ program there are six, as you know, six pathways – M A I N L Y™. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.
Cleaning ‘Messes’ Making ‘Acknowledgments’ ‘Increasing our Wealth’ Doing Something ‘New’ like in the new economy ‘Learning’ something ‘Doing Something just for ‘Yourself’
Each month, in order to create a balanced life, we move forward in each of those six categories. Finally, I suggest on a daily or weekly basis you set aside some time to ‘Acknowledge’ yourself. Most of us do not do this. We think somehow it’s wrong to think of ourselves in a good way. We think we’re not supposed to notice what we, ourselves, do. Yes, WE ARE. We are
Designing My Ideal Life™
6
supposed to notice what we do. We’re supposed to take great pride in what we do. It feels WONDERFUL to know within ourselves that we’ve done something wonderful, yet sometimes people DEPRIVE themselves of that joy, because they don’t take the time to notice what they’ve done. Many times in The Monthly Mentor™ Program I will ask my clients to sit down, take 5 minutes, and record the achievements they’ve had in the last week, or the last month or at the beginning of the year. It’s your choice as to the time period over which you want to notice your achievements. What happens every single time, EVERY single time, is that people will put up their hand, or e-mail or phone me and say, “Oh Raymond, thank you for suggesting that I take five minutes to think of what I had done. I hadn’t realized I had done this. I completed this. For several years I wanted to get a certain thing done and I did GET it done. I got all that done in the last week. I hadn’t REALIZED it was such a wonderfully productive week and I had gotten so much accomplished. I should do this every day or I should sit down every Sunday night or sit down on Friday before I leave work and DO this to feel good about myself”. I say, “YES, exactly, you should” and I do, and many of my colleagues and friends do, and when we do, it has a wonderful wonderful impact and feeling for us. I suggest you redo your ‘Big Picture’ annually. In The Monthly Mentor™ Program, you will be mentored, and reminded and instructed to do it annually. I suggest you do the ‘Ideas In Waiting’ quarterly. In The Monthly Mentor™ Program, again, you will be mentored, reminded and instructed to do it quarterly. ‘Producing Results’. You will be mentored, reminded and instructed in The Monthly Mentor™ Program to complete your forms, the main one being the MAINLY™ form and the little Mini MAINLY™ form in order to instruct the universe as to what it is you want to produce by the end of that month. Then I suggest that daily or weekly, you ‘Acknowledge’ yourself. That’s the frequency. Do I always do it? Am I absolutely perfect in doing ‘The Big Picture’ every year? I am, I do ‘The Big Picture’ every year. Am I absolutely perfect in doing me, personally, the ‘Ideas In Waiting’ every single quarter? Not exactly. Sometimes it’s 2 months. Sometimes it’s 3 or 4 months but in that range. ‘Producing Results’ monthly? YES. EVERY SINGLE month I sit down and my Monthly Mentor™ members sit down and we record our goals. ‘Acknowledgment’. Do I do it every single day? No, sometimes I do but I’d sure like to do it at least once a week. Of all of those if you start doing the ‘Acknowledgment’ weekly or daily you’ll be startled, you will be startled at the changes within you. We’ve looked at what each blob means. We’ve looked at the arrows down and up to see how the flow works and we’ve looked at the frequency. I would like to now draw your attention to the wording within the arrows. You see when we go down from ‘Big Picture’ to ‘Ideas In Waiting’ to ‘Producing Results’ to ‘Acknowledgment’
Designing My Ideal Life™
7
basically what you’re doing is creating a focused mentored journey. It’s your OWN because you decide what it is that’s important to you, and what ideas are in waiting and what the results you are going to produce, and to acknowledge yourself. It is your OWN FOCUS. ‘Focus’ means it just doesn’t OCCUR. You don’t just do whatever comes along. You’re focusing on what it is you want mentored. Why mentored? Because you didn’t create these forms. Your mentor, if you’ve chosen me, has created these forms for you, and will remind you annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily to do it. It’s a FOCUSED mentored journey. When I say, ‘journey’ I don’t want you to think of it as a classroom because although there are some aspects of classroom in it, because you are learning, it’s a journey. We’re all in it together. Many times Monthly Mentor™ Members will contact me and give me some feedback, and that will twig my thinking in order to develop a program for YOU, so we’re learning together, we’re