We’re at a watershed moment in history. Women of all ages and life stages are embracing a new mind-set as they rewrite their life journeys, often multiple times, to bring their values and passions to the forefront.

In recent years, much attention has been given to the subject of women’s reinvention and search to connect with their inner passions. We’ve taken a fresh look at this subject and introduced a new vocabulary for it. “Repotting” is a metaphor we’ve chosen for the creative process that women—and men—must undertake in order to develop themselves as they search for a more meaningful life. Gardeners who want to move plants to a new environment to promote growth need to create a base plan with steps to design a well-organized garden. In the same way, those who are embarking on a journey to redesign their lives, or just aspects of their lives, need a master landscape repotting plan incorporating a series of steps that will provide the framework for their new lives.

As you examine and reevaluate your family life and relationships, you may be asking yourself:

  Do I need a new life landscape plan to help my family life grow? We know that women need more than generalizations to lead them as they initiate their search for a more meaningful life.You’ll need a starting point and a step-by-step process to achieve your repotting goals—in this case the goal of creating enough space in your life’s garden for your family values.

Many new millennium women are living such fast-forward lives that they lack the time or focus to reflect on or act on what is meaningful to them. They live type A lives and, at the end of the day, they feel a gnawing sense of incompleteness. As this “spin cycle” life goes on for days, weeks, and even months, they are wrestling with questions such as these:

1.    Do I feel that I’m shortchanging key relationships: with husband, children, parents, other family members, friends, colleagues, pets, and so on?

2.    Do I feel that time is passing, and I’m missing opportunities to participate in my family’s lives because my day-to-day focus is too narrow, or I’m overscheduled?

3. Do I have the overall sense that the current mix of components in my life is not fulfilling to me?

    If you’ve answered yes to one or more of these questions, maybe it’s time for you to repot!

    Repotting is not just a process; it’s also a philosophy that requires a new mindset. For instance, in order to find more family time, you’ll need a new time mindset. This means descheduling, not overscheduling, your life and that of your family. Repotting embraces a “less is more” approach, one in which you need to prune the nonessentials in your daily, weekly and monthly calendar.

How to Create More Space for Your Family in Your Personal Garden

~Outsource activities. You can delegate to family members or paid helpers or use community resources to get the job done. Invest time in training your children (especially teens) to do more household chores, from watering plants to emptying wastebaskets to doing laundry. Pay a neighborhood teen to care for your pet or hire a dog walker. Investigate services for seniors that can relieve you of some of your responsibilities to your aging parents, from food delivery to art classes.

~“Thin-slice” some activities. Use shortcuts when possible to be more efficient. Let go of the perfectionist mentality. You don’t have to manage every detail in your life or that of your family. Consolidate bill paying, note writing, form processing, and similar tasks and do them all once a week or once a month, depending on your needs. Use your fitness club’s on-site dry cleaners rather than dropping your clothes at a separate establishment (thus having to make an extra trip); try an Internet grocery order and delivery service. Barter services with your friends, family members, and neighbors—for instance, can you exchange child-care or pet-sitting services for weekends away?

~Put some activities on autopilot. Postpone projects that aren’t time sensitive or critical in favor of creating more opportunities for personal reflection. Do you really need to start painting the front hall this month? Schedule these nonessential projects for specific dates in the future to free up more time now for contemplation.

~Prune your social calendar. Edit out social activities that aren’t positive additions to your day, week, month . . . or life!

~ Let fallow beds lie. Don’t immediately fill in the free time slots that you’ve created by pruning your schedule—just say “No!” You may feel pressure from within yourself and from others to substitute new activities for those you’ve eliminated. Giving yourself openings in your schedule for reflection creates “room to breathe”—so recognize that open space on your calendar is valuable and essential for creating a more balanced family life.

These are just a few of the personal gardening tips that you need to change your life landscape plan to bring your family values into focus. Remember, a successful gardener is guided by specific ground rules along the way to bringing her vision of a new landscape to fruition. You will need some rules to help you repot your family life also. Two of the most important rules for repotting are: Change your mindset—you need a new outlook to repot; and Edit your life—less is more!

Looking Through A Kaleidoscope

Successful repotters have found that they need to be proactive, not reactive, in planning a redesigned life. The world today offers so many options, opportunities, challenges, and experiences at such an accelerated pace that it’s easy to live your schedule instead of your life. A central tenet of repotting is setting priorities based on your values so that the choices you make are reflective of the kind of meaningful existence you want to have.

Women today are looking through a kaleidoscope. As they deal with changing priorities—a promotion, the birth of a child, or a rekindled interest in a specific talent or hobby—some things come into focus while others become blurred and no longer receive total attention. As women turn the base of the kaleidoscope, the pattern changes, with new shapes becoming more sharply defined. They’re blending their needs, wants, and Have To’s into an integrated lifestyle that offers fulfillment over time, although not necessarily on a day-to-day basis.

We know that you’re in continual flux, and that you’re often making adjustments of all kinds. Nevertheless, planning for a redesigned life requires a thoughtful assessment of whether your core values and priorities are in sync with your activities.

