The Creation of the Future Self:  The Strategic Life Planning Handbook is one of Feroce’s most powerful tools of personal discovery — of your and your coach’s discovery of who you really are and what, at last, it is you really want out of your life and work.  Download for free the first, powerful chapter.  You’ll learn more about coaching and begin to find yourself asked the questions that cause you to explore who you really are.

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The Handbook is just one of the many tools our coaches may use with you.  Here’s a summary of the chapters, which may correspond roughly to the number of weeks you’re in coaching.

Excerpts from Chapter 1, and Introduction to the Handbook

In Tsarist Russia, a priest walks down a country road.

Suddenly a soldier confronts him. The soldier aims his rifle at the priest. The soldier shouts, “Who are you? Where are you going? Why are you going there?”

The priest has stopped. He studies the soldier. “How much do they pay you?” he asks.

The soldier, perplexed, lowers his weapon. “Twenty-five kopecks a month,” he says.

The priest thinks for a moment and then nods. “I have a proposition for you. I’ll pay you fifty kopecks a month if you’ll stop me here every day and ask me those same three questions.”

You, the client, are the priest. Your coach is the soldier. Let’s go.

* * *

Short of attaining spiritual enlightenment, there is no end to the process of continually arriving at a new and more accurate awareness of who, what, even when you are.  But the farther you are from starting down a path of ever-increasing awareness, the more likely you are to be unhappy in what are mostly unconsciously chosen careers, relationships, and, last but not least, voids where you would like relationships to be.

Similarly, if you lack a real awareness of your true values and drives, you could also be inclined to start sabotaging jobs or relationships that might otherwise be right for you. While it’s far less common, it is possible, in theory, to leave a career prematurely because of unexamined emotional conflicts and untested assumptions.  It may also be possible, and probably more common, to leave a relationship prematurely.

Regardless of the likelihood of your actually leaving too early, you surely want badly not to make such a mistake and not to suffer the sting of future regret.  So you probably want to consider the matter as soberly and with as much reflection as possible.  Whether it’s a job or career, you may reasonably have decided that it’s best to build a secure emotional foundation in order to make the most informed, least reactive, choice possible.  You may have concluded that the best path to authentically good decisions in life is to be, first, authentic.

In this Handbook, you will define many of your ultimate goals (or near-ultimate, given that you are unlikely to set goals for that greatest of trips, the one few of us ever prepare for).  You will also set out many of the steps that you think will, if completed, help you to reach those goals.  (You won’t often be right, but you can try.)  Before you can know where you want to go, you will need to decide what matters to you.

Chapter One — Introduction and Initial Vision

So we will start in this Chapter One by looking at your values and vision for the future as of today, including, critically, any steps you are already taking (or not taking at all) that are in alignment with your values and goals.  We’ll do this to get you thinking about your future, because common sense, scientific research, and the anecdotal claims of successful people all tell us that some future orientation is a necessary step toward successfully bettering that future.  Your vision will also give your coach some very useful information about where you’re going.  (And later, we’ll also be able to see how your thinking about your life purpose has evolved.)  You’ll talk about what a life purpose means to you, who you know who has one, and you’ll even take a preliminary guess at what yours might be.

• What You Can Expect From This Handbook – Some Journey, Some Destination, Not Both at Once
• A Harmless Explanatory Note for Clients Seeking Career or Relationship Coaching
• A Brief Detour Through Personality Types and Profiles
• The Bracing Value of Pain in Overcoming the Powerful Fear of Change
• Accountability, or, Readiness for Change
• How This Handbook Works and How It Compares to Self-Help Books
• 12 Unoriginal Axioms for Living
• Initial Vision
• Inventory of the Status Quo
• Exercise: Vision for a Child
• Exercise: Vision for Yourself
• Exercise: Back to Your Life Purpose

Chapter Two, Cleaning House and Letting Go

In Chapter Two, “Cleaning House and Letting Go,” you’ll start to clear out some of the things that hold you back, from that messy car and desk to the loose ends in your relationships. You can expect an infusion of new energy into your life when you engage in some of this personal Feng Shui . . .

