Living in the Bucket

The System Part 2

In my previous post,  I gave an overview of the concept of Roles as a way to compartmentalize how you Prioritize the use of your resources in your quest for self-fulfillment.   This post will deal with the practical application of those concepts.

Activities – The Implementation of Roles

In my last post, I gave an example of one of the activities I started this year under the Role of Father.   While Roles seldom change (they do evolve over time), Activities are constantly being reviewed and adjusted.  Think of them as the “how” to the “what”.  Activities are the actions that put your Roles into reality.

Roles

Refer back to my pie chart of Realms in my last post.   Notice under Personal I listed Fitness.  The activities that I am currently using to implement that objective are: going to the gym, hiking and walking.  Now that I have identified the Activity, all that is left is to set measurable Goals to execute. To do that, we must be specific and responsible.

Specific

If you can’t measure it, then how can you tell you are on track?  My gym goals are:  400 minutes per month of aerobics and twelve strength training sessions per month.  I keep this score in Excel.  Here’s my progress through July:

 

Responsibility

I mentioned in the previous post that if you are unwilling to take responsibility for your own actions, this exercise will be a waste of time.  The Lakota Sioux have a saying “what you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say”.   Personal Responsibility is at the core of this system.  Don’t set an Activity that you aren’t committed to!  It is also important to assure that you will be fulfilled in the Role in which you are working.

 

 

Vigor Activities

There is a special category of Activities that gives an added boost towards your goal of realizing you’re Roles, Vigor Activities.   One of the  major resources you will need to do any Activity is what I like to call Vigor.  These activities are easy to identify.  The longer you do them, they more energized you feel.  They are different for each person, but they all have the same effect: a vigorization of your stamina to complete your Activities.  I know, for me, one of my Vigor Activities in the Health Realm is hiking in the woods.  No matter how many miles I log on the trail, I always feel rejuvenated at the end of the hike.

 

An Example

I asked my good friend Cynthia Hubbs if she would paint a picture of how these Vigor Activities combine to form a river of Vigor that fuels the accomplishment of your Roles.  This is what she came up with:

 

Note I had her divide these into Domains to help group them for thought.   Just as the sun melts the snow, releasing it in water form, so do these Domains release the Vigor that we need to function in our Roles.   As the Vigor is released, it joins with the other currents to form a “River of Vigor” that feeds your Energy to accomplish your Activities.

Give some thought to this important concept.  What do you love to do?  As I said, one way to recognize a Vigor Activity is, if you did it all day, you find you have more energy than when you started.  Once you identify these Vigor Activities, make sure you do one or more of them each day, or you may find yourself too exhausted to do any Activities; thus insuring failure at your Role execution.

We are almost finished.   My next post will deal with the concept of Arenas and then we will finish up with a worksheet you can use to apply all of these concepts in your daily living.

Until then, I wish you fulfillment.

Bob

The System -Part 1

Living in the Bucket

The System

Before I start into the details of this system, I want to make a disclaimer.  After forty plus years of books, conferences, and classes, I can no longer remember where or when I got the ideas that are contained in the structure.  Let’s just give a giant nod to all of my teachers and mentors as I attempt to combine all these thoughts into a workable program.   Thanks for helping me grow.

Roles, Resources, and Responsibility

Life is difficult to manage!  My experience has taught me to organize and execute.  Living in the Bucket is my attempt to suggest an easy system for you to do the same thing.  After introducing the four major components, I intend to give examples of how to put the concept into practice.  It is my hope to create a community that will exchange and expand the system by suggesting additions to the ideas presented.

Roles

The first part of this system is to identify your Roles.  Think of them as categories of your identity.  In my case I found it to be helpful to group these Roles by what I call Realms (Personal, Private, and Professional).

Under each Realm, there are some specific Roles that can be identified.  Ideally, the resources that you allocate would be equal in each Realm (more on that later).

Try this exercise for yourself and see what you come up with.  Eventually, we will use this chart to set Goals though Activities, but first things first.

Resources

It’s easy to think of your Resources only in one dimension; money.  But what about other ones such as Time, Health, Relationships, or Vigor (more on that later as well).  Effective use of these resources increases the probability that you will have a successful outcome on the pursuit of your Goals.

