Stephen Scoggins answers questions on building a life vision using imagination and sensory detail, balancing family and career by thinking in seasons, and breaking procrastination by clarifying priorities and taking small steps.
Chapters
How do I create a vision for my life? First thing you do is use your imagination.
Think about where you want to be in five years, 10 years or 15 years. Is it on top of a mountaintop? Is it at the beach? Are you, do you have a family? Is it a large family? Are you traveling everywhere? You've got to learn to dream again, right? As you learn to dream, as you learn to use your imagination, grab a pen, a paper, and actually take the time to jot down all the ideas, all the things that come to your mind on paper, on purpose. Try to use all five of your actual senses. You know, what types of smells would you be smelling? What types of things would you see? What types of things would you put your hands on? Right? These are elements of ways to create a mental picture in your mind on what you want your dream to look like. You can't create a plan to get to your vision until after you've taken the time to dream about what it looks like. And I do mean dream, right? If you want a big fairy tale castle like the Magic Kingdom, right? Then put that on your paper. For all we know, you'll be working at Disney. Okay, seriously, take the time to dream, take the time to imagine. Use all five senses, be intentional, be clear, and just keep the list running until you actually create the vision itself of where you want to be 5 years, 10 years and 15 years down the road. And if you'll do that, then we can actually help you create a roadmap to actually obtain it. Alright, so that's how I would start with learning to create a vision for my own life.
How can I achieve balance with my family, my career and my personal goals? This is a little bit tricky because I don't look at it as a term of balance. Instead, what I look at it as a term of seasons. Okay? There are just like four seasons. Winter, summer, fall, spring. Right? Each one of those seasons represents a different part of life. Right. One of the things that I personally do is I'll actually sit down with my family, with my wife, and we'll look and see what that year is going to look like or that quarter, that first half of the year, first quarter of the year is going to look like. Am I going to be traveling a lot? Right? That's an episode of actually me having to do what's known as sewing on a regular basis. Okay, so what I would recommend is, is if you go to your family and you spend time saying, okay, look, the next three months, it's going to be hard work I'm going to be going a lot, all this kind of stuff. Then do your best to make sure the next three months are using a lot of time to make up for lost time or spending time doing something fun with the family. Does that make sense? Take the time to actually use it to plan the seasons. Use communication, right? Make sure you and your spouse are sitting down and saying, hey, look, this is what it's going to be like for the next three months, and this is what we're going to do as soon as that season is over, so we can kind of keep plugging away and keep doing things, okay? Also, while you're doing that, look for little mini breaks, right? Look for one day a week or one day every other week or something like that to have intentional connection with your family where you shut the phone off, shut the TV off, shut the computer off and just focus, right? Go to out, go for a walk, do the park thing, take your kids out, go throw the ball, okay? Those are different ways to stay connected to your family, okay? Because what will happen if you use this principle of seasons, then essentially what will happen next is your family will be behind you and. And supporting you in pursuing your own goals. Okay? Why? Because they know it's important to you and because you made them a priority, right? To take care of them, but also to spend time with them. And as a result, you'll get their support, which on your personal goals will allow you to kind of keep moving forward and kind of keep making things happen. I hope that helps.
What's the best way to change my emotional state when I don't feel empowered or disempowered? Well, one of the things that I personally like to do is I actually like to go for a walk. I know that sounds crazy, right? But somehow changing my physiology and changing the fact that and using energy momentum, it creates additional momentum, it helps get my blood pumping. Right? I actually like to use things that actually will actually put great resources in my mind. So I'll use podcasts and YouTube while I'm on these runs or these walks or in the gym working out. All of these are things to create activity and get the blood pumping, okay? Those are specific ways in which I like to use. To get my emotional state out of my head and back into a great place. The second thing I like to do is I will actually go into a mirror and actually look in my bathroom, as strange as it sounds, and actually be going, you're worth it.
You're worth it. You're worth it. You're Worth it. You're worth it. You're worth it.
And I'll keep doing that until such a time as I actually feel like what? Exactly what I'm saying. And then I'll go out and I'll attack the world with everything I got. Use those two things, and I think you can help yourself get unstuck in that area.
What's the best way of breaking a bad habit when it comes to wasting your time and not using the most of your time to help you move forward? All right, that's a kind of. That's not a loaded question. It's not a tricky question. It's an easy question to answer. Believe it or not. It's all about priorities. What are your actual priorities? Do you actually need to get financially stable? Do you actually want a healthy relationship? Or are you just running around saying you do? Okay, intentionality comes with priorities. Once you clearly define what it is you truly, truly want to achieve, then somehow it creates a path to become intentional about how to get there. What I find most often is I find that people that are wasting time procrastinating is it's not that they don't want to do the work, it's because they don't know how to do the work because they haven't got clearly defined what their actual priority is. Okay, when you finally get serious, I mean really serious about going a direction, right? When you finally decide you want to get out of debt and you don't want to have to owe anybody anything, and that phone doesn't have to ring with the bill collectors on the. On on the other line, and they're not blowing up your email box, right? And doing that whole cyber stalking you thing. When you finally decide that that's not what you want in your life, then you'll actually create steps to let nothing actually stand in your way. And when nothing stands in your way, you become unstoppable, your dreams begin to happen, you begin to make progress, and all of a sudden, all the stuff that was holding you back no longer hold you back. So in order to overcome procrastination, which is essentially what we're talking about, you use the principle of progress. In order to make progress, you got to set a priority. So list your priorities in order based on how much you actually want to achieve them, and then take a step to get there. And that'll help you keep going forward.
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