walking TOGETHER on this journey. There is no one who is better or worse then anyone else, we’re walking together. I may have some skills that allow me to be your mentor in this regard but you have many skills that are far more advanced than ME, in which case, I can learn enormously from you. We’re just journeying through this life together. As we go down the page it is your own focused mentored journey. What is it as we go up the page? It is your owned ENHANCED REFOCUSED mentored journey. What does that mean? It’s your own, of course, it’s your own because when you acknowledge yourself for producing a wonderful result that gives you an idea to produce another wonderful result it’s you, YOU’RE designing that YOURSELF. You’re choosing the things you want to produce. It is your ENHANCED journey because when you get the joy of producing the focused results you want going down the page, and then you decide you want even MORE of it, you now have an ENHANCED and REFOCUSED that means, a more CLEARLY focused, more beautifully focused, more importantly focused mentored journey. I should even say, ‘re-mentored’ or ‘enhanced’ mentored because as you proceed through this, what I suspect will happen to you because it happened to so many of my Monthly Mentor™ members that they say, “Oh Raymond, I’ve enjoyed being mentored by you so much this particular lesson that you taught or that particular lesson that you taught made such a huge impact on me that I want to now have a mentor in lots of areas in my life”. EXACTLY. That’s exactly how I do it and exactly what this form is intended to help you do. We’re now at the stage where we’re going to look inside each blob in order to look at the PROCEDURES that have been developed by The Monthly Mentor™ Program for you. Within ‘The Big Picture’, this is the first blob you do annually, there are three specific procedures. 1. Annual Love Letters™ A list of your current loves. The purpose of it is so you are AWARE of your own loves so that you have balance and fulfillment in your own life. Many people say they want to do what they love but when I ask them what they love they say, “What I love, what I’m good at” and maybe they’ll think of 1 or 2 items but they won’t have a written list. There is a SPECIFIC way. You can’t just sit down and make a list of
Designing My Ideal Life™
8
your loves. It won’t work. When you do the program called, “Annual Love Letters™” you will actually get an uninhibited, uncensored list of your own CURRENT loves. When I say, ‘current loves’ it’s because they CHANGE every year. If you keep a record of your annual loves as I do, you’ll be quite startled in that certain things stay the same, stay constant through your life, and certain things you think will be there forever actually aren’t any longer. ‘Annual Love Letters™’ – you know what you love. 2. My Life Missions™ Preventing regrets and the icon for it, is a tombstone. The purpose of it is so you’re aware of what is truly important in your life so you’ll get what you want this lifetime. This is a very exciting procedure that we do each year in order for you to understand what it is that you really really want to produce this lifetime. I will give you an example for myself. On my tombstone, and I mean somewhat metaphorically now, really what I mean is I want to be known for. I want to be known for being a great teacher and a great dad; I want to be remembered for that. I want to be remembered for being a great teacher that’s what I want. I don’t want people on my deathbed to talk about how many vacations I’ve had or how wealthy I am or how many cars I owned, if I happen to own more than one, that’s really not what’s important. I’ve decided what’s important…when I do my ‘Ideas In Waiting’, ‘Producing Results’ and ‘Acknowledgment’, I look to SEE how consistent they are with the two ultimate goals I have in my life. You can see the importance and see why it’s in ‘The Big Picture’. 3. Annual Backwards Goals™ Finally, and this is a very exciting thing, is the ‘Annual Backwards Goals™’. It’s next year’s goals or the upcoming year’s goals as if already achieved. It’s a funny way to write goals. We write them backwards. We write them as if we’ve already achieved them to plant in our mind the idea that it’s already achieved and once our mind thinks it’s already achieved strangely enough it’s easier to produce it. It’s as if you’re doing it the SECOND time because your mind already thinks you’ve done it the first time. The purpose of the ‘Annual Background Goals™’ is to create a path along which your own monthly efforts are directed towards supporting your annual goals. It’s very exciting. When you put together your ‘Annual Love Letters™’ and your ‘My Life Missions’, that means, the ‘Annual Love Letters™’ and the ‘My Life Missions’ is what you truly want to produce this lifetime you make it annual by completing your ‘Annual
