Progressions

Out of all the possible steps you could take for self-care or self-improvement, do you find yourself wondering what to do next? Have you found yourself feeling, like the songwriter Beth Orton, that you “don’t know how to live” and you just can’t get all the pieces of the puzzle to fit together? This way of progression can become incoherent without the intention of focusing on small steps. Moving from more basic needs to deeper self-actualizing needs.  It also borrows from a wheel model that is often used by life coaches, a spiral-like diagram that addresses all the imbalances in your development that could be preventing you from rolling smoothly. If you investigate “wheel of life” diagrams, you’ll notice that they differ in every categories. Use the categories that make sense for you. Customize a chart to reflect your situation. You might have mastered one whole category, so you might choose not to include it. Your wheel can still be balanced if you work on only four categories. Using categories can help you remember to keep the focus on important things—like health practices— if ignored for too long, it can lead to an illness that stops your progression in every other area. The idea is to master your current level by reaching your goal in each category before moving on. Your goal for a category might be to (a) complete a task or (b) form a specific habit. 

For habit goals, think of it as tracking your progress. Consistency goals can put a lot of pressure on us and encourages a perfectionistic mindset. Research shows that simply by keeping track, the behavior will change over time.  A recent study led by a team at the University College London suggests it takes an average of 66 days to create a habit. If you find you are consistent for 21 days straight, count it as completed if you feel like you can keep going without tracking it. For habit-forming goals, you might put a daily habit tracker page in a place where you do the activity, or in a place where you typically begin or end your day. Use gold star stickers if it feels fun.

Be patient with yourself. This shouldn’t be one more thing to cause you stress. Notice if and when you need to renew your commitment if you’ve slid back from prior gains. Once you’ve mastered the basics in all the areas you choose to work on, you can keep revisiting these basic categories. Alternately, you can plateau and simply enjoy the view, concerning yourself with maintaining that level while enjoying a sense of serenity without hustling. We only ever have so much bandwidth. Outsource if you need to and can. While money can help create a context where it’s easier to work on your goals, but money can’t buy them. Just as no one can exercise for you, those are efforts you need to put in, dispite how much money you might have. Knowledge is also a great equalizer. Though we can hire coaches to hone in on specific areas to progress faster, there is so much free knowledge available to us that seems to get overlooked. To speed up that learning, RegenerativeBusinessConsulting.ORG is specifically organized to give you all the resources you could need on your journey of transformation. All for free.

Think of progression as whatever imagery appeals to you.. It could be a starburst radiating outward, a spiral of stepping stones from the center moving clockwise outward, or going from basic levels to complex and expansive levels (see images below). You could picture it as staying in a grade level until you eventually gain adequate mastery in each subject, only to move the next school year to start again in the same subjects. Use the Multi-Category Progress Tracker worksheet and/or create your poster (one standard-size page likely won’t be enough). Each level of development supports the other categories in that level and the subsequent levels. It may seem less overwhelming to focus on just one step ahead of you, in a logical progression. If it feels overwhelming to focus on several categories at a time, just take the smallest possible step and call it a day. The small steps you do take are going to get you there faster than the large leaps you don’t take.