Category — General Great Life Posts

Reduce Your Commitments – Being the Perfect Partner, Parent, Student, Employee, Friend, Etc.

In this post I want to focus of something that that I see as a big over commitment  problem for most of the people I know.  It probably doesn’t fit into a typical view of what it means to be over committed.  I’ll get to all those more traditional situations in the third and final post of this series but I want to attack this problem first because it is so important.

When you are an over committed parent (I can hear the screams now about how that is not possible) you are doing your children a great disservice.  You are failing to provide for yourself and you are creating unnecessary stress and tension for your family.
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Reduce Your Commitments

Secret #1 was to simplify everything. Put that together with a reduction in unnecessary commitments and you have a strategy to dramatically increase the amount of time you have to spend doing those things that you really want to do – those things that will lead to Your Great Life. See the How to Have a Great Life Life series for the most powerful method available for figuring out what makes you truly happy and fulfilled.

Over time you have accumulated your commitments one at a time.  In isolation each one seemed justified at the time you made the commitment.  However you can’t make those decisions in isolation and you are likely operating under an assumption of unlimited bandwidth when you do so.
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Simplify Everything

This does not mean you will do less.  In fact it means you will do much more of the things you most enjoy doing and/or those things that are most important to you.  Simplifying your life will allow you the time to actually enjoy your life.  It even makes it much easier and much less burdensome to get through those tasks you don’t enjoy but feel you have to do for one reason or another.  You can’t expect to have a great life if you don’t create the time to live it.  Simple will be a big theme on this blog and on my site Your Great Life which I have only barely begun to construct.

The best introduction to simplifying your Life is the book Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life by Leo Babauta.  If you don’t get this book you will regret it.  Leo is a rising star online.

It took me a long time to realize how much of my life was unnecessarily complicated.  Despite my own life being way too complicated, I was naturally inclined to much greater simplicity than many others around me.  Trying to survive the team lunch car pool decisions or restaurant choices was and is almost more than I can take.  For whatever reason, in the modern world we tend to over-complicate everything.  All this time spend stewing over minor decisions and adding unnecessary steps to everything is very unhealthy and totally unnecessary.
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This post concludes my summary of the method for achieving happiness describe in Richard Brodie’s book Getting Past Ok: A Straightforward Guide to Having a Fantastic Life.

Once you have all of your results from the question answering process described in part 2, you will want to look back through them and write down any words or phrases that occur more than once.  It’s ok to have too many but if you don’t feel comfortable with that, look for words or phrases that occur more than twice.  You will be making a mistake if you get too few the first time through the process.  When you have finished creating this list, you need to separate the results into three categories: needs, means, and structures.  What you are ultimately going to end up with is a list of your core needs.  This list will be a foundation for maintaining your great life for the rest of your life.
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In Part 1 of this post I introduced you to the book Getting Past Ok: A Straightforward Guide to Having a Fantastic Life. In Part 2 I am going to summarize the author Richard Brodie’s method.  This does not take the place of a full length book but it should be enough to get you started.  I do recommend you get the book as well.

First you answer a series of questions.  This is the heart of the process.  When you answer these questions focus on the experiences and feelings and not the event.  Write liberally on the experience with only a sentence or a few words about the thing or activity.  For example when I said that being in alone in nature made me happy, I described how I was inspired by the raw power and beauty of nature.  I described the feelings of peace and tranquility I felt being in the natural environment and how  I love listening to the sounds of nature. Getting away from my hectic life in this way gives me the opportunity to think and meditate without distractions.This part is very important so be liberal and write execessively if you want.  Please be very truthful.  You are the only one who will ever see this.  Here are the questions (note I added the first question myself - it is not in the book).

• What things give you that feeling of true or genuine happines?
• What do you want (try to come up with 10)?
• What have been the greatest successes of your life so far?
• What is it about other people that you admire?
• What are your most important values?
• What did you really enjoy doing as a kid at play?
• Describe your ideal job.
• Describe your ideal relationship.
• Describe what life is like from the point of view of your pet, or any other non-human object or being.  When you say “I”, the “I” is the pet.

It is critical that you don’t just list but describe experiences and feelings.  Otherwise this won’t work.  If you take this to heart and do it thoroughly the results from the follow on steps are simply amazing.  This is truly a life changing method.  Thank you Mr. Brodie.  I don’t want to write really long posts and this will take you a few hours so I will continue in Part 3.

Please comment on my blog and I look forward to hearing from you soon. Have a Great life!

Chuck Stanley

Welcome, to the Your Great Life blog!  I am thrilled to have you aboard.  The mission of this blog is to give you what I believe is very valuable information on how you can have a great life.  It is indeed possible and it is much easier than you might imagine.  All it takes is the right information and the desire and commitment to follow through on what you learn.  I will gladly help you with some tools to do just that.

There are a few really good books available and an ocean of information on the internet.  The problem with the information on the net is that it is like trying to get a few ounces of pure mountain spring water while drinking from a lake on a muddy delta.  I will help go straight to the gold without having to dig through the ore or drink from the muddy water. I went through that process myself and was aided by a number of outstanding blogs and other net content. I encourage you to explore the Web but don’t make the mistake I did and try to absorb it all. You end up spending all your energy on reading about how to have a great life and filtering out the muck. You forget about the action part of the equation. Action is the ultimate key to getting anything in life. The information you have in your head is useless without action.
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