Get Your Head Out of the Clouds
While it can be energizing and inspiring to connect with our goals, visions, and life purpose, each of these are fulfilled through the actions we take. What that means is that being able to get granular, stay focused and knock out tasks is a prerequisite to reaching a high level of achievement. As much as we might want to remain at 50,000 foot level, until we get in the weeds, the garden really doesn’t grow.
Covey wrote about this as being the evidence of Independent Will, the final of the Four Human Endowments. After having moved through the processes self awareness, imagination and evaluation, our intentions came to life through our independent will. We must get fully engaged if we wish to “manifest our destiny.”
Three Facets of Action
We engage the world, and forward our work in three related, but unique ways. Neglecting any of these will ensure that we surrender the momentum we so desperately crave from 
both the productivity and enjoyment perspectives.
By Prescription
The first facet of action is doing the work we have predesignated. As we have previously discussed, this is one of the great benefits of envisioning how and where our next physical actions will occur. It enables us to get into and stay in flow. Staying on task, building on our successes and being fully engaged increases our energy and ensures a high level of productivity.
The Planning Process
In order to have the predetermined work to do though, we actually have to have invested the time and focus to create it. We too often relegate this high priority work as an afterthought, squeezing it in when we can, but not respecting the value and leverage inherent in breaking projects down so we can get after it when the time and setting is right. Failing to honor this time and give it a high priority results in our wheels coming off, wondering what went wrong.
Life Keeps Coming at You Full Speed
The third facet of action is the doing work as it shows up. Regardless of how well we have strategically designed our lives, stuff happens.
Real Art Ships
This is a powerful concept in Seth Godin’s new book Linchpin which ties in very well with this awareness that life happens when we are in action. Why I share it here with you is that regardless of the importance of all the other phases in this Live on Purpose model, until we are in action nothing else matters. We can capture, corral, define, systematize, and strategize, but if we fail to act, nothing changes. Nothing.
Beyond merely taking action, the idea represented by “Real Art Ships” reminds us that beginning projects makes sense only in the context of a commitment to complete them. A huge barrier to completion is our unhealthy obsession with perfection and the belief that it actually exists. Life is not about creating works of art that we protect from critics until every glitch has been removed and perfection achieved. No, life, and art by metaphorical extension, must be put out into the world to impact others. Otherwise, it is merely another way of escaping reality.
Sorry to interrupt but have you been enjoying the Living on Purpose video series? If so, please let me know by leaving a comment. Here is the next video in the series.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y-3bO4DpWA
Flow in the Moment
Being fully engaged in our lives reduces stress capitalizing on momentum built one small success upon another. Where we lose momentum is when we fail to delineate the activities that comprise our lives. This leaves us feeling stagnant and paralyzed, trapped motionless within big project rather than moving rapidly through the tasks that comprise the project.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his groundbreaking book Flow, describes the key elements that create full engagement and enable us to access our greatest potential. These components include completable tasks, requires full attention, clear objectives and immediate feedback.
We create the context driven lists in the Systematize phase. These lists ensure we stay engaged. This scenario creates a fertile environment within which we experience effortless high performance, free of worry and frustration, with a peaceful sense of control. Our focus shifts from being primarily personal to being more transcendent.
By investing the time and focus to identify the moving parts of our lives, defining our relationship with them, developing systems that enable momentum, and strategically thinking through the most advantageous effective application of our resources, we find ourselves fully engaged in action that is both incredibly effective and fun. Having fun reinforces our actions and keeps us going for more. And the virtuous cycle continues!
In our next section, we will explore how we delve into the different vantage points from which we evaluate and engage our lives.
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