Master Checklist

As described in the get started page, when you set a new life goal, you will quickly learn that success demands you build an entirely new infrastructure to support the path to get there.

Failure to achieve big change rarely occurs because you did not try hard enough. Failure comes from a blindness to this reality: new goals require a new life; the people, the places, and things you allow into your days will either buoy your intentions, or sabotage all your efforts.

The KindEdge Master Checklist below is a series of tools that enable you to get the deep clarity you need to make the new, tough decisions and choices you’ll need to be making along the way. Whether it’s a grad school degree you seek, or a new life on a ranch, those goals are not in your way. They are sitting off in your future ready for the taking. What’s in your way may be your hidden fear of tough conversations, a reticence to be seen making messy mid-stream trials and errors, or a lack of acceptance that bridging to your new life might require you sell your high-end car or house to afford you the time and resources to safely experiment for a spell. The exercises I’ve built below enable you to get absolute clarity on the essence of your goals and then drive that essence down deep, like securing pylons for a bridge. The world will seek to tear down your goals. Getting clarity on your goals, and what you’re willing to change in or to achieve them, is the only way to make change stick.

Elsewhere in this website you’ll see the KindEdge core concepts described in detail. Below-listed items are ACTIONS. Please do take the time to read about the concepts and why they are so important to effecting real change. It was necessary to separate the longer discussions of concepts from the action tools linked below because the point of tools is to GET YOU IN MOTION, in the small bit-sized moments of time life affords you.

KindEdge Master Checklist of Actions

As each guide is published, it will be added to this page as a link.

Defining your Direction

runing priorities

Pha

Foundation for Change –

Your daily arc –

Experimentos – Try everything

Day Redesign

Patterns, vs variety

Drive in the groove through daily practice (my checklist became automatic)

Environment

5-Noun-Ninja

Environment is all 7 senses

Blog: Totems

More

Mindset –

Kind Reframe

Self-Permission

Spirituality and Purpose are the Same

More

Health –

Mind

Brain health (light therapy etc)

Emotions are as physical and chemical as any other thing on earth

Body

Nutrition (Glucose is suicide)

Exercise –

Sustainability

Recovery – The performance differentiator

Eustress – Do hard things; garbage in, garbage out

More

Structuring Change – Ensure progress by making it easy to fall into action vs. have to reinvent your plans and resolve each day

Project Management

Goals & mile markers

Progress tracking & metrics

Productivity & Optimization

Time management methods

Sustainable, consistent progress requires REGULAR INTRINSIC REWARDS.

Data is the reward of productivity

Full List (and growing…)

• Imagining your north star
• Illustrating your north star “In Real Life”
• Verbalizing the key elements of your future life by category
• Why? Shortening the critical elements list based on your why
• Journey map (how did you get where you are?)
• Creating your gap assessment worksheet
• Closing the gaps: Listing ACTIONS you can take to close the gap
• How to build a bridge: Assigning specific actions and TIMELINES to the actions you need to take
• Change management 101: managing this LIKE A BUSINESS PROJECT (processes and tools that work for YOU!)
• Building your Board of Directors (Friend, mentor, teacher, “knew you when” BS-caller-outer, Therapist, Other values-aligned contact, barber/hairdresser-gut-checker)
• Winning (or tough) conversations – getting others on board with change
• Leveraging Board of Directors to effect progress despite barriers
• Fierce fitness for change – you are the ultimate foundation. You MUST be fit, mind, body, soul and more.
• Fierce calendaring: time is sacred and irreplaceable. Treat your calendar as sacred, and be fierce. Step 1 – Block your bday, 2 – On every KindEdge tasks, label it “NO RESCHEDULING: KINDEDGE PRIORITY TASK”
• Agreements with yourself
• Agreement from family/other
• Root cause barrier resolution
• The Kind Reframe – Transforming limiting shame by retelling your stories with a wise, compassionate voice
• Binder life: Taking up space IN REAL LIFE
• Your best daily habits
• Mastering the core concepts of change (Core Concepts – Tracking when you’ve shown you’ve mastered them, from 5-people, to “disappointing others” to “regrow the ego” and more.
• Environment for change: Evaluating everything you see, hear, touch, smell, and interact with
• And more…
  

Master Checklist Downloadable Format

Building a bridge plank by plank works: When life is already in motion, there’s no chance to iteratively experiment, observe, and modify your attempts. You need bite-sized steps that move you forward with the safety to back up and regroup along the way. You also need each step to be so simple you can do the in small pockets of spare time And we need to make these actions THE NEW NORMAL. Here is an uncomfortable truth: NONE OF THE SELF-HELP BOOKS CHANGE US. It is only OUR DAILY ACTIONS that drive real change. I spent 20 years buying the next relationship book, going deeper and deeper and deeper, enlisting my disordered household in more and more complex therapy programs. All the twelve steps, the Gottsman method, The Catalyst Center for Change, off-site retreats, talk therapy, … the list is exhaustive. I’ve purged 90% of the books and I STILL have enough to cover one entire wall of my garage. Many books were hugely helpful. The bloom of books on topics related to Growth Mindsets were promising, but still, it did not change the behaviors that occur from our gut reflexes. Your inner child takes over for the mature adult in your brain any time you are under stress. (I’m a big Carl Jung/Myers-Briggs geek, amongst other personality profiling tools, so I’ve analyzed all my strengths and weaknesses that will appear in good times and bad, in efforts to decode any dances of disorder that occurred in my prior household). The key, however, is ACTION. The books will certainly help you understand the why for the many challenges in one’s life. But it is YOU taking ACTION and YOU trusting YOUR OWN diagnoses of what does and doesn’t serve you in your life, that is going to actually steer your ship in a new direction. I encourage you to consume—and devour—every book you can find that may help you on your path toward change. Listen to books while jogging or driving, read at night. Seek out expert Podcasts… But DO NOT WAIT for these to help you find what truly works in your life and what truly exists as an invisible barrier in your life. You will only learn this by taking action in the real world, and seeing how the world bounces back at you. And as I’ve said, change is a muscle. Your goal is to build the muscle of change, not tick off more reading hours. Reading is parallel play for this change project. If you find yourself getting stuck… reading at night… saying things like “That’s really interesting…” “Now I see why that happens.” That’s fun to learn but in parallel you must be pushing yourself to implement a change in your daily and weekly life, and figuring out what in your life is holding you back.