WOW.
A major milestone has been reached. I started coaching around January of this year. And by September, about 9 months later, I finally completed my next 20 year plan.
Scoff you might, as you may think, “How can Dshen have a 20 year plan when people can barely think of what they’re going to be doing a month from now, let alone a week or tomorrow?”
It actually started off more like that. My last 20 year plan was more like a huge list of things to do. It had stuff like:
+ Get my Aikido black belt.
+ Manage a group of designers
+ Buy a house
+ Become an “expert” in design
+ Etc. Etc.
And then the Internet explosion came around and turned my previous 20 year plan into a 4 year plan and left me with nothing to shoot for.
But in my recent coaching experience, I think I’ve come around to thinking that a list of things to do isn’t the best way to approach life. Yes you need to do things to get to wherever you want to go. But just creating new lists of things to do wasn’t enough to evaluate whether they were the right things to do or just me wasting time….
Instead, I’ve developed a picture for what the “future Dave Shen” should look like. I did this by really looking inside myself, and my coach was very good at asking me questions and probing to draw out these important feelings and thoughts about what I wanted the “future Dave Shen” to be.
After I did this, I now have a way to evaluate whether or not the things I spend time on are worthwhile and add to the me becoming the “future Dave Shen”. If they did not, then I should stop doing those things and do something else.
Of course, things could change so I intend to check in with my coach every 6-9 months or so and see if the “future Dave Shen” attributes need to change.
This will be an interesting exercise going forward.
But at the moment, I am ecstatic that a major milestone has been reached in my life. I look forward to the future knowing I have a great way to evaluate whatever I am doing at any time….