These principles and framework are a work in progress and will be refined over time as we explore them together. Principles are unchanging, universal truths found in nature. Principles are not commands or suggestions, they are cause and effect relationships, unbreakable natural laws or rules, or a clear view of the true nature of the way things are. Principles are valuable guides for intentional behavior designed to achieve specific results.
“We control our actions, but the consequences that flow from those actions are controlled by principles” – Stephen Covey
The Simple Framework
The philosophy is that you can exact change in your life by taking steps and applying true principles. After reading hundreds of personal growth books, you begin to see patterns and repetition in what is being said. All this advice can fit into the following simplified framework.
- 4 Steps (Movement)
- Activate
- Clarify
- Align
- Progress
- 6 Areas (Map)
- wellness
- character
- relationships
- contribution
- wealth
- lifestyle
Framework Outline Expanded With Concepts & Principles
We start with an introduction to personal growth followed by 4 simple and vital steps you need to take in all areas in your life. Finally there seem to be 6 areas of life that all self-help advice falls into. I simplify and organize the principles and concepts here in a way, I pray, that will truly get you to where you are going.
0. YOUR LIFE
- OUR MAIN GOAL: I want to be completely transparent, the full and sole goal of the content here is to help you “live a happier, fuller life.”
- FRAMEWORK – Following a strategy built on a simple and employable framework assists in navigating change and progress in your life.
- PROGRESS – Moving forward and making progress in life increases your chances for happiness.
- PRINCIPLES – Principles are fundamental truths or propositions that can be used to make progress.
- REPETITION – Internalizing principles often requires repetition. In other words, if you rinse and repeat, you improve absorption and application.
- SPIRAL UP – As there are many areas of life to progress in, and as it takes time to progress from precept to precept, it is necessary to rotate progress from area to area to spiral upward.
- PROBABILITY – While you can’t 100% control the outcome, there is much you can do to increase your chances. As there are many principles of progression toward happiness and fulfillment, each principle should be viewed as an increase in probability rather than a guarantee.
- APPLICATION – Internalization is most likely to succeed when you immediately apply what you learn through actions, activities, exercises, worksheets, checklists, challenges, and more.
- 4 STEPS: There are 4 steps you need to take to create change and direct the outcome in your life or create your situation or existence.Activate, Clarify, Align, Progress.
- 6 AREAS: health, character, relationships, contribution, wealth, lifestyle
4 STEPS
- Activate – Waking up, acknowledging you can move, taking responsibility, and doing something.
- Clarify – Getting clear on what you want in life and where you are going.
- Align – Align your subconscious mind with your conscious aims.
- Progress – Taking the steps and actions that will yield the results you envision.
1. ACTIVATE
- AWAKEN – If you awaken from and reject the automatic path set out for you by others, then you open up the possibility to determine your own path.
- POSSIBILITY – Acknowledging the possibility that you CAN make changes in your life and design and create the life you want is the first step in enabling change.
- RESPONSIBILITY – You, and you alone, are 100% responsible for your past, current, and future situation in life.
- CHOOSE – Recognizing that you have a choice in every single moment greatly increases your power to create a life you want.
- INITIATE – It is up to you to create the life you want. No one can or will do this for you.
- LIVE – Allowing yourself to live a happy and fulfilled life right now and along your journey to create a life of progression will move you more swiftly on that path. Enjoy it now. Don’t wait to enjoy it.
2. CLARIFY
- DESTINATION – You are significantly more likely to end up at your destination if you have chosen a destination.
- DECIDE – Choosing one narrow path and consequently cutting off all other options significantly increases your focus and chances for success.
- INCLUDE – Defining your destination in every important area of your life increases your chances for happiness. Leaving out an area risks imbalance and happiness.
- INDIVIDUAL – Take inventory and determine where you are in life to give the most accurate starting point in your journey to your new life. Know yourself.
- DETERMINE – Using what you know of yourself you can more accurately determine what you want in life.
- ONE THING – Intensify your focus by narrowing your targets. A diluted focus dilutes your power.
- TRADE OFFS – Some things by nature are mutually exclusive. Knowing and accepting this will enable you to allocate your resources effectively.
