The Effective Living Resource Group is committed to providing access to timely and progressive resources which can help you more effectively accomplish the goals that serve your mission in life. Our hope is that your mission in life somehow helps to bring healing to the earth.

Process [ Top ]

Effective living involves the following continual process:

• Step 1 - Mission. Establishing and refining an overall mission statement.
• Step 2 - Goals. Identifying ways to measure your progress and growth as you work toward achieving your mission, and then continually documenting and measuring your progress.
• Step 3 - Improvement. Committing time, energy, and resources on tasks, projects, routines, training, self examination, and self improvement. Continually being mindful of ways to save time, save money, develop skills, and increase the effectiveness of achieving the goals (in step 2) that serve your mission (in step 1). Prioritize tasks and expenditures based on their ability to achieve your goals.
• Step 4 - Persistence. Continuing to return to Step 1 to refine your mission statement as necessary, to Step 2 to measure progress and look for new ways to measure progress, and to Step 3 to look for ways to accomplish more with less.

Effectiveness Tips [ Top ]

• Time and Financial Management. Time is spent in the same way that money is spent. One who spends time or money wisely, proactively, and with a purpose, will achieve more with their investment. One who mindfully prioritizes how they spend time or money, will continually spend their time and money on those things which are of highest importance and priority.
• Youthful Living. Continuing to maintain a youthful outlook on life is essential. Characteristics of youthful living include: high energy, physical fitness, stamina, creativity, optimism, sense of humor, laughter, open mindedness, and willingness to change. A reduction in these positive virtues can seriously impede effectiveness.
• Balanced Living. Maintaining balance and serving all primary areas of life is essential: faith, health, career, finances, family, outreach, and effectiveness. Click here to visit the Resources for Life Map page for more information.
• Minimalism. Increase your ability to focus and do more by reducing the clutter of objects, commitments, services, contracts, meetings, and obligations in your life.
• Walk or Bike to Work. Automotive transportation is costly, time consuming, bad for the environment, and it does little to improve health. For many people, walking or riding a bike to work can save time, save money, and help improve health.
• Meditation. Taking 20 minutes in the morning and evening to meditate can improve your overall effectiveness dramatically. Meditation is not necessarily religious, spiritual, or intellectual, but simply the functional mechanics and technique of exercising and resting the soul. In the same way that a scale must know 'what nothing weighs' (through calibration) before it can tell you what you weigh; our senses are more acute when 'recalibrated' through meditation to a state of zero/nothing. This is similar to sensory deprivation. By resting our five physiological senses, we can be more sensitive to our non physiological senses.
  • "If you were to suspend your senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, what would you be left with? Initially, this may be a terrifying thought - that you would be left with nothing. But you are not left with nothing, you are left with yourself. We only need our senses to interact with the world outside ourselves. You don't need eyes to see yourself or ears to hear yourself. You know you are there, without using any sensory tools; it is simply an awareness, a totally separate sense. So we are fully alive without our senses." - excerpt from the book Toward a Meaningful Life, The Wisdom of the Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, adapted by Simon Jacobson. (Pages 5-10)

Resources [ Top ]

• Effective Living Centre - workshops
• Franklin Covey - training, tools, services, and more
• Mind Tools - career effectiveness
• Writings on Effective Living

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Resources for Life
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