Clutter is nothing less than a collection of postponed decisions to act.  That is, physical clutter is symbolic of inner disorder, avoidance, even laziness.  Why, just look at my desk: a check I intended to cash.  Two business cards I intended to use to write emails.  A manuscript I intended to edit.  Pages from a print-out that I intended to group with the rest of the pages printed earlier.  A list of goals that I intended to revise before placing on postcards for twice-daily review

Chapter Three:  Budget and Obstacles

In Chapter Three , we’ll look at your budget to test some of your assumptions about how that vision and life purpose can be reached, and you’ll set out any other obstacles that stand between you and your preferred vision of your future self.  That is, which of your stated values are you not honoring?

• Exercise: Identifying Limitations and Hurdles
• The Anchors Beneath Your Sailboat
• Exercise: Anticipate Anchors and Be Better Prepared for Temporary Squalls
• Exercise: Comfort Zone – How Much Money Do You Really Need?

Chapter Four:  Money, Security, Things

In Chapter Four , we’ll look at how money and security have influenced you – particularly other people’s ideas and values and anxieties about money and security – and we’ll try to parse out the influences that are outside of you and can lead you astray (and probably already have).

• Closure on Your Vision for a Child
• Old Eyes
• In the Beginning: Personal Archeology – Get at the Past that Made the Now
• Exercise: Photographic Anthropology: Relationship to Others, Things, and Security

Chapter Five:  Doing and Doing Well

In Chapter Five , you’ll revisit your relationship between doing and feeling – and particularly doing well and feeling good about yourself. This chapter isn’t just for the over-achievers! Using examples of what you have done in the past that has given you joy and fulfillment – that is your values in action.

• Exercise: Relationship to Doing and Doing Well
• Exercise: Transferable Skills and Old Loves. Or, “Finally, You Can Bring Up Things You Did Well”
• Exercise: Clues Buried in the Past

Chapter Six — Values Assessments and Testing

This is what you look for when you see a career counselor or use the outplacement services of a large company:  testing and assessment to determine what matters to you at work, your preferred work style and environment, what skills you like most to use, and much more.

Chapter X — The Creation of the Future Self:  How Modern Science and Ancient Wisdom Traditions Agree on Creating Success

And then, in Chapter X, “The Creation of the Future Self,” we’ll revisit your initial vision, revise it according to what you’ve learned, and use the best of modern goal-setting art and science to identify, set, and start you on the road to achieving your goals.  You too can leverage the most effective techniques used by top athletes, entrepreneurs, businesspeople, and other very successful people.  We’ve collected them in one place, and we’ll start working them in a few weeks.  This is the most exciting chapter of all!

• The Creation of Self
• Intentional Change
• The Creation of the Future Self
• Future Self Best Practice #1: Create SMART Goals
• Future Self Best Practice #2: Choose Quantum Goals and Identify a Few Key Breakthrough Goals
• Future Self Best Practice #3: Write Goals Down
• Future Self Best Practice #4: State Goals in the Affirmative
• Future Self Best Practice #5: Dramatize Goals As if They Have Already Happened
• Future Self Best Practice #6: Share Your Goals!
• Revision – Or The Revising of Your Initial Vision
• Future Self Best Practice #7: Reverse-Engineer Your Strategic Goals Until You Know Your Week-by-Week Tactics
• Future Self Best Practice #8: Get Your Tactical Action Items Into Your Calendar
• Future Self Best Practice #9: Visualize Your Goals At Least Twice a Day for 30 Days
• Future Self Best Practice #10: Cut Back on the Negative

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he Creation of the Future Self:  Strategic Life Planning is one of Feroce’s most powerful tools of personal discovery — of your and your coach’s discovery of who you really are.  It is of great power for clients seeking direction, or to know and prioritize what matters to them.  It’s of special interest to career-changers and clients trying to decide on a business to start or whether to maintain a relationship.  Please note that clients retain the choice of whether to utilize the book, and, after discussion with their coach, even to decide which chapters are of most relevance to them.  Rather than paraphrase the contents, we offer below some excerpts and the Table of Contents.