Being Result Oriented and Purpose Driven

In my previous post "How to have more time , less stress and be fulfilled", I explained the areas where we are usually wasting most of our time and what are the things we can do so that we can gain more time. I explained about living in Delusional or Distractional and wasting our time away. By identifying how we spend time in these areas and reducing the time we spend in these areas can give us as much as 14 hours per week additionally.

Also I explained about spending more time in the area of Demand and being stressed out of our skin. By planning more and reducing the time we spend in the area of Demand, we can relieve ourselves of so much stress and we can really free ourselves of so much suffering.


Then we also talked about being in the Zone and the more you reduce time wasted on the above three areas the more you can have time to be in the Zone. But how do we really get to be in the Zone and how do we know when we are really in the Zone. Well in this post I will explain two key ways of thinking ,or two questions that I ask myself (because thinking is basically asking ourselves questions), that helped me to spend more in the Zone and got me out of of the stress - mess.

As I explained previously, being in the zone means spending more time on planning so that we are spending our time on things that are important to us and we do that before they become urgent. This can be attained by being RESULT oriented.

Being RESULT Oriented 

Being result oriented simply means not to focus on the TODO's or actions, but on what we want to achieve , simply focus on our outcome. What I have found out is that if we tell our brain what we want to achieve, then our brain has this uncanny ability to find many ways of getting that outcome or result achieved. All we need to do is pick and choose the best way of how we want to get about getting our objective achieved. However most of the time we spend our time on “how to get” something done without knowing “what” we want to get done, this is called being “fooled by movement for achievement”.

There have been many times in my life where things seemed to be so much larger to do simply because the amount of things of that needed to be done. But once I sat down and really thought about what I want to achieve and not what I had to do, things became so much simpler and smaller. Because maybe with just one or two small actions I was able to achieve my outcome. Which of course just made all the stress melt away.

This is called being result oriented, now this way of thinking is part of my life. So before I do anything I stop and ask myself, “What do I want to achieve with this, what is my result/outcome?”. This question alone stops me from spending my time on things that are really not important to me. 

For example there were times when I used to go to meetings and waste my time which I could have used for something much more valuable and productive, so now before I go to any meeting, I ask myself “Indika, what do I want to achieve by going for this meeting”. Sometimes I ask the person who comes with the meeting invite, what is the outcome of the meeting or what is my outcome of being there at the meeting. By doing this either I am very focused when I go to the meeting, or each person in that meeting is focused as they are moving towards the outcome of the meeting or I sometimes find that I do not need to go to the meeting as there is no relevance / importance of me being in that meeting.

Another example is when making calls. Unlike previously, now when I need to make a call, I first put down in a piece of paper all the outcomes that I want to achieve by making this call, and then how I am going to talk with the person. This makes the call so much focused and short. I move into to my outcome quickly and both of us can be fully engaged on moving towards the outcome or the result we want to achieve. The same with writing emails as well.

Well I can go on and on with example's but it is safe to say that now I simply run my life with this rule, that is in any situation without asking myself “What do I need to DO here” I simply ask my self “OK Indika, What is my OUTCOME / RESULT that I want to achieve here”. This gives me so much freedom of choice I just aim for the shortest and the most direct way of getting my target achieved. Once I know my outcome I just decide to go for it and more often then not I always get my outcome met / result achieved.

Now that I know my outcome I am set to achieve my result, but sometimes when heading for the outcome the going does get really tough, and I feel like I will not be able to achieve what I want. I think this would be common for most of us, and this is where my second question that I ask comes into play. That is getting to know the “WHY” before I start doing anything. This simply mean knowing your PURPOSE.

Knowing the PURPOSE

My mentor and coach always told me 

"If you know WHAT you want very clearly and 

If you have a bigger enough reason WHY you want it 

you will most surely achieve anything"

Well this is my second question which I ask myself before I start anything. That is, once I have identified what I really I want to achieve I need to give myself the juice to follow through when the times get tough, and that is when knowing why I want to achieve my outcome becomes very important. If there is no reason why I must do something or if the why is not compelling enough, then even if I achieve my outcome I may not feel the joy that I deserve.

Knowing the why helps in two ways, one is to give the emotional juice to move towards my outcomes and the next is to see if what I am trying to achieve is really important to me or not. So knowing the purpose of doing something could even stop me from wasting my time on somethings which are not important to me. 

Also I try to make the purpose so attractive to me so that what I want to achieve becomes something that I am just longing to do and I can't wait to do. This gives me so much emotional juice to just go out and do it. How I do this is I try to visualize how I would feel, what emotions I would have once I achieved this outcome. This even helps on beating procrastination as well. Because once I get the feeling of how good it feels at the end of what I want to achieve, then I have such a desire to just go for it.

In this post I tried to explain two key questions that we can ask ourselves before we do anything so that we can reduce the time we waste and move towards achievement and fulfillment of our lives.

• What - is my Outcome / Result  
• Why - do I want to achieve this Outcome (Purpose)

The above two questions and way of thinking has simply revolutionized my life and have taken it to new heights. My advice to you is for you to start practicing these two questions in the next couple of days and see whether they will help you also to have the same freedom and satisfaction of achieving your outcomes and also feeling really great about that.

In my next post I will explain about creating an Action Plan (The strategy) to get our outcome achieved and the art of CHUNKING. Till then live your life being outcome oriented and purpose driven and live like there is no tomorrow.