I Choose Happy! Process Step 5: YOUR MANIFESTO

I started this series on October 10, and said it would be two weeks. Wellll–here we are, twenty days later–are you still with me?

To remind you, thus far we’ve:

• Made the commitment to Choosing Happy (over Being Right)
• Listed what we’d learned as Measures of Success
• Surfaced our own Measures of Success
• Savored what we’ve created that we love
• Taken this further to add what we’d like to do more of that we love
• Put these lists together to come up with what we truly value.

Here’s your last step. It’s a big deal. It pulls it all together. It will become the template for your life, as you fully embrace who YOU are, what YOU came to this life to do. It’s your manifesto.

I recently introduced the idea of a manifesto to a group and it seemed to unnerve them a bit, as they uneasily brought up the Unabomber and other folks who used manifestos to declare their violent intentions. So here are some definitions to help clarify what I mean.

The dictionary defines Manifesto as “a written statement declaring publicly the intentions, motives, or views of its issuer.” I’m asking you to publicly declare who you are (at least to yourself, to begin with). Behind that is my intention for you to manifest, or “display or show (a quality or feeling) by one’s acts or appearance” who you really are.

What does a Manifesto sound like? You’re taking the information you’ve gathered about what you truly value and making a declaration out of it. You’re owning who you are and telling the rest of us about you. It could be written prose, it could be a poem or a song or even a piece of visual art. There’s probably some attitude behind it, some sense that your whole body is in it and agrees with you. This is your chance for your voice to be heard.

What do you think? Are you ready to publicly declare who you are and what you really value, what your life is about?

My next post will be my own manifesto, to give you an idea of where I went with this.