Designing My Ideal Life™
9
Backwards Goals™’ and you now have a ‘Big Picture’ of your life and the upcoming year. Once you do ‘The Big Picture’ you go into the ‘Ideas In Waiting’. There are two forms or procedures in that one. 1. Priority Organizer™ What this does is help you prioritize what it is you want to do. It helps you clarify what’s important and what’s urgent so you know what to do next. Many people are kind of flustered or a bit lost in the life because they have so many things yelling at them. “DO THIS DO THIS DO THIS”. Some are important but not urgent, some are urgent but not important, some are important and urgent, some are neither important nor urgent but they do them. The ‘Priority Organizer’ is a wonderful procedure and a procedure you can use to decide what it is you need to do next taking into account your ‘Big Picture’. 2. Future Generator™ The ‘Future Generator™’ is a just a DELIGHTFUL form that is an inventory of your future ACHIEVEMENTS. Isn’t that a nice way to say it? It’s not an inventory of things to do. It’s an inventory of you FUTURE achievements. You don’t have to do them immediately but you want to record them somewhere so that you never forget them. The purpose is not JUST to help you remember them, it’s so that you never have to worry that you’ll forget them; they’re written down. Any time you get an idea, you rush over to the ‘Future Generator™’, you write it down and then you know you can relax knowing you’ll never forget about it. The purpose of the ‘Future Generator™’ forms is to have a place to record your own ideas as they come to you so that you’ll feel comfortable that you’ll never forget something that you once wanted to work on. We now have ‘The Big Picture’: • • •
Our ‘Loves’ Our ‘Life Missions’ Next Year’s Specific ‘Annual’ Goals
We’ve moved into the ‘Ideas In Waiting’ where we have a ‘Priority Organizer™’ that helps us determine what we should do next and we have SIX pages of ‘Future Generator™’ forms; one page for each of the six Monthly Mentor™ pathways – M A I N L Y™. So, when you record an idea you want to remember you chose the pathway that it’s in. If there are some colleagues of yours that you wanted to send a nice birthday present to, well then, you would write it in the ‘Acknowledgment’ in the ‘Future Generator™’. If there is some tax filing that has always been a ‘Mess’ then you would record it in the ‘Mess’ in the ‘Future Generator™’. Whenever you’re thinking in any month what it is that you want to produce and you say, “I
Designing My Ideal Life™
10
should clean a ‘Mess’” all you do is pull out the ‘Mess’ in the ‘Future Generator™’ and you’ll KNOW the result you want to produce that month. Now, we have moved down to the third blob, which is ‘Producing Results’. The TWO major forms in this one are the MAINLY™ form and its accompanying, Mini MAINLY™. The MAINLY™ form has its purpose to record your own monthly goals in an easy yet powerful way so they actually get achieved, sometimes ‘automagically’. The Mini MAINLY™ form, which is the wallet-size summary of the large MAINLY™ form has, as its purpose, to remind you throughout the month what you wish to achieve. Some people put this in their wallet or purse. They put it in a place where they’re going to bump into it each day or a few times a day. The more times your mind is REMINDED or your memory is JOGGED on the things you want to produce, the greater is the chance that the universe will somehow bend and produce that result for you sometimes magically without appearing to have needed any effort on your own. The two other forms or procedures that are in the ‘Producing Results’ blob are called: 1. The Total Ingredients Process™ 2. Overcoming Obstacles™ They both have as their LARGE intent to help you achieve a difficult goal and do it in two different ways. The ‘Total Ingredients Process™’, which is subtitled, “Achieving Very Tough Goals” is to break down very tough goals into manageable parts so that you have a step-by-step process to know exactly what will help you to complete the goals. It basically turns a very tough goal into a menu or an ingredients list of things that you need. The other procedure for achieving very tough goals is called, ‘Overcoming Obstacles™’, which is subtitled, “Transforming Brakes Into Fuel”. It has as ITS purpose to transform your obstacles into the very thing needed to actually achieve your own very tough goals. So in the blob called, ‘Producing Results’, we have the MAINLY™ and the MiniMAINLY™ form plus we have two totally different ways to help you achieve VERY tough goals that have plagued you for a while.