- DIRECTION – If you use your determined destination to give direction to your daily actions, to answer questions, and to make decisions, the probability of your dreams becoming reality increases dramatically. Your destination and its plan should become your guiding map.
- UNCONDITIONAL – Your happiness is not conditional on arriving at your destination or achieving your goals. Indeed, allowing your happiness during the process will assist in the process.
- REMEMBER – Adopting some method to continually remember the destination you are headed in increases the probability of reaching it.
3. ALIGN
- AUTOMATIC CHOICES – Because you have so many choices to make every day, your subconscious mind helps run your life on automatic. Understanding this and using this knowledge can greatly assist you on your way.
- TWO MINDS – Conscious and subconscious. Waking brain and lizard brain. Recruit them to work together.
- SUBCONSCIOUS – Your subconscious mind does not think, reason, but drives you with instincts (RAS), emotions and mood. These emotions have a great impact on your actions.
- MINDSET – Getting your mindset right leads to the feelings and moods that trigger the right actions, which create the target results. Start with mindset and your subconscious beliefs.
- SABOTAGE – While trying to save you from pain, your subconscious mind may sabotage your conscious efforts by emotionally steering you to return to where you subconsciously believe you should be.
- SUPPORT – When your conscious and subconscious mind are aligned and focused on the same goals, your subconscious mind creates the emotions that support and encourage you to effortlessly gravitate toward success.
- THERMOSTAT – Your tolerance for success and happiness can trigger you to sabotage or support your conscious plans for happiness and progression.
- FALSEHOODS – False beliefs are things you know, which just ain’t so. These incorrect understandings of the world cause us to make unsupportive choices.
- EMOTIONS – Understanding and managing emotions, mood, feelings, how you feel, and how you respond goes a long way to give you control on your happiness and progression.
- RESPONSES – Design and reprogram a helpful and supportive response for those moments when sabotaging scripts kick in to overcome blocks on your road to success.
- FEARS – Your fears are invented by your subconscious to protect you, but they keep you from greatness. Feel the fear and act anyway. Disarm the fear by setting it in its place.
- VALUES – Values are what’s important to you. Unique to you. Values explain the priority you place on what you see is more important. Values can be chosen or inherited. Ask yourself, what values will get you where you want to go?
- NEEDS – You have six needs that drive you. Self (certainty or reliability and uncertainty or variety), Social (significance or importance and love or connection), and Service (growth or progression and contribution or growing others).
- WITHIN – You can gain great strength by filling your needs from within. For example your need for love can be filled by loving yourself or your need for importance can be filled by acknowledging you are important to you.
- PARADIGMS – Paradigms drive you subconsciously to create your life in the way you subconsciously believe it should be. Paradigm beliefs are built through evidence from words, observations, and personal experience and reinforced through interpretation cycles.
- ATTITUDE – Positivity propels you forward.
- RELEASE – Removing emotional blocks, resolving trauma, re-interpreting past wrongs and needs, will help you move frictionless to your goals.
- PROGRAMMING – Whether you wrote it intentionally or not there is a program running in the background in your head. You can either accept what was accidentally put there or install a program that helps you.
- PROGRAMMER – You can consciously program your subconscious to help you get what you want. You can use words, modeling, experience, and interpretation to create new supportive programming, paradigms, and beliefs.
- MANIFESTING – You can, through your initiative, mental efforts, and actions bring about in the physical world visions you create in your mind.
- GRATITUDE – An emotion to cover all emotions, gratitude for things you appreciate draws your energy and focus on those things you want to grow in your life.
- TOWARD FORCE – There are forces that push you toward your goals (pleasure, desire, joy). Recruit them to push your sails toward the promised land.
- AWAY FORCE – There are forces that can push you away from your goals (pain or fears). These forces push you in all directions. Recruit them to push your sails toward your intention or away from those elements that detract you.
- NEGATIVITY – The supportive way to interact with negative emotions is to give them minimal airtime, listen, feel, and move on.
- POSITIVITY – Deal with natural positivity by greeting it, feeling it, and riding the wave.
