Dr. Rakish Rana (The Clear Coach) is a life coach who challenges, encourages and supports clients to find direction, happiness and purpose.
getty
Success in work, with family and friends, in social circles and with partners is built on solid relationships. Personal developmental success even comes down to the relationship you have with yourself. Relationships are critical in creating a life filled with purpose and passion, yet so many of us forget their importance.
Throughout the following five steps—the CLEAR framework—a crucial emphasis is placed on building, maintaining and strengthening relationships, i.e., how to improve, support and nurture them to secure your fulfillment in life and reach your desired goals—no matter what they may be.
Let’s look at the CLEAR framework in a little more detail.
Connection
To begin, you need to build a connection with yourself. One that you may have been avoiding for some time. To understand your own needs and clarify your perception, crafting a personal connection is critical. Furthermore, it’s important to build rapport with others to build trust and likability. This emphasis on connection strays into every avenue of your life. Learning how to create long-lasting rapport can help to improve your satisfaction with your personal life and enhance growth in your profession.
Connection is a fundamental part of being human; it’s something we wholeheartedly crave yet scarcely achieve. By reevaluating the importance of connection, you can uncover how to integrate it into your everyday life.
Language
Communication is a key part of how you build the connections I just mentioned. That is why it’s essential to think about your message in advance so that you can use the best language that ensures it is clearly understood. You need to cut through the jargon and eliminate the fluff to get right back to the basics of language and communication so that you have the power to live a life filled with clarity.
Life is intrinsically complicated; however, expressing yourself doesn’t need to be. A clear message delivered with confidence is far more valuable than a complex sentence that shows little clarity into what you truly mean. When you express yourself with a lack of focus and clarity, you don’t just confuse others, you can confuse your inner dialogue, too. With the CLEAR framework, you can learn to empower yourself to use the right language about yourself, your goals and your vision. Keep it simple. Keep it clear. Get what you need.
Energy And Enthusiasm
For high achievers like you and me, it’s common to lose the energy and enthusiasm you once had when you achieve the things you thought you wanted to achieve. Thoughts of “what next?” or “what now?” aren’t only common—they’re prevalent. Keeping your energy, enthusiasm, inspiration and motivation is critical to living a purpose-filled life. When you lack that, it can creep into every corner of your day, every aspect of your person. Positivity and productivity start to dwindle, and the cycle continues to spiral deeper and deeper.
Find ways to ignite your adrenaline and spark your innermost enthusiasm needs. Make it a priority as you live each day of your life. That means actively choosing things because you wholeheartedly want to do them, rather than feeling like you had to do them or that it just seemed like the right thing to do. Refocusing your energy, capturing your positivity and transforming it into each day you wake up is part of a process.
Awareness
You cannot “fix” the things you do not like if you lack the awareness and understanding of what you want instead. Similarly, it can become impossible to identify what is holding you back when you have lost all consciousness of what's happening in your everyday life. To change that, you need to heighten your awareness and reestablish your presence in everything you do. When you have awareness, you can stimulate change—not just in small and select ways, but in every aspect of your being.
Building awareness isn’t just about your connection and relationship with yourself; it’s about your understanding of other people’s needs so that you can maintain your relationship with them, too. There is no aspect of life where a lack of awareness is beneficial. Hence, raising awareness and emphasizing its value is integral to your progress in this framework.
Results
To achieve a life filled with purpose, you need to outline the results you want to accomplish with clarity and precision. It's important to ask yourself: “Why am I aiming for this?” “What am I truly trying to achieve through these actions?” Once you have a clear vision of the results you want to achieve and why, you can move forward with connection, enthusiasm, awareness and drive. This can make the journey much easier and far more sensical.
Without a vision of the result, you run the risk of losing direction, giving in to distractions and impacting your own progress. You may even suffer from imposter syndrome, as you forget how to progress and why you have the right and experience to do so. By skipping to the end, we can start at the beginning—mapping each step of the way. You need to outline the results you want to accomplish with clarity and precision. It’s time to make a change. It's time for you to find the clarity and purpose you're currently lacking so that you can gain the confidence to move your life in the right direction.
Using the CLEAR framework, and underlying principles, you too can build, maintain and strengthen relationships to lead a more successful life.
Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?
