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| Life Mapping: A Vision of Success |
Success is more than economic gains, titles, and degrees. Planning for success is about mapping out all the aspects of your life. Like a map, you need to define the following details: origin, destination, vehicle, backpack, landmarks, and route.
Origin: Who you are
A map has a starting point. Your origin is who you are right now. When asked to introduce themselves, most people would say, Hi, I'm Jean, and I am a 17-year old senior high school student. It does not tell you who Jean is; it only tells you her present preoccupation. To gain insights about yourself, you need to look closely at your beliefs, values, and principles aside from your economic, professional, cultural, and civil status.
Moreover, you can also reflect on your experiences to give you insights into your good and not-so-good traits, skills, knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses. Jean realized that she was highly motivated, generous, service-oriented, but impatient upon introspection. Her inclination was in the biological-medical field. Furthermore, she believed that life must serve a purpose and that wars were destructive to human dignity.
Destination: A vision of who you want to be
Who does want to be? This is your vision. Now you must know yourself to have a clearer idea of who you want to be; and the things you want to change, whether attitudes, habits, or points of view. If you hardly know yourself, then your vision and targets for the future would also be unclear. Your destination should cover all the aspects of your being: the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Continuing Jean's story, after she defined her beliefs, values, and principles in life, she decided to have a life dedicated to serving her fellowmen.
Vehicle: Your Mission
A vehicle is how you can reach your destination. It can be analogized to your mission or vocation in life. Your task would depend on what you know about yourself to a great extent. Based on Jean's self-assessment, she decided that she was suited to become a doctor and wanted to become one. Her chosen vocation was a medical doctor. She described her vision-mission fully: living a life dedicated to serving her fellowmen as a doctor in conflict areas.
Travel Bag: Your knowledge, skills, and attitude
Food, drinks, medicines, and other traveling necessities are contained in a bag. Applying this concept to your life map, you also bring with you specific knowledge, skills, and attitudes. These determine your competence and help you in attaining your vision. Given such, you need to assess what knowledge, skills, and attitudes you have at present and what you need to gain along the way. This two-fold assessment will give you insights into your landmarks or measures of success. Jean realized that she needed to gain professional knowledge and skills in medicine to become a doctor. She knew that she was a bit impatient with people, so she realized that she wanted to change this.
Landmarks and Route: S.M.A.R.T. objectives
Landmarks confirm if you are on the right track while the route determines the travel time. Thus, it would help if you also had milestones and a way to plan out your life. These landmarks are your measures of success. These measures must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time-bound. Thus you cannot set two major milestones, such as earning a master's degree and a doctorate within three years, since the minimum number of years to complete a master's degree is two years. Going back to Jean as an example, she identified the following landmarks in her life map: completing a bachelors degree in biology by the age of 21; completing medicine by the age of 27; earning her specialization in infectious diseases by the age of 30; getting deployed in local public hospitals of their town by the age of 32, and serving as a doctor in war-torn areas by the age of 35.
Anticipate Turns, Detours, and Potholes
The purpose of your life map is to minimize hasty and spur-of-the-moment decisions that can make you lose your way. There are turns, detours, and potholes; thus, we must anticipate them and adjust accordingly. But often, our plans are modified along the way due to some inconveniences, delays, and other situations beyond our control.
Photo: https://pixabay.com