- EMOTIONAL HOME – Live in a good emotional home. We all have an emotional state that we naturally gravitate to. If your emotional home is a negative or unsupportive one, you must move it to a positive and supportive emotional home.
- ADVOCATE – Be your own best advocate. Argue for a better tomorrow not a continuation of a bad today.
4. PROGRESS
- DIRECTED ACTION – To create tasks and actions that will propel you to your goal, start with the end goal and work backward to daily tasks and habits.
- MASSIVE ACTION – Take massive action and create massive results.
- DIRECTED GOALS – Set goals that mean something. Specific, Measurable, Achievable and Attainable by Yourself, Realistic or Reachable, and Timebound with a deadline.
- COMMITMENT – When you make a promise to yourself, sticking with it, being resourceful, exclusively attaching yourself to a direction, you empower yourself to create the world you want.
- INTENTION – Setting and stating your intention clarifies and locks you into your path and takes an unquestionable step toward manifesting your goal.
- INTELLIGENCE – You can overcome or override most obstacles by using your innate intelligence, imagination, and resourcefulness.
- HUNGER – When you are hungry enough for the outcome, you can go to amazing feats to bring them about.
- PASSION – Passion gives you guts and energy to charge towards your goal with confidence and fire.
- URGENCY – Now is the only day you get to act in. Urgency presses you to bring about the target and increases the priority in taking action to bring it about.
- FOCUS – Increase the attention and energy you place on your goal and increase the chances of reaching it.
- TOOLS OF CHANGE
- WILL POWER – Willpower has limitations and should be shored up. And you shouldn’t rely on it… to a point.
- ACTIVATION ENERGY – By making preparations you can take advantage of willpower and efforts to progress by making preparations beforehand.
- PREPARATION – Taking efforts ahead of time improves your chances of success.
- SOCIAL STRENGTH – Drawing upon the strengths of others helps you when you are down and you help others when they are down.
- PURPOSE – The reason you do something gives you the strength to hold on.
- VISUALIZATION – PARADIGMS – Change your world inside and change your world outside. Spending time in your visualized world, you increase the chances that your visualized world will become your real world.
- NO THANKS – Saying, “No,” to everything that doesn’t add to your dream clears a path for your dream to actuate.
- REMEMBER – Have some built-in device to remember where you are headed.
- MANAGEMENT – Managing yourself, your resources like time and financial resources to create momentum and acceleration toward your goals.
- CHUNK – Achieve big results by chunking them down into smaller parts.
6 LIFE AREAS
- health
- character
- relationships
- contribution
- wealth
- Lifestyle
wellness
- WHOLE – Seeking to make yourself whole by including parts of Body, Mind, and Spirit in your goal will bring peace and stability.
- WELLNESS – If you achieve full optimal wellness, you have the energy and vitality and greater chances to succeed.
- ENERGY – Having enough energy to perform your various actions will significantly increase your chances of success.
- VITALITY – Vitality, the feeling of life, is key and important to enjoying more happiness and fulfillment.
- LONGEVITY – The ability to live longer and enjoy greater health at the same time will greatly improve your happiness.
- STRENGTH – Being stronger in terms of muscular strength improves your feeling of health.
- ENDURANCE – The ability to endure physical trauma enables you to ride out the vicissitudes of life.
- NOURISHMENT – Macro or micronutrients, and nourishments are all important to giving your body the fuel and the building blocks you need to grow and enjoy life.
- ENVIRONMENT – Reducing negative elements in your life such as toxins or any harmful elements and cleaning out those that have already become clinged to you.
- PROACTIVITY – Taking the initiative to achieve a high level of health rather than reacting.
- ACTIVITY – Physical movement and exercise frequently done for at least a 30min duration, that crosses intensity levels with variation is important to staying in health.
- REST – Relaxation, rest, recovery, stress management, play, and sleep are critical to good health.
- EMOTIONAL HEALTH – Enjoying emotions and spending most of your time in enjoyable and positive and supportive emotions.
- MENTAL HEALTH – Not brooding on trauma, issues, and unresolved events. Dealing with things and focusing on joy and progression…
- SPIRIT – Spiritual nourishment. Soothing and nourishing to your soul, your humanity, and the deep longings of the heart will do much to enrich your life with meaning, purpose, and a sense of love, appreciation, and belonging.
character
- EMOTIONAL HOME – Where you live emotionally in a natural way determines the quality of your life.
