In my last post, I talked about creating a personal development seminar called Relevant Light. In this seminar, which starts on a Friday night, audience members are taken on a journey to the end of their lives, and shown how life choices will affect their Legacy. Through a vivid stage play, taking place in the garage of the deceased, viewers are shown what will endure and what will be thrown away. In an emotional “wheat and chaff” exercise only a few items will remain. These few remnants will outlive your life.
As the night winds to a close, the garage scene disappears and is replaced on stage with two free standing doors in wooden frames. One says “personal,” the other says “the world.” Above the doors is a sign that says Impossible. The speaker on stage takes a key and tries to open each one. They are locked. He faces the audience and leaves you with a challenge. Come back in the morning with new keys and destinations in mind.
Saturday morning you return. With a cup of coffee and workbook in hand, you get ready to take on the challenges of the day. The speaker enters the stage and has you turn to exercise one…
1. The Remnant: This is what remains after everything else is given or thrown away. On your worksheet is a list of items…
- Written: Book, Journal, Notes, Recipes, Instructions etc.
- Visual: Photographs, Pictures, Paintings, Diagrams, Video
- Audio: Music, Songs, Recordings
- Property: Business, Houses, Cars, Furniture, Technology etc.
- Monetary: Bank Accounts, Stocks, Investments, Business Income
- Values: Faith, Goals, Habits
For the Saturday morning exercise, you are to pick one item from the list which is important to you, write it down and explore how it will come into being. For our example in this post we’ll select Writing a Book. This exercise is based on the “Garage Experience” from Friday night. Once you have one item selected you move down to exercise 2.
2. The Doors of Impact: In this exercise you need to figure out a destination for the two doors from Friday night. You need to choose a major impact project for your life and also a major impact project that is larger than yourself, which will impact your family, friends, or the world. This exercise works best if both of the doors revolve around the remnant item from exercise one. For our example in this post, the personal impact project will be writing a book and the world based impact project will be building a seminar around the book. Once you have this step completed, you move on to the planning stage in exercise 3.
3. Goals Written Down: In this exercise, you are given a 4-12-48 goal setting worksheet. This worksheet breaks down a year into four quarters and sets up a 12 week goal sections that you’ll use to take on one of your Impact projects from step two and design a milestone timetable to complete it. For our purposes here, we’ll set a 12 week goal to write a book, followed by a twelve week goal to edit and publish it. A third 12 week goal will have us design a seminar around the book. Once you have this step completed we’ll move on to the implementation stage in exercise 4.
4. Ritual Into Habit: In this exercise, you put together “rituals” to accomplish the goal in step three. This usually comes down to planning out a week and deciding what actions you will do on the different days. For the purpose of our blog post, we’ll create two rituals. One is the daily writing ritual, that we will do on weekdays. The other is a weekly wrap-up or review where we take what we have written during the week and put it all together. One we have the ritual written out, we’ll design a habit consisting of a cue, routine, and reward to make sure we accomplish it. Once this is done, we move to the final stage.
5. Schedule The Time: In this exercise, we carve out a daily “singe focused” time period where we can perform the routine we’ve designed in step four. In the case of this exercise we’ll set aside two hours in the morning for writing our book and one hour on the weekend for the wrap up. This is where we can fine tune the habit in step four. In this case the cue, is a time period. We’ll start writing every morning at 5am. The cue is the alarm that we set. The routine is writing for 48 minutes at a time (followed by a 12 minute break). This is repeated twice. The reward is having someone read back what we have written for the day.
Overall: When you play this as it will actually happen, you’ll see just how powerful this seminar will be. Here is how our example will play out…
1. Time: We’ll write for two hours a day starting at 5 am each morning. We’ll write for 48 minutes at a time with all distractions turned off, followed by a 12 minute break.
2. Habit: We’ll be cued to start writing by an alarm we set for each morning. When we hear the alarm, we sit down and get started. The routine is writing for two hours (48-12 single focus), followed by a reward of having someone read back what we have written.
3. Goals: We’ll track our goals by using a 12 week goal planner. We’ll mark off each day as we accomplish it. During our weekly wrap up, we’ll make notes and make any needed modifications to fine tune our project.
4. Impact: At the end of our first twelve weeks, we’ll have our rough draft completed. At the end of our second twelve weeks, we’ll have our book published and ready for sale. In our third twelve week period, we’ll plan out our weekend seminar, tie in our book to the curriculum and create a workbook with worksheets for all of the sessions.
5. Legacy: In our fourth 12 week period, we’ll offer the seminar to the world, sell our book, and create a legacy for our children and others.
Real Life: Thank you for taking the tour of our Relevant Light Project. As I write this, I am in the first stage of writing a workbook for this project. Working with my editor I hope to have this first part done by summer and self publish. Once we have the workbook done, I’m exploring the idea of working with some speaking partners to put an actual weekend seminar together. I’m also putting together a book proposal to publish a full length book, based around the experiences of attending the seminar.
I would love to get your feedback on the ideas presented here. Here are three questions.
Does this sound like a seminar that you would like to attend?
Does this sound like a book you would like to read?
What changes or modifications might you suggest?
