Assess yourself – within the 4 domains in life

Lately I have been talking about dreams and goals a lot!

And I got it! The first step is to give permission to ourselves to dream! In our busy lives do what our heart is calling and give a voice to what we try to shut down inside of ourselves… is a lot! Beyond of the possibility of your dream coming true or not, forget it!! It is about first to dream out loud!

Dreaming is beautiful!…but it can be a bit overwhelming, when we decide to follow our dreams and then can’t decide where/when/how to start…I know looks like a joke, right? But manage the dreams out loud could be too much…so how to organize them and go from a dreamer stage to a doer status.

I found some help in the book from Stew Friedman, Total Leadership, where he categorizes four circles in life, to find the balance and be happy.

These four circles, or the four domains in life as defined in the book are:

• Self
• Home
• Work
• Community

I love this definition as I can understand where I am, and define my AS IS, and what activities I need to shuffle around to have more time in the things I  want to do and fulfill me more. Remember now as you shouted out your dream is time to assess where you are…where you are spending your time to do anything else from what is your current routine.

Mr Friedman has a whole course of Total Leadership, that you can take online, I did it in Coursera, but my biggest takeaway is the self awareness from those 4 domains in my life and using as a model of attention to balance where I am and where I want to go. And because the time doesn’t add more hours, how to shuffle things around and get the best out of it.

This also helps me identifying the things that I can’t skip right now, and live better with, avoiding the frustration that I may feel when my baby is sick (which is happening , the little things from a baby going to a daycare) and she can’t sleep well, so I can’t sleep well, so I can’t have the same morning routines as ideally I would love to have, or the same productivity as I would expect.

So what I use is in an excel file, fill out the activities in each domain, then correspond an average of hours per day spent in those activities, and then it gives a % per day.  Plot in a 3D Bubble chart to have a sense where the time is been spent, and remember, there is a must for remaining time to sleep.

Take a look in the table…

And the graph will look like this…

Is it true???! I don’t have a bubble of community! How is that possible???? It is a shock!

But now from here I can imagine where I want to go, as my next step this year, and what actions should I take to reach my goal for each domain, like this:

• SELF – I want to grow with my blog and with my coaching life.
• HOME – I want to plan a family holiday in the beach and have 2 date nights per month with my husband.
• WORK – I want to be recognized as a great manager.
• COMMUNITY – I want to build and look after a Women Community where I can support and give back with my coaching skills.

With this I think I can have more clarity to draw my roadmap and write it down the tasks and actions that I need to have in each domain.

The first time I was doing it, I forgot that the day has only 24 hours, and I was having 34 hours in total!! Crazy, right?

There is one thing is that the goals can’t be too many and disconnected. Otherwise there is no focus.

Give it a try to start to do it and reflect in your AS IS. So you can project your future and be realistic about your dreams!

Please never give up!

Thank you

AnnaJo