You will become someone, either by accident or on purpose. I beg you to choose on purpose. Become the person you want to be by unwaveringly examining who you are and comparing what you find to what you could be.
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I don’t know about your 2023, but mine was rough. It started out fast and furiously. Then, it just seemed like one bomb after another.
When those things happen to me, I ensure I am grounding myself in my mission.
One aspect of that mission is to be involved with other guys intentionally, so I started a men’s group on Saturday mornings. Every Saturday, a group of us get together to talk about life, faith, family, and all the directions we are driving toward or being pulled toward. Last fall, we read a book where the author asked us if we wanted to be good or great.
It seemed like such an easy answer, but the way he posed it, I knew something was up. He said good, not great.
What he was really asking was how will you measure your life? I love this question; it can terrify me depending on the day.
It’s such a great question, though. How will we measure our lives? In the book, he talks about how greatness has changed over the years. The context of the book is about men, so he writes about how, in past societies, it was often about a man’s ability to be a warrior. He laments that today, it seems that greatness is defined by fame or money.
We admire people who are good at a sport because they have money or are attractive or famous and confuse that with goodness.
Don’t get me wrong; I genuinely admire Michael Jordan when it comes to the dedication he had to be the best at what he did. His willingness to squeeze every ounce out of his talent to win is commendable. His ability to push people to do the things they don’t want to do to become what they want is admirable.
But is his character of life something that I should admire? Is he a good man? The truth is that I don’t know because I don’t know the person, Mike. I do know that it seems wise to be cautious in the amount of admiration I give to people I don’t know.
But this brings me to the more important question regarding measuring our lives. Who do we want to become? Who do we want to be? What are we aiming for?
There’s an exercise I like to do that I want to share with you. It’s a bit involved, but I have found it helpful over the years. To do this, you’ll need something to do some writing. You’ll need to make lists on a computer or sheet of paper.
Make a List of All That Happened Over the Year.
How did the last year go for you? What happened? As in, literally, what happened last year? I know so many people who had hard things happen to them. I know people who lost their homes, their jobs, and loved ones. I also know people who had a fantastic year of beautiful things. Babies and grandbabies were born, marriages happened, homes were bought, and new career opportunities happened. It was great!
Many people lived somewhere in between those two extremes.
This section is just designed for you to record everything that happened over the last year. Get it all down on paper. If you’re like me and journal, you can cheat and review there. You might need to go through your Facebook, but spend some time trying to recall what happened in your life.
Once you have all of that down, we can move on to the next step, but before we do, I recommend letting this sit for a few days, and as things that happened come back to you, jot them down. We’re taking our time getting this done.
Make a List of How You Acted, Reacted, and Responded.
How did you act last year? What were things you did intentionally? How did you react to stressors and good things? What were your responses? It might be helpful to take a moment and explain the difference between actions, reactions, and responses.
Actions are anything that we do. For our purposes in this exercise, they are things that we intentionally did. Maybe you went to the gym three times a week because that was a goal. That would be actions in this list. Reactions are things we do without much thought; we take in a stimulus and react to it without conscious thought. Responses are things we do in response to stimuli that we think about before we do them.
An example of a reaction might be if someone is yelling at you, and you yell back with words you later regret. You screamed with little thought about your actions’ possible outcomes or consequences. In the same scenario, you responded if you paused and thought through possible outcomes and consequences and purposely chose the ones that best represented your values.
Spend some time on this list as well. Remember, this list is only for your perusal and self-development, so don’t cheat yourself by editing. The temptation is to leave out what we find embarrassing or ashamed of doing. Things we wish we had done differently tend to be a temptation to leave off this list.
But that robs us of the opportunity to grow. So throw it all in there.
Now, ask some hard questions.
Now it’s time to ask yourself some hard questions. How did those actions, reactions, and responses reflect the person you want to be? Did those activities reflect your stated values? Did your behaviors match the person and characteristics you aspire to become and exhibit?
This is the crux of change and, perhaps, life. Are you becoming the person you could be? Do you have ideals about who you want to be, or are you actively pursuing those ideals? This is where our brain will start to scream at us for some relief. It will employ our tried and true self-defense mechanisms. But this is where the real work of growth occurs.
This is intentionally comparing who we want to be to who we are today..and Making a Plan for Change.
Healthy living involves intentionality. It requires honestly evaluating what is going on in our life today and what we are doing and then comparing that to who we want to be. But if we stop there, we’ve just done a fun mental exercise with little value. Without action, we’ve created the potential for change. Without honesty, we’ve spent some time doing something of little value. Without honesty or action, we’ve wasted time that we will never get back.
What changes do you need to make based on your observations? Make a list. You may have yelled too much. You may feel like you needed to devote more time to developing your mental acuity. How much time did you spend watching shows? How does that fit into your values? You may need to be less or more confrontational.
Don’t Try to Change Everything, Pick Just a One, Two or a Few
It’s unlikely that anyone will successfully change every area they identify as an area for growth without some failure. Because of this, it’s usually best to pick one or two or maybe a few. More importantly, deciding what change will look like is imperative. What would success look like? Again, it is helpful to write these ideas down on paper. I will usually use a pencil as it allows me to erase and shape the ideas over time. Ensuring this part is measurable and entirely in your control is vital. If you want to do more serious reading, that’s a great start to an idea, but it’s a terrible goal. It needs to be more specific. You might set a book count for the year; let’s say you want to read three non-fictional books this year.
Make short measurement periods, but make sure they are long enough.
If we stick with the goal of 3 books, we would need to read one every 4 months. Most books average around 300 pages, so a great short-term goal would be to read ten pages daily or seventy a week. This is an easy and utterly controllable goal. It is essential to now figure out how you will track the goal. For me, I write them down in my notebook. For a goal like this, I would put three boxes down, and when the goal was completed, I would put a check in the box. Keeping all my goals on one sheet and all my tracking on another sheet is the most helpful for me.
Don’t be Afraid to Look at Character Things
This one can be more nuanced, but it is so important. Most people do well with things like reading more or going to the gym, involving action. It gets more opaque when discussing being generous or other more esoteric endeavors. You may want to be more empathetic. Measuring things like this can be more difficult.
It can help if you attach a behavior to the desired value. For instance, what would being more generous look like to you? What would spending more time with your family look like? The second question is simple: when I look at my time finished, how much goes to my family? For the generosity question, how much did I do that was generous for people?
Short Measurement Times are Important.
For these goals, short measurements are essential. You might check your progress weekly or even daily. I prefer monthly for myself. Ben Franklin chose to do his daily if history books are to be believed. Most people find experiments helpful in this regard. I track some things weekly, and most I track monthly, even if the overarching goal is for the year.
Last year, I set a goal to walk 200 miles. With two weeks off, that works out to 4 miles a week. I tracked it over weeks, monthly, and yearly. Every Monday morning, I have a routine where I follow my goals on a list I call Tracks—I am not the most creative man. This helped me to see how I was doing weekly and monthly as the year progressed.
I also set a goal to create an environment where my wife felt more pursued. This is much more vague than whether I walked a certain amount of miles, so I tied the goal to specific behaviors I knew she would appreciate. Each week, I would record whether or not I did something from those behaviors or add something to the list. Every couple of months, I would check in with her about her feelings (the goal was to check on her feelings).
Expect to Fail
It’s important to note that you should expect to fail at both the goals and tracking them. Only some things you try will work. About 4 years ago, I decided to go completely digital in my journal life. It was mostly a disaster. Tracking things was not as seamless as I would have preferred. I could have done better in being intentional.
I tried different apps, and they didn’t really work. There were some things that I wanted to change about being completely paper, and I had to solve those problems. I ended up with a hybrid system that spends time in digital and paper arenas. But my goal setting and tracking exist almost exclusively on paper until the year ends. Then I move them to digital for different tracking (that’s probably a separate post).
Make It a Part of Your Routine
So many people I talk to and walk with will be incredibly intentional about their professional lives. Still, that intentionality seems to fade in their personal lives. This can be because it can feel exhausting. I have found that if I make it a part of my routine, it becomes a part of my life. When it’s part of my life, I find it the opposite of tiresome and actually find energy in it.
It’s essential to be able to look forward and backward in this process to achieve the best results.
You will become someone, either by accident or on purpose. I beg you to choose on purpose. Become the person you want to be by unwaveringly examining who you are and comparing what you find to what you could be.
If you’d like to learn more about this topic, check out Episode 251 of The Joe Martino Show, which can be found in your favorite podcast store. If you found value in this post, would you consider sharing it on social media? Thank you for reading.