Identifying Opportunities extracted from the book Dare to Blossom: Coaching and Creativity, by Mary Lunnen

You may have some ideas about what you would like to change in your life to get it in balance and about how you would like to be spending your days in your ideal world, how do you set about creating some of those things in your life?

Try this exercise to help focus your thoughts.

Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the centre. On the left hand side write “What” and on the right hand side “How”.

To encourage a flow of writing, it can be helpful to fold the paper in half down the line so you are looking at only the “What” column to start with.

Write a list of all the things you want to achieve. It might look a bit like one of those lists of “100 things to do before you get old” – that is fine, but it need not be like that. Keep going, don’t allow that internal editor or censor to pipe up saying “that’s silly, you’re too old, too fat, too thin, too scared, too poor,” etc.

When you have written down everything you can think of, open the page out. There are two ways of doing the next step.

1. Straight away go down through your list and write something in the “How” column next to each item.

2. Alternatively, you may prefer to organise the “What” list into some sort of priority first (here it can be easier to do it on the computer so you can cut and paste, but can be done on paper with a new sheet). The order might be “most important” to you first, or it might be “easiest to achieve”.

Or you might mix these up, perhaps one “easy to achieve”, followed by a “most important”.

Either way, the magic of this process is that once you start you might find the boundaries blurring – the important things may not be hard to achieve after all.

Then, do something! Although I have been making the point that everything people achieve starts with an idea in their mind, nothing will happen unless they take action. This might be asking someone for help, making a phone call, doing some research, going for a walk, applying for a job. Whatever it is, the first stage is going through the process of deciding that it is the right action for you to take now. Choosing what you are going to do or how you will respond to events means that you are in control.

If you start to feel stuck with your lists, put them aside for a few days or even weeks and come back to them with fresh eyes.

Copyright 2008 Mary Lunnen | Dare To Blossom | Buy the book