- EMOTION MANAGEMENT – By effectively managing your emotions, you become a better, more loveable person.
- MANAGE SELF – Managing your life, time, finances, energy, skills, …
- COMPASS – Having a moral compass, standards you live by, or deep convictions will help determine who you are. A sense of what is right in your world. Spiritual nourishment.
- INTEGRITY – Representing the truth makes you believable and reliable.
- CONVICTION – Being true to yourself and your beliefs builds and solidify their characters.
- WISDOM – Wisdom is the ability to use knowledge to make progress.
- CONFIDENCE – The feeling of self-assurance and belief in one’s ability.
- FORTITUDE – The ability to withstand attacks and fortitude.
- FORESIGHT – The ability to think toward the future.
- HUMANITY – Embrace your humanity and accept that you’re not perfect.
- RELAXED – The ability to live with the fears and enjoy life.
- NATURALLY HAPPY – Develop an affinity toward being happy and calm.
- GROWTH – Personal growth through intentional progression builds strong, reliable character.
- LOVING – Being kind and loving are principles that, in good conscience, should always trump all others.
- INTELLIGENCE – Being smart, wise, and using your knowledge toward positive ends. The glory of God is intelligence.
- ROUNDED – A well rounded knowledge prepares you to handle a well-rounded world.
- EDUCATED – Knowing valuable information about the world around you helps you make better choices and navigate the world around you.
- SUPPORTIVE BELIEFS – Building beliefs and paradigms that correctly depict the world around you will make you a better person and help you achieve greater happiness.
- CLEAN – Keeping your self and surroundings clean help keep your mind clean and make life more pleasant and progress more possible.
- THRIFTY – This just means being efficient with the allocation of your financial resources.
- NEAT – Being organized helps you keep an organized and efficient mind.
- KINDNESS – Being interested in others, kind, considerate, sets us up for favoritism and being in favor with others.
- ATTRACTIVE – Being someone who is friendly, easy to love, attractive, and pleasant to be around will get you much further in life than almost any other personality characteristic.
relationships
- LOVE
- OTHERS – Having a love for others and being outward thinking not only makes life more enjoyable but also increases the chance of success as others return their affections.
- YOURSELF – Feeds your need. If you love yourself, others will love you, too
- GOD & UNIVERSE – Love and gratitude for a higher power in your life ensures humility and teachability and a sense of belonging to something greater.
- CONNECTION – Relating to others is an important part of finding happiness and fulfillment.
- WHY RELATE – The pros and cons of building and maintaining relationships.
- SOCIAL ANIMALS – Relating with other humans is the nature of humans.
- HAPPIER TOGETHER – More connections bring more happiness. People who connect and relate experience less stress and more joy.
- GREATER – Sum of the whole greater than sum of the parts. Better together.
- STRENGTH – The ability for people to create or achieve more together.
- SYNERGY – The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. When people work together, they can achieve more than if they work alone.
- BENEFITS – The benefits of working together include specialization, synergy, portfolio protection, support systems, mentoring, collective wisdom
- TEAM – Teaming up with others can help you do more together.
- BUY IN – Getting buy in from people you lead helps them follow naturally.
- LEAD – Lead others with love. A leader is someone who others naturally follow.
- DELEGATION – Let others help. Let go of some of those things you like to do by letting others help.
- RECRUIT – Recruit others to your cause. Inspire others to join you in your vision of the future.
- ROMANCE – Filling the need we all have for intimate relationships in our lives brings happiness and enjoyment.
- DIVINE – Whether you admit it or not, you have a relationship with the divine; fostering and nurturing that relationship will increase your chances to experience the fullness of joy in this life and beyond.
- HARMONY – Getting along with others even though others have different beliefs and interests will imbue your life with richness and fulfillment.
- TOLERANCE – Allowing others to live as themselves and accepting them despite those elements or characteristics you do not value will also increase your joy. Live and let live.
- GOOD & BAD – There can be both good and bad relationships in your life. Grow the good eliminate, elude, and evade the bad.
