…is the foundation to all the other CORE/OPUS/PoP work you will do. As the saying goes, without a solid, level, strong foundation, the rest of your building will end up with serious cracks.
Everyone has a worldview — only a few have written it out with conscious clarity and rinsed it to fill in the gaps. A worldview addresses the big why questions about life, including the universe, the world, humanity, death, spirituality, morality, etc. It’s much easier to just focus on the how, but when the storms of life come, if you don’t know your why, you’ll lose your way. A strongly constructed worldview gives context for understanding your identity and the world around you. Almost every identity issue we see at BTL is rooted in something either missing or out of whack in a person’s worldview.
Your worldview is your lens for interpreting life, what’s important, what’s unimportant, what to say yes to, what to say no to, what’s true, what’s false, what’s knowable, what’s not, what’s worth suffering for/sacrificing for/living for/dying for. Your worldview will be the why for your purpose, and the ethos for the culture of your twenty square-feet.
At the root and center of your worldview is where you’ve put your hope. Hope informs your explanatory style and resilience as you interpret adversity, events and the good/bad/ugly of life. Without hope you’ll quit and settle somewhere in victimhood or mediocrity. With misplaced hope, you’ll find yourself on a trajectory that will disappoint. Self-centered/others-controlling is an example of misplaced hope. If you find this is your current state as we hit Day 12, don’t be overly surprised. Just face up to it, and then resolve to re-solve finding a better hope on your Builder’s Journey toward becoming CORE-centered/self-controlling.
As LA taught me more than a decade ago, a strongly constructed worldview has these elements:
- CLARITY…it is not fuzzy or ambiguous.
- DEPTH…it is not superficial.
- COMPREHENSIVENESS…it is not too narrow, ignoring some of the broadest aspects of life.
- ALIGNMENT…it does not internally contradict itself.
- SIGNIFICANCE…it is not uninspiring.
Take your time with this one. Challenge yourself to write out at least 20 “I believe _____________” statements as one long run-on sentence, finishing each statement with an “and” before starting the next one. Just throw up on paper or your screen. See how deep down the bunny hole you can go as you write why you believe what you just wrote. Do this until you get to the root of your core beliefs and where you’re putting your hope and why.
If you’re stuck because you’re having a Moment of Truth (MOT) about whether you really believe anymore what you’ve been believing up to this point in your life, just write about what you’ve been believing. Like Neo in the Matrix, accept this as part of the awakening process.
When you’re done, title it “worldview v1.0” and date it. Many rinses await.
Done so.
BUILT TO LEAD 