Vishen Lakhiani talks with John and Missy Butcher about Lifebook, a system that designs your life across 12 categories so goals don't conflict. Instead of isolated goals, you build one clear vision that threads through daily habits and choices.
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You guys design the world's foremost lifestyle design system. It's so different from goal setting. And one of the things you've said is that traditional goal setting is broken. Why is that?
You know, any goal setting is better than nothing. But if you really want to get effective with your goal setting, you've got to make sure that you're not doing it in a vacuum. And what I mean by that is just focusing on one or two categories of your life. Because often vision, a career goal that you set could be completely counterproductive to a family goal that you might have or completely contradict a health and fitness goal. There can be a lot of tension between goals when they're just set in a vacuum. But when you have a crystal clear vision for the life that you want to be living, where you know exactly where you're taking your entire life, the person you want to become, and the life that you want to live, then all of your goals are aligned. They're all directed at the same target. And the energy of those goals are sort of flowing like a river in the same direction. And that's when there is no friction between your goals. A win anywhere becomes a win everywhere. And we found that it's just infinitely more effective than traditional goal setting.
Yeah, for sure. When you have that life vision, that North Star that you've thought down, you've thought, okay, these are all the things that I believe. This is who I am. You've done that self discovery piece. And then you can then build your life or your goals in conjunction with that life vision. And we call it the golden thread of consciousness. Your life vision is a big, hairy, audacious goal out there, right? But then you break it down by goal, by goal, by goal, yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, down to your day. And that golden thread of consciousness from your life vision, there's little pieces along the way that you're going to do all the way down to your very present moment. And that is where everything happens and everything happens in the day. That's why we call those habits you do every day, those daily actions, the 12 sacred choices. Because it all comes down to the present moment, what you're going to do in the moment. And if you don't have a life vision, you could make a million different decisions and they could take you in a million different ways. But if you know where you're going and you know your life vision, then you have a rudder, you have a.
North Star, and each goal that you set is a piece of the puzzle. It's a piece of a much bigger picture. They're not just all disconnected pieces all over the place. They add up to something.
It's integrated.
That's exactly right. That's why it's so critical to know what your ultimate destination is before you sit down and set a bunch of goals.
And what I love about what you guys are doing with Lifebook is that you don't just have someone look at goals in the most common areas, which for the average person living in the Western world is career and finance. Right? You're looking at 12 different categories.
That's correct. That's exactly right. Now, some people do set health and fitness goals. That's the other one that I'd throw in. That's relatively common. Very, very few people set goals for their emotional life. How do you want to feel every day? You know how important that is? That's massive. Right? Very few people set goals for their character. What kind of a person do you really want to become? What kind of character traits do you want to cultivate in yourself? That's a big one. That can completely change your life. Very few people set love relationship goals. Where do you want to take this? Or how about parenting goals? What do I want my kids to really focus on this year? To expand themselves as human beings. So we look at the entire pie, not just one or two pieces of.
The pie, and it's so beautiful what you guys have done. Lifebook is probably something that everyone should be required to do before they get married, that everyone should do as soon as they graduate from university, and everyone should do as soon as they join a company. In fact, at mindvalley, every single person who joins mindvalley, we ship them off to a retreat for four days in the mountains, where they go deep and they create their lifebook. And when they come out of it, they're faced with a choice. Maybe they discovered something that makes them realize that they shouldn't be joining mindvalley. And that's cool. Go and do your own thing. That's perfect. You have our blessing. And others decide, okay, this is who I need to be. Now I know what I want to do within mindvalley. To become the person I want, want to be.
Exactly.
And so either way, it's a win win for everyone. But you're bringing in deliberate consciousness into a crucial junction in someone's life. Everyone on the planet needs to be doing Lifebook. So if you find these ideas interesting, join us for a deep dive into the Lifebook process with John and Missy Butcher in a new masterclass on Mindvalley.
