Hey friends – Adam Thompson, coming to you as always from FocalPoint Minnesota’s world headquarters in lovely Plymouth, Minnesota. Hope you’re having a great day.
Do you have a great business at the expense of everything else in your life?
Is your business growing, dominating, developing, and changing – and all it’s doing is costing you your personal life, your health, and maybe even your financial freedom? What would it look like if all those aspects of your life worked together to make everything better?
This is the first video in a three-part series on time management, prioritization, and focusing on what really matters in our lives with the idea of developing better work-life collaboration – not balance. Balance is hard to achieve, but it’s possible to make all the aspects of our lives collaborate to make everything better. Which can lead to a happier, more successful, and more fulfilled life.
Which, yes, can lead to a more impactful and more successful business.
Diamond Mapping Your Path to Personal Fulfillment
At FocalPoint, we talk about a process called Diamond Mapping, which is essentially looking at four key areas in our lives: our business and professional success, our financial well-being, our health and wellness, and our family and relationships. It’s an honest process of really evaluating where you are.
- Step one is to rate where you are in each one of those key categories from 1 through 10: one being bad, 10 being obviously, the ideal state – not perfection – but your ideal state in that category.
- Step two is then to identify what the gap between where you are now and that ideal state is. What is the gap between the 4 and the 10? The 7 and the 10? If you put down a 6 on health and wellness, what does the 10 look like?
- And the final step is to identify the things you need to do to bridge that gap: to get from where you are now to that ideal state.
Measuring and Creating Goals After Your Assessment
This is where goals come in, this is where action steps come in, and this is where numbers come in. This is a numbers-based process – it is important to put down metrics that you can measure.
If your home life and your love life is a 6 because you haven’t taken your spouse out on a date in a year because of your business, perhaps going out every night for a candle-lit dinner is not a real high level of expectation. Maybe it’s coffee once a week. Get good at that, take a small step. Find that first goal, find that first way you can move things forward, and get that to be the habit.
Then once you’ve mastered that, move on to the next one: let’s expand that goal, set new goals, set and lock your goals, and what you’re going to find is things start happening right. You will see the results – small goals stack up to big change and that’s what we’re looking for is that big change in the long term.
There’s no overnight fix, these are all small steps whether they are focusing on the financial side, the actual business, the health and wellness, or the family and relationships. You need to set those small goals, set those metrics you can measure, and start measuring your progress against them.
How to Start Creating Your Ideal Life
So what do you need to do now? What is that first step? I’ll give you a great action step right now: email me athompson@focalpointcoaching.com. Put on the subject line, “I’m ready for collaboration,” and I’ll send you the Diamond Mapping exercise.
I will send you a worksheet that you can fill out that is visual, that will give you a visual representation of where you are in those four key areas, and where you want to be. It will give you a chance to write down what those things in the middle are:
- What are the gaps?
- How do you bridge them?
- What are the goals?
- What are the things you can measure?
- What are your action items?
- What are the things you can start doing today to move things forward?
Email me athompson@focalpointcoaching.com and put “I’m ready for collaboration.” I’ll send you the Diamond Mapping exercise and I’ll commit to you that I’ll follow up to make sure you’re following that plan and see how your progress goes.
Let’s get to work.
Let’s take those small steps, let’s find a way to build better work-life collaboration. Let’s find ways to make all the aspects of our lives work together to make us better, make us happier, and give us more fulfilled lives.
Get to work, find those small steps, be honest, and I’ll talk to you soon.
