Are you living the life that you truly want to live?

Are you working at the job that you wanted to be your career?

If you want to make a change, do you have the permission to do so?

“I'm grown, I make my own decisions.” “I can change anything I want to and I don't need anybody's permission.”

The challenge is not whether someone else gives you permission to do something. The challenge is whether you honestly believe that you can give yourself permission to change. Sometimes you may find that you're in a position that you hate. Or, you're in a position where you find that no matter how hard you try, you just can't cut it. You always seem to land in average land and just can't jump that above average hurdle.

These two examples don't mean that you're a failure. It may just mean that you got sidetracked from your true path and landed in the wrong mountain. You might be stuck and afraid to come down off the mountain that you've found yourself on. If that's the case, you just may need to take a step back, regroup and move ahead again. Wherever you are, you have to keep moving. Even if you're in your life's sweet spot; the place where you truly want to be, you have to keep the innovation cycle in motion.

For some reason, there seems to be the thought that changing directions in life is a show of weakness or being double minded or being unstable. However, changing directions in business is seen as just part of the competitive innovation process. That is where the Product and Development guys hang out. In living your own life, taking the Product and Development approach may just give you the permission and the new lease on life that you have been looking for.

Using the P&D, competitive innovation process, you see goals and reaching goals as points in your journey of life. Goals are not the ends, but means; markers on your journey of living a successful, fulfilling life. Success and fulfilling being terms that only you can ultimately determine. Simply beginning to have this mindset is actually liberating in itself. It is movement. You start by creating goals, determining the tasks necessary, implementing the tasks needed to accomplishing those goals, evaluating whether those tasks accomplished the desired goals or outcomes and if so, start the process with another goal and repeat. If it didn't accomplish the desired outcomes, modify the tasks, implement the modified tasks, evaluate the new outcomes and move on as dictated by your outcomes.

What this does is breaks your goals down into a series of projects. And, within each project, there's places and points to start, design, implement, evaluate and move on. You keep moving. You're now allowed to take detours and still stay on track toward your current goal or even change goals completely. You can't allow yourself to get trapped into thinking that you've made a decision, determined a goal, decided that what and who you are and that's the end of it. You may find that your current goals are not really fulfilling and leading to the success that you want. With this process, you are free to evaluate and redevelop and re-implement and if necessary, change directions. Remember, the successful businesses are the ones who are able to adapt by going through the competitive innovation process and changing when necessary.

In the same way that the competitive innovation process must be holistic, living a balanced life is a holistic process. You have to understand that you don't live in a vacuum. You have to take into account your abilities and resources, others that you affect and that affect you and the environment that you are in. Each of these things are always changing and are in a constant state of flux – unless one of those elements is dead. By taking the competitive innovation process approach to life, it helps you to stay balanced and allows you to be true to yourself and what really matters. “To thine own self be true.”