Responsibility

Steven Covey noted author, refers to Victor Frankel’s concept that true freedom comes from the ability to respond to outside stimuli.   He states that we are responsable, or able to respond to situations as we choose. It is a basic theme of Living in the Bucket, that you choose what activities and resources you will engage in on a conscious level.  In other words, be purposeful about how and what you do.

 

 

 

My Roles

If you think about your life as a movie, you are asked in every scene to play a “role”.  How do you go about this with no script to guide you?  Let’s consider a process that breaks down your roles into Realms.  As I stated my Realms are Private, Professional and Personal.

Look at the chart below, it shows how I have done it for myself.

BOB'S REALMS
 

 

 

An Example

When I sold my planning practice, my Profesional Realm contracted, freeing up resources to expand my Activites  in the other Realms.  One Role that I wanted to expand on was “Father”.  After some thought, I came up with the Actvity of Dad, Daughters, and Dinner.  Once a month, one of my two daughters picks a resturant and we  go (my treat) to have a leisure meal.  The only rule is that we treat each other as equals and try to relate on a individual basis, as friends.  This has produced some suprising insights into our relationships. 



Dad, Daughters, & Dinner - July 2016

 

In my next post, I will discuss how to identify your Goals and link them to your Roles.

Until then, I wish you fulfillment.

Bob

Thanks for joining my blogosphere.....Living in the Bucket.....read the first post

Hello CyberSpace

Welcome to my first post on my Blog "Living in the Bucket".....The name comes from the concept that if you organize your Life Wealth correctly, there is no need for a "Bucket List", as each day is lived in a style that is in integrity with your life goals.

I am starting with the first newsletter I wrote in 2002, I will use that as an example of how I intend to continue my work of helping people define and accumulate wealth in the nine dimensions (only one is money!), in order to "Live in the Bucket".  The full Library can be found at : http://lifetimesolution.com/site/newsletter.asp

Bob

 

 

Climb Every Mountain …

My wife and I just returned from a two week trip to Olympic and Mt. Rainier National Parks.  For those of you who have visited the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, you know what a spectacular place it is.  For those of you who haven’t, I hope your future plans will allow you to.

We started planning for the trip in January.  This would be the first time that we had taken such a trip together and there was a need for some negotiation on the itinerary.  We ordered trail guides and maps to help us in our process.  The first guide that arrived had a picture of a bear sow and her cub on the front of it.   After seeing this picture, my wife announced that she was not going anywhere that there were bears!  I assured her that, in all my years of hiking, I had yet to see a bear and that the risk was worth taking.  Reluctantly, she continued our planning.  The area has many eco-systems --- such as mountains, glacier valleys, hot springs, rain forests, and seashores.  We wanted to see them all!   Our plan was to camp in the campgrounds and then spend the last three nights at The National Park Inn at Mt. Rainier.

Over the next few months, we laid out our hikes, planned our menus, and went thru our gear.  We had to add a few items of equipment; so we researched them on the internet and purchased some of them at local stores.  We even began a training program at the gym that lasted two months and had us in tip-top shape for our adventure.

Finally, we arrived in Seattle.  After spending a few nights there, we were on our way.  Over the next few days, we found we had to improvise; as some of our plans did not work out as we had thought.  Mother Nature forced us to shorten one of our hikes.  To my surprise, we also had to turn back on one of the trails when – yes, we ran into a bear and her cub!  They were a few hundred yards away from us, playing in an open field.  They never saw us, so we were free to spend some time watching.  What a treat to see wild animals in their own environment!  What we thought of as a danger actually turned out to be one of the high points of the trip.

 
It occurred to me that such an adventure is much like life itself.  We spend many hours planning for the future.  With the help of some sophisticated tools, we make projections.  Still, only the most naïve would believe that the final outcome would exactly match the original plan.  We spend most of our lives adjusting our plans to the reality of the moment.  Sometimes that reality involves confronting our fears and finding out that it was our pre-conceived perceptions that were the issue in the first place.  I still feel strongly that planning is a critical part of the process of living a successful life.  Still, it is in the adaptation of that plan that real life is experienced.   I guess there are always “bears” in every life, but with a good plan as a foundation, it’s easy to take a broader perspective and see the beauty of this thing we call life