Assessing Your Balance Sheet
Assessing your personal balance sheet is an important exercise to help launch forward movement. Here you assess your assets, asset-usage, assortment “potency”, “debt,” and consequences of actions.
Assess Your Assets
List your assets, both tangible (e.g., material possessions) and intangible (e.g., time). Identify your resources, be it money or a network of friends. Decide what you can do without, if necessary.
What can we do to make use of our strengths for our futures? Also, what do we do well that we can use to make others’ lives better or to enhance this world we live in? Sharing ourselves can be revitalizing, even when it is off-goal.
Assess Your “Assortment Potency”
Stores have assortments of goods and people have assortments of assets. How potent is your assortment? Will it be helpful to you to trade off one thing for another, to increase the potency of your assortment?
For example, will selling some of your possessions give you more capital, which in turn will make you more potent in being able to act on opportunities that may arise? Do you have plenty of time, in which case you might want to further your education? Assortment potency is a useful concept!
Assess and Minimize your “Debt”
By “debt,” I mean anything that may work against us and which creates a negative entry on your personal balance sheet. Physical debt includes not taking care of our bodies. Social debt includes outstanding grudges and the like. Personal debt includes self-loathing, for example, or even narcissism. What items in your life need correcting?
The idea of “debt” is that we are in a negative position that we will first have to pay or write off before we can take advantage of a desirable opportunity that comes our way. It puts us behind now and in the future. Try to rid yourself of debt now, before that opportunity becomes a missed opportunity. If you are looking to date, create in yourself the person you would like to be with by paying down those debts–lose the weight, quit smoking, mend broken fences, and pay the off the credit cards.
Manage Consequences to Others
“Systems theory” says that every move we make impacts others. We live in a universe — a system. When we make our shifts or respond to changes, we will impact everyone near us, and there will be a ripple effect to others even farther from us; i.e., when my mate and I separated, it impacted our friends.
Our decisions are not made in vacuums. We have the opportunity to create negative or positive consequences from our decisions. It is best to maximize the positives and minimize the costs of our actions to others. If I have a job offer in New York and another in California, and they are both equivalent, I will choose the job in California to be near my family. It is good for me, but it is also good for them. If I have a choice between painting my house a color others will enjoy, versus a color others will detest (assuming I like both colors), I will select the color that enhances others’ lives rather than detracting from their life experience.
I do not mean that one should be self-sacrificing or be a martyr. I mean simply that we should acknowledge the effects of our actions, and try to reduce negative impacts, and increase positive impacts, when possible.
