Making your Holistic Context a reality
Helen Lewis – Picots Farm, Warwick, Qld.
Your Holistic Context is a great source of motivation and inspiration, it has some lovely words in it, in your future resource base you sound like a legend who will surely get an OAM, your community is nirvana, your infrastructure is in ship shape condition and OMG your landscape – it’s paradise!
I love the Holistic Context process- writing our values down providing clarity, distilling what is important to us and what our preferred future looks like. The process allows our heart to sing, the thrill can cause us to do the ‘Toyota’ jump, high five and say ‘Oh Yeh’ out loud. Our Holistic Contexts should excite us. However, the excitement can be short lived, when we have to contend with every day life getting in the way…
So there can be a gap between what we want and where we are. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s idea that “A goal (Context) without a plan is just a wish” is true. If we don’t make plans to fill that gap, we create a giant Air Sandwich as Charlie Gilkey put it in ‘Start Finishing’.
-The top slice of bread in the sandwich is ‘the Why, the big picture, our values, our future i.e. Our Context
– The bottom slice of bread is our day-to-day reality
The wheel of life exercise is a great tool for creating the sandwich filling, layer by layer towards the future and big picture, enabling you to rate (1-10) how satisfied you are now with each aspect of your life and then mark your preferred level of satisfaction rating – eg Finances might currently be rated at a 5 but you want them to be at 8 . This illustrates the gap in your air sandwich and provides you with insight into the journey ahead. ( More aspects of the Air Sandwich available HERE)
Let the work begin
Embark on filling your ‘Air Sandwich’ by creating your Master List- Make your Holistic Context real ( Down Load Here)
- Look at each aspect of your life (on the Wheel of Life) and work out what actions you need to take to shift from your current satisfaction level to your ideal. List these actions
- For the major aspects of your life – family / relationships, the landscape function and your business – you may need to identify Business Systems and Behaviour/Practice (Javan Bernakevitch – All Points Design BC Canada). Holistic Management planning and monitoring are Business Systems.
Eg: We might want to improve our landscape function. A Business System we need to put in place is to record growth/volume in the monitoring cage every time we move the stock.
A Behaviour or Practice might be to give everyone we see a compliment or daily meditation
Add these to the list
- Look at your context – your values and your preferred future resource base and ask what you need to do to make these a reality. Add to your MASTER LIST-make your context real
You may find you come up with the same action many times – put it down in the first instance and keep ticking it every time it comes up, the number of ticks assists you with making a prioritised list.
Tips to make it happen and fill that Air Sandwich with Activity and Results
- Prioritise using Stephen Covey’s BIG ROCKS– Priority Actions and Actions that cause the most important aspects of your life to thrive.
- For Priority Actions: Highlight your Priority Actions and associated tasks and Ask, ‘Who? What? When? By?’ Diarise and set reminders
- For Projects: Meet with those involved and Ask, ‘What does the finished project look like.’ Our ideas may differ. Plan out the project in stages- with the end in mind
- For Planning (necessary for managing holistically) Ask: Where will we Plan? Who is involved in the Plan, When will we Plan? When and How will we monitor progress? Arrange a date for Making the Plan.
Interested in dusting off and updating your Holistic Context and making an Action Plan? Email me to arrange a chat : helen@picotsfarm.com.au
For other Action Plans/ Planning/ Time Management ideas check out https://www.picotsfarm.com.au/learn–pf–hm-support.html