Living a 5 Star Life!
You cannot hide behind the excuse that you are disciplined in one area of your life but not in others. You are either becoming more disciplined and successful in every area of your life or you are becoming more indulgent and apathetic in every area of your life. Many authors who write on being successful comment on the distinct categories of our life. In recent years one of the most brilliant and effective displays as it relates to balance has been Gary Michel's "Ideal wheel" where each spoke on the wheel represents a different area of our life such as our work life, our money management, and a whole variety of other areas. As it relates to self-discipline, one important concept that circular models don’t convey is the interconnectedness of each area of our life and how they affect one another
Living a 5 Star Life is about finding success via discipline in five major areas of our life referred to as the 5 "Fs": Family, Fitness, Fun, Faculty (profession), and Finances. Success breeds success. The 5 Star Life diagram visually depicts how our life is interconnected. For example, our success in our family life is not solely independent, rather it's largely affected by, two other major areas of our life: fitness (health), and finances (money). Likewise our faculty (job) largely determines how much money we make (finances) and how much fun were having in our lives. Because about 1/3 of our life is spent working, our fun is directly related to what career we choose and how much we enjoy it.
Work your way mentally around the five points of the star thinking about how each point is connected directly to two others which are influenced by two others. What you start to realize is that any success or failure in any area of your life is in some way tied to the successes and failures in other areas. And you can imagine a reverse pulley in between each two points which functions to push out one point of your life anytime another point is pulled to be more successful. Expanding in any one component of your life results in expanding its counterpart, therefore increasing the geometric area within the star.
There are two common questions that come after reviewing the 5 Star Life. The first is "what is in the middle" of the 5 Star Life? Inside the diagram is a simple “H” which stands for Habits. Habits in each individual component of your life either expand that point outward towards success or retract that area inward towards un-fulfillment. We form habits (either consciously or unconsciously) and then habits form our lives. It's much easier to focus on changing our habits than it is focusing on our results in any given area because you can not always directly control your results. However, your success or failure in any area of your life is nothing more than the output of your habits.
Undoubtedly, people always wonder “where does spirituality” fit into all of this? The answer is that “Faith” or spirituality is not a component, section, or part of your life but rather it is your life. You were created for a specific reason and purpose, in fact for many specific reasons and chances are that those reasons are attached to every area of your life. And the focus of a successful life is to be used in a way that has eternal implications; to fulfill a higher spiritual plan that is much deeper than any worldly concept or thing. More directly, every single area of your life can be used to celebrate and live into the purpose you were created for. You see, the most destructive part of life is not failure at any given task but rather not being used to our full potential.
Failure is a part of success, but not being used in the way you were designed to be is tragedy. Our Faith in that purpose is grown as we achieve success in each area of our star, and our Faith is powerful enough to pull any single area of our life into success. The geometric area within the star grows as each area of your life grows. In this model of Faith is represented as the line around the outside of the star. Maximizing our success maximizes our Faith and maximizing our Faith can help maximize our success in any other area. A 5 Star Life is about reaching your maximum potential and fulfilling your usefulness in every area of your life. Not only does this type of life bring you success and happiness in every way, most importantly it honors what you were created for and whom you were created for.
Rory Vaden is an author, performance expert and motivational speaker who is available to speak at your next event. For more information on him, visit www.premierespeakers.com/rory_vaden.