Life Mapping: The En route to Success

Origin:  Who you are

A map has a initial point. Your origin is who you are right now. Most people when asked to introduce themselves would say, “Hi, I’m Jean and I am a 17-year old, senior high school student.” It does not tell you about who Jean is; it only tells you her present preoccupation. To increase insights about yourself, you need to look closely at your attitude, values, and principles aside from your financial, professional, cultural, and civil status. Furthermore, you can also reflect on your experiences to give you insights on your good and not-so-good traits, skills, knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses. Upon introspection, Jean realized that she was highly aggravated, generous, service-oriented, but intolerant. Her leaning was in the biological-medical field. Moreover, she thought that life must serve a purpose, and that wars were vicious to human dignity.

Destination: A visualization of who you want to be

“Who do want to be?” this is your vision. Now it is significant that you know yourself so that you would have a clearer design of who you want to be; and the things you want to alter whether they are attitudes, habits, or points of view. If you hardly know yourself, then your vision and targets for the future would also be uncertain. Your target should cover all the aspects of your being: the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. Continuing Jean’s story, after she defined her beliefs, values, and principles in life, she decided that she wanted to have a life dedicated in serving her fellowmen.

Vehicle: Your Mission

A vehicle is the means by which you can reach your target. It can be analogized to your task or profession in life. To a great extent, your assignment would depend on what you know about yourself. Bases on Jean’s self-assessment, she determined that she was right to become a doctor, and that she sought to become one. Her chosen profession was a medical doctor. Describing her vision-mission fully: it was to live a life dedicated to serving her fellowmen as a doctor in conflict-areas.

Travel Bag: Your knowledge, skills, and attitude

Food, drinks, medicines, and other travelling necessities are enclosed in a bag. Applying this perception to your life map, you also bring with you convinced knowledge, skills, and attitudes. These determine your capability and help you in attaining your dream. Given such, there is a need for you to review what knowledge, skills, and attitudes you have at present and what you need to add along the way. This two-fold assessment will give you insights on your landmarks or measures of success. Jean realized that she needed to gain professional knowledge and skills on medicine so that she could become a doctor. She knew that she was a bit impatient with people so she realized that this was something she wanted to change.

Landmarks and Route: S.M.A.R.T. objectives

Landmarks verify if you are on the right track while the course determines the travel time. Thus, in planning out your life, you also need to have landmarks and a route. These landmarks are your measures of success. These procedures must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound. Thus you cannot set two major landmarks such as earning a master’s degree and a doctorate degree within a time of three years, since the minimum number of years to complete a master’s degree is two years. Going back to Jean as an instance, she recognized the following landmarks in her life map: completing a bachelor’s degree in biology by the age of 21; completing medicine by the age of 27; earning her specialization in transmittable diseases by the age of 30; getting deployed in local public hospitals of their town by the age of 32; and serving as doctor in war-torn areas by the age of 35.

Predict Turns, Detours, and Potholes

The reason of your life map is to diminish quick and spur-of-the-moment decisions that can make you lose your way. But often times our plans are customized along the way due to some inconveniences, delays, and other situations away from our control. Like in any path, there are turns, detours, and potholes thus; we must predict them and fine-tune consequently.