The 5 Foundational Pillars

To Build Your Future Life,
Your Foundation Must be Strong and Stable

Before you can believe and achieve your dreams you must believe in yourself.

You must understand your calling, be true to your values, take inventory of your strengths and weaknesses, catalog your talents and find what truly motivates you.

1. Anchoring your life with purpose gives you a strong sense of who you are, what you stand for and helps inform many of the decisions you make in your life.
2. Values offer clarity. They are the guiding light illuminating how you will behave.
3. Honestly assessing your strengths and weaknesses is fundamental to understanding yourself in relation to who you are and how you will be able to make your dreams come true.
4. Taking inventory of your talents will help you leverage the skills, experience and expertise you have (or can acquire) to move you closer to achieving each goal on the path to your dream life.
5. Motivation and inspiration are the fuel for your transformational journey and will be necessary to stay the course when things get hard or disappointing.

Pillar #1: Live with Purpose

Discover your Life Purpose

Some of us know, from an early age, what our purpose in life is, others go through life unsure.

Sometimes, we end up defining a purpose or calling that doesn’t come from within, rather it’s an inherited purpose from someone else. An inherited purpose can come from your parents or close family – their hopes and aspirations for what your life should be.

Or in some cases, you may have had a clear purpose and knew exactly what you wanted to do, but someone at some point in your life crushed the purpose you carried in your heart and soul.

I struggled in defining my purpose and realized in my early thirties that I wasn’t honestly living my full purpose. I’ve found that the following list of eight questions, was very helpful in helping me rediscover a critical component of my life’s purpose.

I recommend taking a few hours or, even, a few days to reflect on the questions below – this is an exercise that you should really devote as much attention to as it as you can invest – as this will be the foundation for everything else you do on the journey to living your dream life.

To help you on your path to discovering your purpose, write out the answers to the following questions:
1. What makes you happy?
2. What energizes you?
3. What is important to you?
4. What activity makes time fly?
5. Are you passionate in finding a solution to a problem?
6. Who do you admire for what they are doing?
7. What impact do you want to have in the world?
8. What do you want your legacy to be?

Still not sure? Get busy doing – try different things. What you love will surface to the top. Sometimes just trying something will make it clear whether it is what you were meant to do or not to do. Either way, it’s a great way to find you passion or eliminate an activity that doesn’t align.

While doing this exercise, be attentive to how you feel as you answer the questions. Be brutally honest with yourself – is this what I truly believe? Is this me?

After reviewing those questions and much contemplation, I realized that writing was something I deeply loved as a child and as a teenager. But as an adult, I did everything I could to avoid writing. I would write for school and business because I had to and that was my limit. I didn’t write with the enthusiasm and passion as I had done as a child, a teen or young college student. As an adult, the writing experience was wrought with stress and anxiety for me.

While reflecting on why that was, the memory of my freshman college Creative Writing professor reading my writing assignment in front of the class flashed in front of me. He finished reading it and praised my creative writing abilities – followed quickly with an angry tirade in concert with him jumping up and down, red-faced with my paper shaking in his hand. He screamed- face contorted, “It doesn’t matter if you’re creative and can put words together to form a great story, your blood-curdling use of commas proves you aren’t a writer.”

That humiliating experience. Those words. They stayed with me and writing became something I avoided whenever I could, and I certainly didn’t even consider attempting creative writing again.

I’m grateful that I revisited and questioned that moment. That I took the time to truly reflect on the things that really made me happy and were important to me. I learned that I loved writing and I had missed it. In my heart I had always wanted to teach and share my knowledge and expertise with others. I was impassioned when I could teach, and writing was an important aspect of sharing knowledge.

Writing and sharing my work with the world was and is an integral component of who I am. Rediscovering my passion for writing, helped re-calibrate my purpose and paved the way for me to enjoy writing again and gave me the courage to launch the digital publication the Decorating Diva (where I’m the primary writer and editor) as well as write content for clients of my digital media and marketing consultancy Panvezza.

My greatest hope for you, is that you find your true life purpose. Do not allow others or circumstances to define you or the life you are meant to live – let you define yourself and your life.

Pillar #2: Guiding Values

Identifying Your Core Values

Your values become your destiny.

Mahatma Ghandi

Values, simply put, are the standards/guiding principles that provide you with guidelines on how you will behave on a day-to-day basis and inform the choices you make.

Once you establish what your values are, you will also learn that being clear on those values will keep you grounded and also minimizes risks associated with internal civil war when your values don’t align with how you live your life – instances of misaligned values:

• if you state that you value family and that they are a priority, yet you spend hours ignoring them and playing video games or watching television – your actions belie your values.
• or, if you value being healthy but instead of exercising as planned to meet goals, you lose yourself in social media and push off your exercise. Obviously, the value isn’t being healthy as it was easily set aside for sitting on the couch Instagramming.

Knowing your values will also help you better understand what drives you and how you can leverage that to accomplish your goals. For instance, if you aren’t the type that holds being competitive as a value, it doesn’t make sense to frame your goals in a competitive structure. You’ll be wasting energy and resources fighting against your natural inclinations.

So how do you determine your personal values?

If you already know your values, that’s great!