The Values Orbit Exercise

Imagine yourself at the center of your own solar system. If you’re the “sun,” so to speak, the planets are your values in orbit around you. At any given time, the most important ones will be closest to you, in the Mercury, Venus, and Earth orbits. Those of lesser importance at this point in time will be in the Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and outer planets’ positions, circling you at the farthest edges of your solar system.

Recognize that some of your values may actually be in the outer orbits, even though you want them to be a priority, because you’ve been unable to focus on them for a variety of reasons. For instance, you may want to travel and see the world, but family responsibilities or finances are keeping you close to home. Or you may feel that there’s something missing in your life, such as a spiritual component, but you haven’t yet found a way to include it in your inner circles. The purpose of the following exercise is to show you in black-and-white whether the life you’re living is truly the one you want to lead.

For these three steps, you will need several pieces of unlined paper.

Step 1: To construct your current Values Orbit, take a piece of plain paper and draw yourself as the sun in the middle, with 12 other concentric circles around you representing the planets. Look at the list of top-12 values above. Decide which ones are most important to you at this time and write them into the Mercury position.

You may have more than one in each ring. For instance, you may feel that relationships, career, and finances are of equal importance; if so, place them all in the Mercury orbit. Write your lesser priorities into the other orbits. If you have a value or priority not on the top-12 list, now is the time to place it on your chart where it belongs. In addition, your Values Orbit may not contain everything in the top-12 list. That’s okay—remember, this is your life.

Once you’ve completed the diagram of your current Values Orbit, set aside time to consider whether this values hierarchy accurately reflects how you want your life to look. For instance, maybe “giving back” corresponds with Pluto (which is now technically designated as a “dwarf planet”), but you’ve been thinking about your affluent and self-oriented lifestyle and feeling uneasy about the lack of time you’re devoting to others. You may need to investigate how to move the philanthropic value at least as close to the sun as the Earth orbit.

Or perhaps your family, which you’ve placed in an outer ring, has been shortchanged because you’ve been working long hours and traveling for work. Assuming that family time is important to you, you may need to evaluate what steps you have to take in order to move this category into an inner orbit. Do you need to find a new job, or is there some other solution?

    It’s important to invest time and effort into analyzing your current Values Orbit and to be completely honest with yourself. Without this self-evaluation, you can’t create a clear plan for your new garden landscape.

Step 2: Take a second piece of plain paper and draw a second solar system. Again, you’re in the center, in the sun position. Now it’s time to visualize the life you truly want. In this case, you’ll place the values from the top-12 list (and any others of your choice) in orbits according to where you’d like them to be.

    We realize that this plan for your new Values Orbit isn’t going to become a reality overnight. We suggest that you do this exercise several times over the course of a month or more—whatever period of time it takes for you to feel comfortable that the organization of the values on your diagram reflects the life you desire. For example, we know that it will take time and hard work for you to move fitness front and center in your life, if that’s what you’ve decided is important to you. But the very first step is committing yourself to this newly acknowledged goal. Just as there are no instant gardens, there’s no shortcut to a new Values Orbit.

Step 3: Revisit your Values Orbit maps, comparing your current one and your revised version. Look at what you’ve newly placed in the orbits closest to you. Has it occurred to you that one of these may represent a touchstone—your innermost passion—that will reveal hidden desires in your life? Now that you’ve done this exercise, have you finally uncovered and brought to the surface a passion that you’ve allowed to lie fallow but now want to cultivate?

One repotter was surprised by the results of doing this exercise. She told us that crocheting had been an interest and love of hers since her teen years, when her grandmother taught her this art. Recognizing the great satisfaction she derived from her hobby, she moved it from the outer reaches of her solar system to the Venus orbit (the second ring) around her “sun.” She’d never had—or made—the time to pursue this passion, but realized that she wanted it back in her life, front and center. In addition, she loved it so much that she was motivated to start a crocheting business from her home and now sells her handicrafts at local hospitals and nursing homes. Just as it did for this woman, this exercise may unleash the hidden blossoms—or desires—in your life and put you in touch with a motivating passion that will help you determine how you’ll repot your life.

Diana Holman is an entrepreneur and well-known trends expert who speaks worldwide to corporate audiences on lifestyle trends. She founded WomanTrend, the first company to analyze and interpret trends created by and affecting female consumers. She was also the editor of WomanTrends, the firm’s quarterly newsletter. Since selling WomanTrend in 2001, she has focused her efforts on marketing and trends consulting.

Ginger Pape, a former Wall Street executive and corporate officer of a Fortune 500 company, is an entrepreneur and repotting consultant. Long an advocate for women’s issues, she helped found both the National Women’s Business Center (WBC), and the National “Race for the Cure” in Washington, DC. Over the past 15 years, Ginger has advised women from all walks of life on their repotting process.

Visit: www.repotting.com  www.hayhouse.com

Repotting: 10 Steps to Redesigning Your Life, March 2007, Hay House.