So how is your life manager doing? You are probably thinking, who? I dont have a life manager. Well then who is running your life? You are! If you stop and think about your life like you think about a business then you will realize that being your own life manager is the biggest and most important job you have, or ever could have.

You worked as an apprentice life manager for the first eighteen years then the job was yours whether you were ready or not. How did you do as an apprentice? Did you learn the life lessons you needed to know to be successful? Life lessons included goal setting, organization, time management, study habits and more? Did you have good teachers or did their life managers need to be fired?

Well if your life is not where you want it to be then now is the time to get it on track. Put your life manager on probation. Give your life manager evaluations on how well the job is being done.

Lets get started!

Step one - you may need to start over in your training as a life manager. Find a mentor. Find someone who has his life on track. Someone who has his life going in the direction you want your life to be going. Someone who has the job you want. Someone who is where you want to be.

Step two - Compare your life with theirs. What do they do different than you? What are their habits and work ethics? Ask yourself good questions. Do they sleep in every day or are they up at dawn? Do they get to work early or are they usually late for work? Are they organized or disorganized? Are they conservative or are they risk takers? Remember your ideal life and mine might be different. Your ideal mentor and mine might be different. That is okay; pick someone that you want to be like.

Step three - Analyze your habits and character. How do they differ from your mentors? Decide which habits you need to change to be like the successful person that you are modeling. Remember you will not have to change everything about yourself. We all have both good and bad habits. Keep the good ones and change the others.

Step four - Make those changes! Make the changes you need to make, and then monitor your progress. It doesnt matter how hard you are working if you are not doing the right things. The only way you will be able to tell if you are doing the right things is by the results you receive.

This is where goal setting comes into play. Write down on a piece of paper a problem you would like to work on changing. Then write down the outcome you would like to see. It needs to be measurable and have a time limit. The outcome could be weight loss, as an example. You would not want to write down something like I want to lose weight. It needs to be specific. Like, I want to lose twenty-five pounds in four months. Now you know exactly how much weight you want to lose, and by what date you want to lose the weight.

Next you would write down all the things you are going to do to lose twenty-five pounds in four months. Perhaps your plan would be to eat a bowl of ice cream before bed every night, take a nap every day, to do no exercise, things like that. These are known as the approaches, although not the most appropriate approaches. Now you pick a time to re-evaluate your progress to see if your approaches are getting you closer to your goal. So lets say you re-evaluate in two weeks and see that you have gained three pounds. Your approaches are not working. You do not give up or get down on yourself you only try different approaches. You do not change the goal you change the approaches you are using to reach the goal. So this time you try eating a salad everyday, going for a thirty minute walk after dinner each night, and drinking a gallon of water a day. Now in two weeks when you re-evaluate you progress you see that you have lost six pounds. You look at the two different approaches. The second ones work so you continue doing these for two more weeks and then you re-evaluate them again. By the end of four months you have reached your goal, and are on track as a life manager.

If you are married, get your spouse to have a life manager meeting with you every two weeks to go over your goals, approaches, and the results. If you are not married or in a relationship with someone who shares your desire for self improvement, get a friend to meet with you and work towards improving each others lives.

Remember you cant get where you want to go until you find out where you are. You need to make a map. Then you need to constantly check to ensure you are still on course. Happy navigating!