Though you may want to re-examine your values and make sure they are still relevant and that they are YOUR values. As we mature and evolve, our values may change. It’s worth taking the time to make sure that your values are still pertinent. Reflecting on your values, you may discover that a value you listed, is not really one you feel is aligned with who you are. This values’ misalignment happens more often than one expects. We are influenced by many external forces (society, culture, family, friends, employers, and others) that over time shape and set a value system that we accept as our own, when in reality, and upon reflection, we realize that it isn’t a fit. When values don’t fit, you may experience moments where you feel an emotional and mental civil war taking place from within.

For those looking to answer the question, “What are my values?” I have a few favorite methods that make it easier to identify your values. (Keep in mind whatever method you use, I do recommend keeping the values list between five and seven at most. The more succinct your list the better.)

Discover Your Values – Methods and Quizzes to Guide Discovery

• Dictionary Method: In this method, you pick values that are important to you from a list of words that represent numerous values. There are many “values” dictionary lists freely available online. A few you may want to consider:
  • Personally, I use a method based on the Theory of Basic Human values, developed by Shalom H. Schwartz. I found this to be a succinct, universal list of core values and makes quick work of identifying core values, as well as being able to see supporting as well as opposing values.
  • One that I haven’t used, but has received wonderful feedback from others, is TapRoot’s post on “Live Your Core Values” (this also shows the exercise process for narrowing a large list of values you selected to the core ones and how to prioritize them) .
• Experience Based Method: In this process, contemplate key experiences in your life that impressed upon you positive values you respect and want to emulate. Then write those values/associated words on your list.
  • A twist on this approach, is to think of values laid bare in experiences that left a bad impression on you. For instance poor customer service. We’ve all experienced that person who strives to be unkind, consistently exudes negativity, lacks compassion and is mean-spirited in the course of performing their jobs. These are negative values, and by acknowledging those, you can find their opposite positive value. In the example above, it could look like this:
    • unkind==>kind,
    • negativity==>pragmatic positivity,
    • lacks compassion==>compassionate
    • and mean-spirited==>kind.
• Core Values Identification (Online Tests)
  • Life Values Inventory test is my favorite of the various online personal values assessments I tried. I think it is one of the better ones on the web. It will take you through the entire process of identifying values, narrowing them down to the essential values, helps you rank and prioritize the values and offers insight into the meaning of your select values. The test is free, but does ask for your email address in order to access the test. (For what it’s worth, I have not received any spam from them. )
  • Barrett Values Centre Test– is a fast, succinct system and the generated report provides valuable insights. This one is also free and does request an email address in order to send report.

Pillar #3: Play to Your Strengths

Evaluate You’re Strengths and Weaknesses

Making your dreams come true will require work, skills and perseverance. Fully understanding what your strengths and equally, your weaknesses are is critical to your success.

There are dozens of fantastic strength and weaknesses self-assessments on the internet that can guide you in identifying yours. Or, you can simply take a sheet or paper and pen and write them out in a two-column format (as much as I love digital and tech, there is something special and organic about hand writing when writing about ourselves).

Once you have a list of both your strengths and weaknesses do the following: For the strengths, list how they can help you shape a better future self and future life. For the weaknesses, write out what things you can do to minimize their impact or if possible completely eliminate them.

Here’s an example to help you get started on yours: One of my strengths is that I am highly creative, and I can leverage that skill to find solutions to problems and develop ideas that will successfully propel me toward my goals. A weakness, is that I have trouble focusing on one project or task at a time. That weakness can result in unfinished projects, or procrastination because I’m doing everything else that may enter my mind (new idea that I just have to work on right now, for instance) instead of the task at hand.

Knowing that I have that tendency, I minimize the impact of that weakness by planning and scheduling time that I can commit to focusing on one thing and that one thing only. Not until it gets done, I wouldn’t be able to sustain that, but for a certain amount of time. That time block, I have learned, based on being brutally honest in my self-assessment, is about 40 to 45 minutes max per session with 10 to 15 minute breaks in between sessions. Facing the reality of my weakness, and finding a way to minimize the impact has led me to success on delivering assignments and projects either on time or ahead of schedule.

Pillar #4: Showcase Your Talents

Recognize your Talents and Expertise

We all have talents and expertise that we love to use and share with the world via our work, hobbies, school, community or other channels. Take inventory of those skills -they will help you on your path to the life of your dreams.

The talent exploration exercise may take more than one sitting. Actually, it’s probably best that you take your time and document the things you do on a daily basis for a week or more. That process will illuminate just how much you do that you take for granted. Don’t minimize what you can do. We tend to discount the things we do very well, assuming others can do them too. Not true! Don’t be shy – list them all.

Pillar #5: What Motivates You?

Find Your “Why”

Motivators can be based on your values. If you value “winning” or “competition”, those can be powerful drivers to keep you going when the rough patches on the road to your dream life get you down. The same is true of other values like “family”. When the going gets tough and what feels like failures along the path discourage you – thinking of your family who you are doing this for and will benefit from the future you are shaping today – will inspire you to continue.

Beyond values, motivators can be anything that ignites your spirit and keeps you buoyed and going when you want to stop and quit. It’s that inner coach cheering you on, believing in you and knowing that you can do it – but only if you keep going.

Having your motivators in place before you embark on the transformational journey to make your dreams reality, could be the difference between the joy of living your dream or the disappointment of giving up on your dreams.