The influence we have in our lives is a choice. It’s up to us to decide what we want the impact of our lives to be. Let’s look at three aspects of our life’s ultimate impact: width, depth and length.
Width: How many people did we influence?
We may influence a couple people, a dozen people, hundreds of people, or maybe even thousands of people. Some of us are going to be satisfied with touching a few lives. Others of us want to have an influence that is more widespread. Therefore, depending on how many lives we want to impact, we may focus our efforts on people we usually come in contact with or we might seek to work within large established groups. Some of us will be called to create groups of people whose lives we want to influence.
Depth: To what degree did we influence individuals?
Some of us are wired to take change in individuals to an extremely deep level. Others of us may be called to make changes that aren’t as deep, but impact many people or impact people for a very long time.
Length: How long did our influence last?
We can impact people’s lives and the change can be long-term or relatively short-term. How long the influence lasts will probably depend on the kind of change we are wanting to create. It will also depend on the age of the people we work with.
Width, depth and length are each valuable. We can choose to focus on results in one, two or all three of these areas.
Whether our impact is more in width, depth or length will likely come as a result of what our specific passions and strengths are. For instance, I am wired to “inspire meaningful pro-activity” (that’s my personal purpose statement). As I live out my purpose, I have many options where I could help to get people going to accomplish important things in life. With Simply Great Lives I am helping people find their purpose and live their legacy. At Simply Great Lives our goal is to influence lots of people at a really deep level that lasts a life time.
How about you Which aspects of influence are you most excited about: width, depth or length?