Recent Successes™ Finally an ‘Acknowledgment’, which is the ‘celebration’ and ‘rejuvenation’ blob there is one beautiful form called, ‘Recent Successes™’ subtitled, “Acknowledging Progress”. It has three important purposes: 1. To note you HAVE achievements so that your self-esteem and self-confidence can rise.
Designing My Ideal Life™
11
2. Acknowledge yourself for your own achievements so you get ADDICTED to the joy of HAVING achievements. If you get addicted to the joy of having achievements you’re going to have more and more and more achievements almost effortlessly. 3. Build on your own achievements so that you have a self-programmed path of getting more of what you want. That is, designing your own ideal life. That is how to create a lifetime of mentored progress. I have a very interesting item of homework for you. Take this form, ‘Designing My Ideal Life™’ and take a specific project you have in your life, whatever it is, a specific project, and start from the top. 1. 2. 3. 4.
Do ‘The Big Picture’, the three programs of ‘The Big Picture’. DO the ‘Ideas In Waiting’. DO the ‘Producing Results’ and then ‘Acknowledge’ yourself for it.
As you MOVE down from the very top to the very bottom you will find that you achieve whatever project you have in mind whatever it is. You might say, “Well if I want to produce a certain result, if I want to train for a marathon, why should I start right at the top in listing my loves then deciding what I want to produce in my life and listing my annual goals in all of the six categories that kind of overhead seems like an AWFUL lot of work just to run a marathon. I should be out jogging”. It may seem so but the reason you haven’t been able to produce that result, whatever it is; organizing your office, running a marathon, or doubling your income, or getting out of a relationship that’s been bothering you, the reason you haven’t been able to DO it is because you’ve been trying to do IT, you’ve been trying to do just that one little isolated thing. You don’t necessarily know how it’s going to fit into your life, how it fits into the BALANCE, overview, and concept and purpose of your entire life. When you start from the top and move down and do the FLOW from ‘The Big Picture’ to the ‘Ideas In Waiting’ to the ‘Producing Results’ to ‘Acknowledgment’, you will find out exactly where you’re stuck. You will find out exactly what you’ve done and haven’t done and how far you’ve gone down on the path. When you find out where you’re stuck, you can then work at that point and break through BREAK THROUGH the logjam, and get down to the bottom and ACKNOWLEDGE yourself, and WOW what a flood of excitement will come when you acknowledge yourself for having done that difficult job. And then the arrows start moving up. You start getting ideas for other results you want to produce, other ideas you want to put in waiting and it gives you a new and clearer picture for the next year of ‘The Big Picture’ in your life. There is another piece of homework that you may want to attempt, and that is, “this is what a mentored life looks like.” What I do is teach people how to have a mentored life but YOU have
Designing My Ideal Life™
12
your own business. Whatever business you’re in, sometimes you’re in business, sometimes you’re doing a major charity, and there are people who volunteer their time in a charitable organization. Whatever it is that you devote your life and your time to, your business or a charity, see if you can DESIGN that business or charity in the same kind of flowchart that I’ve done here in order to see what YOUR business looks like. To see what your PERSONAL work is in your life. What are the steps of the personal work in your life and how do they flow into each other and what is it that you need to do in YOUR business or your charitable work annually, quarterly, monthly and daily? What are the different aspects? What are the different steps? Break it down. Notice what are the specific aspects you like and don’t like, and delegate what you don’t like and do more of what you do like. You don’t even have a chance to see the overview unless it’s written down. The first item of homework is USE this program, Designing My Ideal Life™ in order to achieve any project you specifically have, and also see if you can design you OWN business or charitable work according to this. Also, please actually DO the work that it suggests. Do those three steps ‘annually’. Do those two steps ‘quarterly’. Do those four steps ‘monthly’ and do that one step ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’ and WATCH what happens to your life. I wish you the best of success. I ACTUALLY do these. They’ve not come from a book I’ve read or some theory. They’ve come from inside me. They come from what I do. Many of my students, my mentored students, are already doing this but not with as much clarity as they can. NOW we have this beautiful graphic to support us. I thank you and I wish you the GREATEST of success in designing your own ideal life so that you can have a lifetime of mentored progress. Thank you.
Raymond
Designing My Ideal Life™
13
