On Mapping your life

I've recently become acquainted with a management technique called Wardley Mapping, which is used to assess business landscapes. Quoting from hiredthought.com:

A Wardley Map is a representation of the landscape in which a business (or anything, really) operates. It consists of a value chain (activities needed to fulfill user needs) graphed against evolution (a measure of how individual activities change over time under supply and demand competition).

Due to my knowledge and experience with personal development frameworks, and particularly when seeing the approach could be used to assess Practices, through the evolution from Novel to Best, I tried the exercise of mapping out a lot of what I write about in my blog and by consequence the things I value. 

For the past year, as I opened my own business and decided to tackle some knowledge gaps I felt I need to close to be successful and the coming of a second child, I lost many of the good habits I had up until late 2017. And I've been feeling that something is off in my balance, but couldn't completely put my finger in it until I've mapped this out.

Now, I can't say any of this caught me completely off guard, but this mapping allowed me to get a better understanding of why I'm feeling unbalanced.

If I just mindlessly (as opposed to mindfully) let myself cruise through life, 3 things are going to happen:
- I'm going to be living in my head (in yellow), with my only good practices being acquiring knowledge
- I'm going to eat like crap and not exercise (in purple)
- I'll going to let comfort stuff creep back into my life (blue)

I'm happy with none of those, so this tells the things I need to work on if I want to be who I said I'd be.

The other interesting insight, is that I'm clearly hiding behind the acquisition of more knowledge and not producing the security and philosophy blogging that I so value (in red).

The great news is that seeing it this way, tells me ONE thing I can easily do in order to become more balanced.

Stopwatch on learning time everyday, and the waking hours I get from it, I need to find a way to work on my other goals. I may develop this idea further into an actual framework for personal development using Wardley Mapping concepts as basis, and Stoicism as the underlying doctrine, but at the very least and knowing how cryptic some of my communications are, I may use maps like these in the future to position the message I'm talking about and the type of movement I'm trying to discuss.

Happy to hear thoughts about applying Wardley mapping techniques for personal development.

On losing your edge and finding yourself back

I've last written about creating temporary imbalances so you can have deep focus on a particular area of your life for a Rapid improvement in it. Sometimes, this is exactly what you need to quickly develop in one particular area of your life.

The problem is the apathy and laziness that settle their roots in your core. Breaking ties with ingrained mediocrity is difficult. Much more than keeping momentum when you've gotten used to the ride.

But breaking out of the bad habits that may have generated (in my case, certainly do) requires real application of willpower. So how to deal with it? let 's break it down to 2 key questions

who or what are you doing it for? Get the fire burning again, focus on it as you lay out of bed and remind yourself often.

what is the alternative? think if the path you set yourself on is likely to lead you to a measure of success. Chances are you feel Ugly if that is who you were. We can safely apply the "Law of Holes" to this problem. If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

The main thing to realise is that it's unlikely you'll be a balanced and complete individual if you're only "hanging your hat" in your area. That's not what we're about, is it ? Using basketball terminology, this is triple-double and aiming to go from great to phenomenal, whatever that ends up meaning to you.