Before starting work on developing paths, it’s helpful to review the context in which you’ll be creating those paths: your destination, your starting point, your resources and your constraints.
As you work through this step, use the Review Your Context Worksheet, which you can download at the end of this step, to get a clear picture of your current context.
Your Destination
A path describes how to get from your starting point to your destination. Having a good destination in mind is critical to creating useful paths.
What do you want to be doing? What do you want to have acquired and have accomplished?
Ask yourself if this is your true goal, a proxy for your true goal, or an internalized version of someone else’s goal.
Often, we use a specific goal, like going to graduate school, when we want a generic outcome, like making more money. Or we take on the goals of our partners, friends and family as our own. Make sure your goals are your own.
Your Starting Point
With an idea of where you are going, check in again on where you are starting from.
What are you doing currently? What are the things that you want to keep? That you want to change?
Keep the answers to these questions in mind as you develop your paths. If you went through the Life Portfolio or What To Change First tools, go back and review those.
Your Resources
Resources are those things you can use to move your life forward to achieve your goals. Too often we focus on the obvious resources of time, money and energy, and forget other resources like friendships, community, skills and experience.
While a lack of resources can be considered a constraint, it’s more useful to think of resources in a positive form. For effective planning, focus on what resources you do have, not what resources you don’t.
Your Constraints
Not all paths that we can envision will be open to us. We all have constraints that limit what we can do in our life.
By writing out those constraints, we can keep them in mind when we develop our paths—but just as important, we can question whether these really are constraints. Too often we have constraints which are only constraints in our mind.