Life Power Now - for gay men

You might be reading this section because you are mildly dissatisfied with your life, believe that you can/should do better, or you might be desperately looking for a way out. Whether it is a relationship, financial troubles, stressful/lack of work, loneliness, or a combination of all of them, I believe it is best to have a plan.

If you had a year to live, what would you do?

The first step in your plan is to write down where you want to be. This is different from what you want to get away from. Although in some situations, getting away may be first necessary step to finding a new direction. It is easy to get overwhelmed at this step. Keep in mind that it isn’t necessary to come up with the last defining word about your life. Count on your goals to evolve and change over time. Helpful questions to ask yourself are: “What do you want your life to be like in one year and in five years?” “What would you do, if you won a million dollars?” “What would happen, if you were/weren’t in this relationship?” “What do you want to do in retirement?” “What would you do, if you had a year-long paid vacation?” “What epitaph would you like to see on your grave stone?” “If you had a year left to live, what would you do?” “If your life ended today, what would you regret not having done?” Visualize your answers to these questions as clearly and vividly as you can. A clear vision will generate the power you need to reach your goals and will help you to stay on course.

After this excursion into the future, take an inventory of where you are today. This can have many dimensions. Are you dissatisfied with your work/career? Do you want to get in or out of a relationship? Do you want to take better care of your health and fitness, or reach financial goals? Looking at yourself without rose-colored glasses can be challenging and it can be reassuring. Eventually most people will find that what they see is neither as pretty as they’d like it to be nor as ugly as they feared it might be. Personally, I believe in the power of knowing the truth because it gives me strength to move forward. This inventory might also identify aspects of your life you do not want to change or feel you cannot change. Just keep in mind for now that almost everyone in this process finds in the end that they have much more power to change their lives than they thought.

If you think you need to win the lottery to be happy, try again.

Once you know where you are and where you want to be it's time to ask what you need to get there. If the answer is “I need to win the lottery” or “I just need my boyfriend to drop dead” try again. What are the things you can do to move closer to your goal today. What steps can you take now to move come closer to the life you want? Really focus on what is in your reach or what might be in your reach, if you stretched farther. I had a vivid illustration of that concept on a climbing wall 30 feet above the ground when my instructor told me: “So you tried everything in easy reach. None of the easy holds gets you where you want to be. What about stretching further? What about the holds you could reach, if you let go of the one you are clinging to right now?” I was tired, I was scared, and he told me to leap! I’m thankful to this day that he talked me into trusting myself. I let go, reached farther than I though I could and made it to the top of the wall.

Everything you do should flow from your understanding of what will take you closer to the life you see envision. In most cases, fewer goals are better than more goals. Keep your vision bright, ambitious, and powerful. Make your milestones realistic and achievable.

Two criteria will tell you whether your intermediate goals are well structured: a goal needs to be a quantitative, measurable and the quantity you are measuring needs to be responsive to the actions you are going to take. For example, reducing your waist size by 2 inches is easily measurable whereas “looking good naked” is not. How much better do you look this week than last week? The answer might be hard to pin down. An example of a goal that is unresponsive to the tools you have would be “reduce the national debt”. This is a very measurable goal, however unless you are Ben Bernanke you probably have very little influence over it.

Keep your vision big and your goals realistic.

Once you have identified your goals, make them visible. Write them down on a piece of paper. Find images and pictures that illustrate your goals. Collect and arrange reminders so you’ll see them every day: On your fridge, around your bathroom mirror, on your desk in your office. A reminder doesn’t have to be obvious to others, it just needs to make sense to you.