- SOLITUDE – You are first and foremost an individual; it is necessary and advisable to be alone with yourself from time to time.
- LONELINESS – Alone is the opposite of connection. You are never alone by force. Loneliness is a choice – ask yourself why you’re choosing that.
- ALONE – Going it alone is less enjoyable, more difficult, and sometimes impossible.
- ESTRANGED – Sometimes when people are under the influence of their ego or fear, they don’t want to connect and their happiness suffers.
- WHO – Choosing who to establish and grow relationships with is so very important. Who you associate with can make you who you are.
- DISCONNECTING – Sometimes people are vampires, sometimes they are just much lower and pull you down. Demote these relationships to a 3min status. Be friendly, but at arms length.
- TRANSITIONING – Intentionally changing friends to a higher caliber crowd may be uncomfortable in the beginning.
- QUALITY vs QUANTITY – You can intentionally increase the quantity of relationships in your network. Ask yourself what is more important? Deeper relationships or knowing more people. And it’s not always a tradeoff. Just because you have a relationship with someone does not mean you need to actively manage it.
- MAINTENANCE – Understand relationships, taking responsibility for them, investing in those you want to grow, and teaming up with others for an important end.
- INVEST – Isn’t it about time.
- LOVE IS A VERB – Love is first something you do, then something you feel. Action, service, seeking, understanding, reciprocating, expressions of gratitude and appreciation, making sacrifices when necessary and appropriate support are all forms love the verb takes.
- BLIND LOVE – Sometimes we must love one aspect of someone and turn a forgiving or blind eye on another.
- FORGIVENESS – The ability to excuse bad behavior in others and condemn the crime while giving the criminal a second chance also allows us to move beyond our own imperfections. Forgiveness reduces the friction of progression.
- COMMUNICATE – Communication is NOT the key. What you communicate is the key. Better communication. Lots of words merely confuse. Say more by saying less. Communicate the good. Keep quiet on the bad. Discuss progress. Leave behind the bad. Communicate with not just words. Different ways to communicate: Words of affirmation, Gifts, Service, Quality time, Physical touch.
- BROADCASTING – What we feel when we speak is more important than what we say in words.
- RECIPROCATION – Some relationships are “give” relationships like that of a parent, some are “take” like that of a child, but the default relationship is one of reciprocating.
- EQUAL ENERGY EXCHANGE – An equal or somewhat equal relationship of each giving a little and taking a little fosters a continued valuable relationship.
- TYPES OF LOVE – Whether romantic, brotherly, or just friendship, love and relationships can exist on so many different levels. Ancient Greeks have 8 different types.
- HIGHEST – The highest form of love is how a God loves his child. Need love or gift love.
- LOVE IN BUSINESS – Love is the key to business relationships with customers and partners. A continuous long-term business relationship is based on love.
- RESPONSIBILITY – Take 100% responsibility, own it as tenancy in the entirety, jointly and severally, 50% vs 100%.
contribution
- MEANING- A clear purpose helps to bring meaning and fulfillment. But meaning in life can come from many sources including from within.
- SERVICE – A fulfilling life’s purpose will always include service to others, or in some way to humanity.
- UNIQUE – Your life’s purpose will draw on your unique special attributes. You are the gift you give the world through your service, and there is no one like you.
- FUTURE – A focused life’s purpose or mission in life envisions a version of the future that makes the world a better place.
- PASSION – Your day’s work, mission, or life’s purpose is fed the energy of passion fueled by a reason or a “why” enabling you to endure obstacles and travel toward your vision with force.
- OUTWARD – Outward thinking, meaning focusing on serving others, makes what you do meaningful to others, valuable, and will propel you naturally to success.
- CREATION – Making something valuable, bringing it into reality or the physical world, adds a contribution to the world that only you can bring.
- RECIPROCITY – As the world has given you so much, your life increases in happiness and a feeling of fulfillment when you do something to give back.
- SELFLESS – Focusing on the needs of others above your own needs improves your value to others.
- EXCHANGE – When you give to the world, you must ask for value in exchange.
