Building Your Own Kaleidoscope

January 29, 2008

To create your own kaleidoscope, start by sketching out your framework. Take a piece of paper and draw four intersecting circles. Label them happiness, achievement, significance, and legacy. In each circle, list self, family, work, and community. This will enable you to do a full inventory of the mix and determine how each piece falls in the context of each major domain of your life. (See the exhibit “My Personal Kaleidoscope.”)

Next, quickly jot down examples of your successes or great satisfactions.You don’t have to come up with one for every item in every circle – this is just a quick sketch of your beliefs about yourself, not the full picture. Don’t spend time worrying about whether you should put a particular target next to a particular item. Just work with your first impulses.

Take your college degree as an example. You may feel that graduating from college was a major achievement, a benchmark in your overall career plans and something you will value for your whole life.Your degree represents a mastery of skills. You had to compete successfully to get there and get the grades. You felt satisfaction when you were successful. So you would write “college” in your achievement chamber, next to the word “work.”

But what if college represented other things for you? Significance in your family life, for example, because your parents or spouse really valued what you were doing? In that case, you might also put college in your significance chamber, next to “family.”

The point is not to compulsively divide your life into little circles and lists. Rather, it is to help you assess the various types of satisfactions you have already experienced and see what they add up to. The answer is often more surprising or richer than you may have suspected.

Depending on your age, you might even want to fill out framework profiles for several periods in your life. Did you want the same things at 40 as you did at 20? Will you want the same things at 60? At 85? Could you ever fully abandon one of the categories and still feel that you were a success? (This is the trap that many retirees and those who downscale their careers to become full-time parents fall into.)

Now, metaphorically speaking, you can hold your kaleidoscope up to the light. Look at it objectively, and askyourself:

1. How integrated is your profile? Are some of the domains empty? Are others too full? Is each realm of your identity – self, family, work, community – a depository of only one satisfaction, or is there a broader basis for success in each of these areas?

2. How varied is your profile? Where are most of your greatest successes and satisfactions so far? Where are the holes? The obsessions? Are the chambers and realms evolving or repeating the same things over and over?

3.What have you learned about what you actually do? Where is your time going? How does it speak to what you really want from success? Research into success has shown that one of the biggest causes of failure is an overreliance on one’s greatest strengths. Are you favoring what you do best and neglecting your need for fulfillment in all four categories?

Here’s how the kaleidoscope strategy helped John, the owner of a large real estate company, find enduring success. John was having trouble deciding what to do with his business. After a blowout with his teenage child and a series of relentless, debilitating headaches, he decided he had to cut back on his work. He had already bought a plane – against his family’s wishes – and he had increased his time for himself, but he was still suffering.“I know I should sell part of this business for the sake of my happiness,” he said, “but I just can’t do it.”

We suggested he try putting this sale in another category, one that seemed rather empty. Why not think about the sale as an active engagement in legacy rather than as a platform for happiness? The pieces fit. Legacy is about building on your achievements and values to help others succeed after you’re gone. John remembered a young manager who had left the firm, someone who knew John’s values and was quite accomplished in his own right. This person would probably welcome the chance to head the new spin-off, and he’d be likely to extend the kind of business John had spent his life building. The buyers would need such a person, and John would be comfortable doing business with them.

After seeing the situation from a different perspective, John was more decisive about the sale and had a richer platform of concrete goals around which to structure the transaction: the terms in which legacy would be fulfilled, the new time frame for his own enjoyment of life, a revitalizing and more realistic set of achievement goals, and a sense of providing the space to be there for his daughter and wife without giving up all the challenges of the real estate business.

Identifying where his activities were located in the kaleidoscope gave John immediate insight into what he was seeking and getting from his efforts – as well as what was lacking. In channeling your efforts effectively toward what you really seek from success, it’s critical to test your profile against your idealized view of yourself.What do you want your profile of accomplishments in each of the four categories to look like tomorrow? Next month? Over your lifetime?

Share and Enjoy: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages.