Navigating Your Way to Success With The Life GPS

Older motorists amongst us will remember the days when, using a map to navigate to an unknown location, we often found ourselves lost or meandering from place to place, in search of our destination. Nowadays most people have a GPS unit in their car or cell phone, which they use to navigate from where they are to where they want to be. GPS stands for Global Positioning System and a GPS is nothing more than a radio receiver that uses signals received from satellites above the Earth’s orbit to calculate its position relative to the start and finish points supplied by the user.

Because a GPS clearly defines the route to be taken from point A to point B, it stops a lot of the meandering. The GPS effectively gives us the most streamlined rout to our destination, although we may not always be able to avoid some meandering as dictated by our start and finish positions.

Your Life’s GPS

Now, in the same way that a motorist uses a Global Positioning System to navigate to his or her destination, we can use what we may refer to as a Life GPS to achieve our life goals, only in the Life version of the GPS the initials G. P. S. have a different meaning.

Let me explain by first defining the Success equation, as follows:

Success = G + P + S

Where G stands for Goals, P means Purpose and S stands for Strategy

In other words, success results from a combination of your Goals, your Purpose in having those goals and the Strategy you employ to achieve those goals. Each of the elements of the Life GPS will be covered in greater detail in another post.

Using the Life GPS to Chart Your Path to Success.

In his book The Flight Plan to Success, JT DeBolt, former US Navy Pilot turned Business and Life Coach, reveals a simple system that gives a framework for using the Life GPS to achieve your goals.

JT Debolt’s system is based on the experience he gained managing multi-billion dollar Oil Industry reconstruction projects in Iraq. JT’s conclusion is that the “steps to success” are the same regardless of the size or nature of the enterprise. It is just a matter scale.

It begins by a clear definition of your life goals as the destination of your journey and the resources you have at your disposal now as the start point. Your life goals may be in business, personal finance, lifestyle, philanthropy or any other walk of life. What matters is that you should be clear about what those goals are, be specific about when you want to achieve them and be aware of some, not necessarily all, of the obstacles that you may need to negotiate on the way.

Similarly, an understanding of your starting point in terms of time, money and other resources will determine how you plan your path to success. The thing to understand about resources is that “you have all the resources you need to achieve your goals,” although some of those resources may not be immediately available to you.

When you know your starting point and destination relative to your goals, then using the Life GPS makes it clear what the path forward should be, just as a motorist finds his rout clearly marked out by a GPS.