I hear these words a lot when I’m coaching.

Everything is on track. I’m on track. I feel like I stayed on track.

And just as often I hear:

I got off track. I fell off track. I got sidetracked.

And the central idea is illuminating. There is a track of my own creation, and I know when I am on it or off it.

Maybe it’s so clear you can see it in your mind’s eye, or maybe it’s just a feeling that you are moving towards or away from but it has a pull on you. You know when you are aligned with it and when you aren’t.

That is Directionality.

You know the direction you want to go in. Maybe all the details aren’t worked out. And sometimes it’s enough to have that as a starting point. An intuition, a gut instinct, a sense of this is what I’m supposed to be doing or not.

When I meet someone and I share that my role is to help people stop drifting and start following through, they immediately know what they aren’t following through on. We know what we long for and we know when we aren’t getting closer to it.

In our coaching we work a lot with vision. We have you write your vision and read it out loud often because this is the most concrete form that we can capture of what is pulling you forward. What wants to be lived into and expressed.

Once you have direction, your commitments create the path.

Your weekly commitments give you an opportunity to name the next step. That is really helpful. The more comfortable you get with the idea of commitments being tiny experiments, learning devices, captured energy, you get less perfectionistic about them and you realize, you are using them to create a real path.

This is the track you want to be on. You are cutting through noise and chaos with your commitments. You’re listening to your inner wisdom with your commitments. You’re getting feedback from your commitments. You’re gaining clarity and you know when you make the right ones and they’ve served you well or made the wrong ones that didn’t serve their purpose or that you couldn’t keep for some reason. Learning devices.

Things might seem slow at first. That’s normal. You are creating a new path. Somewhere you’ve been wanting to go for a long time. In these first few weeks, focus on simply heading in the right direction. Each step will make the next one easier, and before you know it, you will have momentum. That’s when things get really interesting.