Journaling the Good Life: how to discover the forces deflecting you from your path
Journaling the Good Life: how to discover the forces deflecting you from your path
This blog work well with our 100 Powerful Self-Coaching Questions & Johari Window/Insight Radar resources.
Your life is full of patterns. Some patterns are routines and rituals that are clear to you. Others are subtle but when discovered reveal significant triggers for dips in your wellbeing, motivation and feelings of connectedness with people and places.
To help discover insights into hidden forces that deflect you from your path, we put together this useful Insight Wheel.
You might be familiar with the Insight Wheel concept as a means to define and map macro goals. However, your response is a snapshot in time that is anything but constant. You are a complex organism that chooses to compete or cooperate with other complex bodies based on your motivation; your degree of shared passion: beliefs, values, standards and behaviours.
"Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them. (Hume, T 2.3.3 p. 415)"
Micro-interactions with others can trigger a profound emotional response that impacts your ability to rationalise your thoughts for days to come. This emotional hi-jack can distract you to the extent that it slows your productivity, engagement, collaborations, creativity and wellbeing. Regular journaling using the Insight Wheel, coupled with powerful self-coaching questions, can reveal powerful forces that influence your life on a day-to-day basis.
You often end up dealing with the consequences of these micro-interactions, where you see the missed goals but remain unaware of the triggers for the outcomes. You need more in-depth insights to discover the perturbation effect; these are the forces influencing your ability to experience Good Life + Good Work.
Perturbation: a deviation of a system, moving object, or process from its regular or normal state or path, caused by an outside influence (Oxford)
Halley's comet orbits the sun once every 74-79 years. The invisible gravitational forces of other heavenly bodies push and pull the comet along its path, with the outcome being that it takes longer to complete its orbit. These forces create a phenomenon called the perturbation effect. The perturbation effect can have unintended consequences, where an ancient tribe, unaware of the science behind the delay, see the delay as an action of angry gods. After drinking a heady cocktail of hallucination inducing plants, the tribal medicine man speaks to the gods. He receives a vision informing him that the only way to appease their anger is to drink bat blood. The tribal warriors venture out and collect enough bats to fill a vat from which over 200 men, women and children will drink for their salvation. Two weeks later, the whole tribe is dead from the ebola virus.
Daily journaling is a powerful tool for discovering the perturbation effects in your life, revealing insights and allowing you to take evidence-based actions to overcome the forces deflecting you from your path. Used in conjunction with self-coaching questions, and a greater awareness of blue zones and purple zones, you can improve your agility while remaining productive, engaged, collaborative, creative and enjoying a greater sense of wellbeing.
Insights: be aware of the opportuities created by your limitations
As a leader or manager, you need to be aware of the skills you need to motivate and develop a high-performing team.
To help, we have designed an Insight Space to help discover and develop opportunities in your skillset.
We also use the Insight Wheel as part of our Good Walk & Good Workshops programme. Get in touch if you would like to know more.
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