Personal Growth

Level 10 Life

level10lifeAs part of my foray into bullet journaling, I ran across some people doing “Level 10 Life” in their journals. This intrigued me, so I started researching it. From what I was able to find, it started with the “Miracle Morning” by Hal Elrod. I’ve borrowed one of his books available on my Kindle and am reading it currently to see if the morning process he advocates will work for me. I’ll report back on that after I finish it. One of the bullet journalers I follow has several posts about how she’s implementing it, here and here.

Since I’m trying to digitize my bullet journal (at least for now) I wanted a way to put this into my OneNote, which means either hand drawing and taking a picture or doing an Excel chart. While expert Excel chart makers can do this wheel type chart, I don’t have the time or expertise to do it. So I did a radar chart. I may change this later on, but thought it was a decent start. While the graphics are amusing, the heart of this is setting goals and tasks that will improve the self scores for each area. That’s a little harder. I decided that I’ll categorize this blog along the ten dimensions, and see how it shakes out. My OCD tendencies had me re-wording the categories as single words, but no single word seemed to work for Personal Growth, so I decided the OCD person in my brain needs to just shut up.

Companions – for me, this is about the people who mean the most to me. I blur the lines between “family” and “friends” enough to cause confusion. So the concept of companions on this journey of life seemed appropriate. My challenge is staying in closer contact with these people. I’ve come to rely on Facebook to update everyone on what’s going on in my life, and it’s very impersonal. My goal is to cultivate closer relationships with my core group of companions. I’m not quite sure exactly what that’s going to look like yet.

Romance – I am so lucky to have a great guy who loves and understands me. My goal will be to spend more quality time with him, and less “veg in front of the TV” time.

Health – I gave myself a really low score on health. I know my health could be a lot worse, but I rated it in terms of how happy I am with my current state. I’m having bariatric surgery to start working on the weight. I will increase my activity level as I’m able post-op. Once I’m far enough post-op to get on the biologic treatments for my PsA I will. So my focus will be eating well and moving more for the time being.

Environment – This one seems a little odd in comparison with the others. It’s about the physical environment we’re in at work and home. I haven’t been able to tolerate outside activities or do much in the way of clearing clutter and cleaning inside, so I also rated this one pretty low, but only because there’s so many things I want to do as I have time, energy, and finances. De-cluttering, cleaning, landscaping, and decorating for starters. I’ll refine this one as I go along.

Career – I think I’m doing pretty good in my career. Once I made the decision to go into Medical Informatics and landed my current job, things have smoothed out. I’m including graduate school in this category, since the only reason I’m doing it is to advance my career. All of my goals are long-term here, so I’ll focus on school for now.

Finances – This area sucks for us, there’s no way around it. All in all, we’re very lucky. We make enough to support the family, and are comfortable. But the debt doesn’t seem to budge, and we’re not implementing much of a plan. I have loaded our data into YNAB (link) and the Mister and I have committed to reviewing it jointly every week, developing a plan and working the plan. First goal is to re-build our emergency cushion as recent unexpected expenses had reduced it. Then get rid of the debt as aggressively as we can. Oh, and buy a used truck sometime late summer or early fall for cash.

Personal Growth – All of the non-school stuff I want to learn and do falls into this category, except for Spirituality. So my bullet journal/miracle morning stuff will go here, trying to learn other languages, etc. My goal is to dedicate some time to doing these things on a regular basis.

Spirituality – I feel like I’ve really lost something here. I used to be active with the church I attended, even serving as a Board Member. I’ve worked with and founded non-traditional religious non-profits, and used to spend a lot of time working on my spiritual life. I feel like that completely flew out the window during marriage #2. I want to get this back, and I’m looking at a few ways to work on that. More to come.

Recreation – There’s so many things I love to do: knitting, spinning, beading, reading, computer stuff, etc. Right now I can’t do much of the craft work because of the pain in my hands, but hopefully this will change.

Giving – I wasn’t sure what to do with this, at all. I volunteer time as a medic for a roller derby league a friend of mine skates with, so I counted that. I don’t feel like there’s a lot of ‘giving back’ in my life right now, and I don’t know what that will look like, but I’m going to give it some thought.

This ended up being a much longer post than I intended, and a lot of it is “I don’t know what this will look like, but I know I want it to be better.” But it’s a start, and one of the lessons I need to learn is that sometimes good enough is good enough.