- SUFFERING – Driven by an urgent need to eliminate the suffering of others we can perform super heroic deeds.
- JOY – Driven by an urgent need to bring joy to others, we outperform our own expectations.
- PEOPLE MATTER – When you put people above programs or profit, you end up with happy loyal people, profit and successful programs.
- SEEN – Helping others feel seen and understood wins their hearts and attention.
wealth
- TRACK – Keeping track of your financial transactions lets you better see what is going on, so you can make better decisions.
- PLAN – When you set clear financial goals and break those down to actionable tasks, you are more likely to thrive financially in life.
- FORCED SURPLUS – Live on less. Spend less. Keep more. Let your money plants live long enough to produce more for you.
- LEARN – Educate yourself financially by always seeking to improve your knowledge, skill, and understanding and using what you do learn to progress.
- ADVICE- Getting advice from those who have been there, and having the courage to say, “No,” to those unqualified to give advice will give you the secrets and protect you from the falsehoods of life.
- CASH FLOW – Seek for cash flow rather than capital gains. Something that pays continually is worth much more than something that pays once.
- DEATH & TAXES – Learn about and prepare for the two constants in the universe: death and taxes.
- KEEP – Of all the money that comes into your hands, a portion of that money is yours to keep forever.
- GUARD – Guard your wealth with all your resources. Do not let anything diminish that portion of your holdings that is yours to keep forever.
- GIVE – Being generous in your giving will increase your gratitude and aptitude and open you to generosity.
- PASSIVE – The best kind of income or financial growth is passive income, when you get something from very little effort.
- EARN – You don’t have to earn money, just receive it. Hard work is also not required – just intelligence.
- INCOME – There are many different ways to generate wealth, seeking out those ways that bring the most wealth with the least effort is the wisest course of action.
- BLOCKS – Do whatever you can to cultivate helpful and supportive opinions, philosophies, beliefs, and paradigms about money or wealth and remove those that are hurtful or unsupportive.
- WEALTH FILES – Cultivate wealth supporting philosophies.
- FRIENDS – Seek to initiate, build, and maintain friendships with people who, by their situation, you judge to be good stewards of wealth.
- DEBT – Are you leveraged? Are you using other people’s money to build your wealth? Get out of bad debt and into good debt.
lifestyle
- FREEDOM – Live and enjoy what you have everyday.
- GRATITUDE – Cultivate a constant feeling of gratitude for what you have, and you will find more flow to you.
- BOUNDLESS – Break down invisible boundaries at every opportunity.
- CELEBRATION – Pause periodically to celebrate and enjoy progress.
- DO WHAT YOU LOVE – Consistently doing what you love brings endless joy and fulfillment.
- ENJOYMENT – Enjoyment is an emotion you must consciously cultivate to continually experience.
- BE WITH WHO YOU LOVE – The people you associate with either lift you to a higher plane of enjoyment or tear you down. See only to associate with those that build you up.
- ENJOY THE RIDE – Your life will be filled with happy memories when you can be in the moment and make a conscious effort to enjoy your life no matter what is going on.
- JOURNEY – The journey is more important, in many instances, than the destination. Fully experience the journey and the joy of the ride along the way.
- LIVE A LITTLE – Work is more than labour. Learn to live, take risks, and enjoy the moment.
- LIVE AND LET LIVE – Allow others to be themselves and give yourself permission to let loose periodically.
- CHOOSE YOUR BATTLES – Some arguments, goals, and achievements are not worth winning in the moment. Sometimes you need to ceed a little to gain ground in the next battle.
- EXPERIENCE – Your personal experience is what really matters in life. Do your best to enjoy your situation in life.
- PEOPLE MATTER MOST – Enjoy people, look for the good in them, and make the most of every opportunity.
- HOBBIES – Cultivating hobbies, talents, and interests you have in the world around you will enrich your life.
- ENTERTAINMENT – Seeking out good and meaningful entertainment recharges the mind, spirit, and soul.
- LEISURE – Taking the moment to coast allows you to harvest the joy you’ve grown along the way.
- LUXURY – Treating yourself to the very best in life brings love and joy to your soul.
- STOP – Stopping to smell the roses brings joy and appreciation into life.
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