Trying again

Okay, I’m trying again with this blog. That’s what people do if they want to succeed. They try again.

Why This Blog

My INFP Blog is my thoughts on being INFP. This blog is about me. It’s my experiments to find a way to make things work for me. I’ve been reading self-help books for years. All of them have the same exercises and similar philosophies, but they mix and match to create self-help recipes that vary from author to author. Every time I read one of those, I think those would be great if I was an ESTJ, but some of it doesn’t fit my INFP preferences very well.

After 20 years, I know many of the ingredients. This blog is trying to figure out a recipe that works for me and my personality style.

This is My Self-Help Blog

This blog is about helping myself. I’m trying to help me first. You know how the airline tells you to put the oxygen mask on yourself first so you don’t pass out. This blog is me getting air first so I can be coherent enough to help others.

I’ve toyed with the idea of being a personal development coach but that’s still about 100 goals and 2 or 3 careers in the future. Here’s one of my deepest beliefs: you are as far as you currently go with your life with what you currently know.

This means that whatever I can teach another person can only get them as far as I’ve gotten. As of this time, I don’t know enough to get anyone further than where I am. Here’s the rub. I don’t want to be where I am. I want to be at that next level. Where I am doesn’t really inspire me. If I can’t inspire myself to be here, what does it say if I’m trying to inspire other people to get some place I don’t want to be anymore.

Where I Am

My life is good. I’ve had a good life for about 10 years now from ages 30-40. Ages 19-23 were the lonely struggling years. Ages 23-26 were the figure out how my life works years. Ages 26-30 were my getting my act together years. Ages 30-36 was the I-think-I-deserve-a-break years. Ages 37-39 have been years I’m realizing that I’ve gotten way too comfortable.

I have a good job that makes a good salary. My relationship with my wife of 14 years is pretty amazing and still growing better. My children have added a whole new dimension to my life and has made me grow as a person. We travel. We own real-estate and are moving, albeit slowly, to retiring comfortably.

Life is good, but it’s been always been my nature to ask, is this it? Is this all I can become? This is what I’ve been asking myself for 3 years.

What’s Next

See this is where the trouble comes in. I have a goals list. Here’s my problem with goals: so what? It’s just a to do list. Why bother?

So I can feel better about myself? What’s wrong with all the Power of Now stuff and just accepting my life as is and be happy with that?

So I can have more Peak Experiences? Yes there’s a bunch of travel and events I want to experience that are well beyond my price range right now. So is that my goal, making more money so I can buy Peak Experiences.

So I can have more choices? Tickets to Cirque de Soleil’s Allegria went on sale today. We don’t have that in our budget. We have enough money right now to make a down payment on our next property, but our “fun” budget is maxed. So are my goals to alleviate my need to choose between fun now and retirement later? There’s other ways to enjoy life besides purchasing experiences that I’m sure would make me just as happy.

Much of the self-help I’ve read and applied doesn’t fit me. It’s either about making a to-do list and showing you how to complete it or it’s about accepting the yourself as you are now.

For me as an INFP, I don’t care for to-do lists and who I am now was good enough for now, but not adequate for tomorrow.

Knowing what I want

Step One is knowing what you want. But I don’t equate knowing what you want as a list of goals.

I want to grow. I want it to be self-directed. I want it to feel organic and natural.

With a lot of self-help is that I feel like I’m adopting behavior which I know will make me “successful” but feels like I’m wearing really uncomfortable pants that will rip if I bend the wrong way.

I want to move from good to great. I don’t mind the hard work. I actually really need something to focus on right now in my life. However, I want to have a really good reason to have a great life beyond just the having of it.

All of these wants are just great, but their so general that if this is all I focus on then I might as well not have goals. General wants DO NOT work. I’ve never gotten something by wanting it in general terms. So how do I grow my life in general and still be specific enough that it doesn’t feel like my life is one to-do goal after the other? This blog is where I’m trying to discover that.

What’s Next

Another things that I believe with all my heart is this: you can do the same things and expect a different result.

The traditional self-help works, but it’s only gotten me this far. As I try to push farther, the more I accomplish, the unhappier I am. If getting more done and being more successful is making me unhappy, I’m missing something. I though it was a goals and values alignment issue but it isn’t.

Because of this I’ve been looking outside traditional personal self-help to find answers. Right now, I’m reading E-myth Revisited about business development. I’m trying to incorporate strategies of other fields into personal development.

I think I’m on the right track.

My First Breakthough

I’ve done the setting and accomplish goals method of “success”. It works. It definitely works, but some of the framework and methodology is too rigid for my liking.

In reading E-Myth Revisited, I can across the exercise of writing down all the positions of your business and the responsibilities of those positions before even starting the business. That way everyone knows what needs to be done and who should do it, even if you and your business partner have to fill all those positions at first. Later as your business grows, you’ve created systems for each of those positions and you hire people to run the system for that position. I was listening to that part on tape as I was commuting to work.

I had my breakthrough of how I could incorporate that into my growth and still have it feel natural.

I’m writing the down all the Roles that I need to step into when I have my dream life. So far my Roles are: father, son, husband, writer/blogger, entrepreneur, family provider, friend, personal coach and role model. Those are the roles that incorporate all my interests. For example, my interest in photography falls under role model. One of the behaviors of a role model is to be able to engage your own interests and make it a part of your life. For other people, photographer could be a primary Role which has a completely different set of behaviors to make that role a success.

This post is long enough. I’ll go into details in my next post about what future-orientation by defining Roles instead of goals entails. I’ll talk about defining success in those Roles and incorporating them with our Six Needs. I’m kind of making this stuff up as I go. I hope you come along for the ride.

Tagged as: future, personal development, try again