Externalizing Obligations

Welcome to the first Monday blog post. My goal is to blog every Monday on a topic around life enrichment. This could be a post about learning new skills, or getting organized, or time management, or living a more vibrant spiritual life. I'm passionate and have made discoveries in all these areas, so I'll write about them on Mondays. Today's post is going to focus on one of a handful of topics I consider central to all the topics--Externalizing Obligations. If you haven't yet, check out "Getting Things Done," by David Allen. (http://www.davidco.com/) We acquire a lot of mental/emotional obligations through out our day and these things stack up in our unconscious. They rob us of energy and focus. From a spiritual standpoint, its impossible to be clear of purpose if you haven't defraged your internal hard drive. You will be distracted. When I went through and cleared out all the hidden obligations in my head, I discovered a remarkable number of agreements. If you haven't yet, check out "Wild at Heart" by John Eldredge. (http://ransomedheart.com/) The enemies of life will not only tempt us to do things bad things, they also accuse us afterward, trying to shape our understanding of who we are. The real reason we never really deal with all these obligations to ourselves is because it hides our agreements with the enemy about who we are. So I really want to encourage everyone to make an appointment with yourself, set aside a weekend, to forcibly externalize your obligation. Make a list of everything that commands your attention, even momentarily. You will probably unearth some ways in which you've been sabotaging your own success. When you do that you'll experience a tremendous rush of energy, creativity and productivity. However, the real goal in doing this exercise is to both break your agreements and capture your obligations in a system you trust going forward. If you don't do those two things you'll soon return to keeping all of it in your head. So look up those two resources. You'll thank me later.