Life Mapping: A Vision of Success - By: Ann Liu

Success is more than economic gains, titles, and degrees, if you want to achieve the success, have a proper plan is essential.

Planning for success is about mapping out all the aspects of your life. It is similar to a map, you need to define details in terms of origin, destination, vehicle, backpack, landmarks, and route.

Origin: Who you are

A map has a starting point. Your origin is who you are right now, when you ask people to introduce themselves, in the most case, people would say, "Hi, I'm Jean and I am a 17-year old, senior high school student." Yes, you got answer, but it does not tell you about who Jean is; it only tells you her present preoccupation.

To gain insights about yourself, you need to look closely at your beliefs, values, and principles aside from your economic, professional, cultural, and civil status. Your experiences can also give you insights on your good and not-so-good traits, skills, knowledge, strengths, and weaknesses.

Destination: A Vision of Who You Want to be

"Who do you want to be?" this is your vision. It is important that you know yourself so that you would have a clearer idea of who you want to be; and the things you want to change whether they are attitudes, habits, or points of view.

If you lack of self-awareness and hardly know about yourself, your vision and targets for the future will not be that clear. What I mean is basically your destination should cover all the aspects of your being: the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.

Vehicle: Your Mission

A vehicle is the means by which you can reach your destination. It can be analogized to your mission or vocation in life. To a great extent, your mission would depend on what you know about yourself.

Travel Bag: Your knowledge, Skills, and Attitude

Food, drinks, medicines, and other traveling necessities are contained in a bag. You can apply this concept into your life map as well. What I mean is that you can bring certain knowledge, skills, and attitudes with you. These determine your competence and help you in attaining your vision. Given such, there is a need for you to assess what knowledge, skills, and attitudes you have at present and what you need to gain along the way.

This two-fold assessment will give you insights on your landmarks or measures of success.

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

Landmarks confirm that if you are on the right track while the route 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 measures must be specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and time bound. But remember that you cannot set two major landmarks such as earning a master's degree and a doctorate degree within a period of three years since the minimum number of years to complete a master's degree is two years.

Anticipate Turns, Detours, and Potholes

The purpose of your life map is to minimize hasty and spur-of-the-moment decisions that could make you lose your way. But oftentimes our plans are modified along the way due to some inconveniences, delays, and other situations beyond our control.

It just like in any path, there are turns, detours, and potholes, thus we must anticipate them and adjust it accordingly.

About the Author

Ann Liu, a certified professional Internet marketer and author of Online Profiting. To learn how YOU too can succeed in Internet and affiliate marketing, please visit http://Marketingbyann.com

Article Directory Source: http://www.articlerich.com/profile/Ann-Liu/10675

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