Before you march forth on your big new life goal, you’ve got to ensure that you have fortified the foundation of your daily life. If the foundation is not solid, no amount of hard effortful work will get past the invisible hijackers that will trip you up along the way. 

What’s that big dream in your head that has been bugging you more and more lately? 

Maybe you crave a new lifestyle, or desire a career in a different industry, or are finding yourself visualizing your success in a new life achievement? 

You know this dream too well, but it remains stuck in the back of your mind. Whenever you try to make it become a reality, responsibilities of your current life suck you back into your old default modes. 

Your current network needs your time, your current group of friends expect your attention, your current weekly haunts and habits crowd out any chance of you growing into new lifestyles. And your current ways of making and spending money all seem to be written in stone.

As you may know, the KindEdge online course is a guided step-by-step system that helps you define and take action on the real-life doable steps to achieve your big life goals. We get a total life transformation in motion by getting into the nitty-gritty actions. So many of you are on this journey already.

But there is a parallel foundational set of tasks that are just as important as your one big goal. We call this foundational set of tasks “KindEdge360” and it’s a huge suite of practices that you can get started on today.

Why is it necessary to build the KindEdge360 foundation if that’s not my one big life goal?  

To succeed at your one big dream or life goal, you also need to smooth and fortify the entire foundational elements of your daily life. You can’t get your future dream in motion if elements of your life remain fit for your old networks, environments, and daily practices. 

In KindEdge360 we review, test and re-choose every aspect of your life. This process is called “Conscious Curation,” taste-testing and selecting only those people, environments and objects that would be a boon for the future you desire. 

KindEdge360 includes a close look at your daily habits to be sure they are designed to fit your personal preferences and rhythms. It also includes going deep on how you are nourishing your mind, your body, your soul and your systems to ensure you will be able to give your big goal the focus and energy it will demand. 

For example, your main KindEdge goal might be to publish that book you’ve always dreamed of writing. If you march forth on that project without doing work on the foundation, you will find that after a few weeks of amazing focus on writing your book, you’ll suddenly get tripped up by some unexpected barrier: 

• You might fall behind on your writing when your employer continually creates false emergencies that keep you working all weekend instead of writing your book.
• Or, you might have plenty of time to sit at your desk to write, but after a few weeks of good progress, you suddenly seem to hit a wall and end up spending hours staring at a blank screen.

What was missing in your grand plan? How are you suddenly getting held back?

What was missing is a strong foundation of mind, body, soul and systems along with thoughtful selection of the people, environments and objects you need to have around you to keep this project in motion. 

If you had started with the KindEdge360 foundational work, you would have identified the areas of your life where you are weak, or not yet “fit” for your future life. When you don’t fortify the foundation you are vulnerable to all sorts of hijackers. 

Hijacker 1:

You may not have not mastered the skills of having tough confrontations with your employer to protect your time boundaries. This leaves you vulnerable to having your weekends continually usurped by your employer for no extra pay. There are many layers involved in this vulnerability, each of which takes time to work on. It takes time to practice advocating for yourself. It takes time to begin to respect your personal goals as expression of your higher purpose that demands serious focus and investment. And it takes time for you to understand the true gravity of your employer’s little-seeming acts of disregard for your boundaries. It takes time to see that your higher purpose involves you writing this book, and if your employer gets between you and your higher purpose, you might need to leave.

Hijacker 2:

‍In the other example above, you had plenty of time to write, but simply lost steam. In this case you may have left yourself wide open to classic writer’s block because you only planned for the writing! You may have neglected the foundational step of nourishing all the parts of you that you need to do all that work. You mind and body, and soul and systems can’t put-out great ideas when you are feeding them a diet of “blank computer screen” for eight hours a day.

To succeed at your laser-focused writing goal, you need to establish daily practices that will:

• Nourish the body with exercise that drives oxygen to the brain and foods that keep your neurotransmitters sparking with new ideas 
• Invigorate your mind with exposure to everything from sunlight and nature to artful environments that spark new ideas
• Enable your soul to reconnect your higher vision and purpose 
• Ensure the basics of your work environment and network are set up to make the hard work feel good, smooth and easy to return to each day.

Even the most basic issues can hijack your greater goals if you’re not prepared. Say you like to take notes with a pencil, and you’re in a great productive flow but you suddenly need to sharpen your pencil and can’t find a pencil sharpener. What happens? Well, you end up looking all over the house and get distracted by other messes in other rooms. And when you return to your desk the next day, you have that “yucky” feeling about the space because you recall yesterday as a “failed” writing attempt. 

You’ve got to go deep on getting all the foundational elements right. If you love pencils, but don’t want to be distracted by the dependency on a sharpener, then take an entire afternoon to go deep on finding the world’s best mechanical pencil and purchase several of them so you will always have an ample number of pencils you love to use every day. 

This obsessive pencil quest is not useless geekery. Having a great set of pencils that you love pulling out each day is critical to your long-term success. 

In KindEdge you will learn to simply honor all the factors that make or break your progress. Every big, hard goal worth doing needs to feel good to return to each day. Honor that. It’s a reality.  

A huge part of KindEdge360 is running continual experiments. 

There are 8 billion ways to live a life here on Earth. You can’t be sure of what’s worth keeping if you’ve never tried an alternative. But our brains’ proclivities for selecting for predictable knowns keep us trapped in old defaults without questioning them. We need to inject big energy into building a muscle for change because our brains won’t do it on their own.

Change is a Muscle?

Neuroscience, including research led by Dr. David Rock of the Neuro Leadership Institute as well as work by the team of Dr. Karl Friston (University College of London) and Dr. Andy Clark (University of Edinburgh and the University of Sussex), has proven the brain has  a preference for predictability in our environments. The unknown is inherently unsafe from a survival standpoint. And in modern life, while we are generally predictably safe, we all know that uncomfortable feeling of resistance when someone invites us to an event or exercise class that is not our usual. While there is a chance you might love the event, there is also a risk that halfway through you are suffering painful regret over having gone.  

So there will always be great resistance to experimenting with the new. In KindEdge we work to grow a muscle for change by making experiments a continual practice. Any experiment is worth doing, and if something you try out turns out to be so great that you decide to make it part of your daily life, then that is an added bonus.

The re-selecting of everything around you is a huge part of transformation. When my home got flooded and I was forced to purge all the objects in my life I was amazed to see that when I re-curated all the new things in my life, I was grateful to be free of so many dark, visually-heavy things. 

I no longer have a huge dark wood dining table and heavy carpet and so on. As I began selecting new items for my rebuilt home, I naturally was attracted to things that gave me a light, crisp, strong, minimalistic feeling. 

So as you go forth in your week, take a look at all the defaults in your life and simply ask the question “could I run an experiment in this area of my life?” You might end up discovering people and patterns that open you up to more of the things you are craving for your future.

The KindEdge practice of continual experimentation is not about seeking any one “perfect” way to do things. We just run experiments guided by this mantra: 

1. Run tests
2. Ask “did that work?”
3. Then do that.
4. And run more tests.

#DWWIRL

(Do what works in REAL life!)

Your path forward can be simple. 

KindEdge is the easy button to big life change. 

Here’s to you unlocking the alternate ending to your life. 

Cheers, cin-cin and hugs, 

@MarySueIRL