The school of life

I love a good question, and one of my favourites is "what unmet need in the world needs more attention?". Our lives have been improved by so many people who previously responded to this question.

I love a good question, and one of my favourites is "what unmet need in the world needs more attention?". Our lives have been improved by so many people who previously responded to this question.

I see a need that calls for more attention and have done for over twenty years. With increasing commitment, I've thought about this need and how to answer it. Today I am excited to share that solution with you. But I'm getting ahead of myself; let me come back to explaining the unattended need.

Participating in the economy

We've all been through school. Maybe some of us have even gone on to tertiary education. Thanks to that education, we hopefully have a job that pays our rent or mortgage; perhaps even get a treat for ourselves now and then. This is what our education system was designed for. To build the ability to participate in the economy as producers and consumers.

Participating in our lives

Of course, there is so much more to building a satisfying life than just our jobs. We want to make a life surrounded by what is important to us. Perhaps a body we feel prouder of, or better able to manage the stress of our jobs, or make more time available for something or someone important. This requires us to change our behaviour.

How do we do this? It sounds simple, but from experience, you'll know it's not. Our schooling educated us to participate in the economy. But it hasn't contributed to our ability to master our behaviour to build a better and more satisfying life. Surely this is just as important.

The need calling out for more attention

The need I see requiring more attention is how to build skillfulness in shaping our behaviour - the ability to impact the quality of our outcomes and experiences in a meaningful way. Just as a craftsperson develops the capabilities to master their craft, we can build the capabilities to master the shaping of our lives. I call this capability, Self Authorship.

Building a better world

Self Authorship is the process of creating a life that you love. Developing Self Authorship improves not only individual lives but also our collective lives. As our capability grows, three significant changes occur.

1. Our ability to do what we say we're going to do increases. Challenging the limiting beliefs we have about ourselves creates a greater sense of possibility.
2. This unlocks an invisible ceiling on the question of what is important to us. To our unconscious mind, it only makes sense to engage with what is possible, and as this grows, so does our understanding of what is important.
3. As Self Authorship grows, so does the scope of our responsibility. Deep down, we recognise a feeling of being members of a broader family, the family of life. When we ask what is important from this perspective, we contribute to changing the world for the better.

Self Authorship is an essential life skill for these reasons. It is vital to our individual and collective well-being to find ways to develop it, and there currently aren't any.

How and where can we develop self authorship?

I have engaged with this question for two decades now and how to do it cost-effectively and at scale. For the last three years, my team and I have designed an original solution. We have combined our talents in psychology, philosophy, human development, and digital technology. From this unique mix of skills, we have designed a digital product; delivered to the palm of your hand. IDOJO is a mobile app that develops Self Authoring capability, supporting people to wake up to a better tomorrow. I think it can change the world.

Launching our website

With my colleague Nav Rao, and a cast of other talents, we will be launching the product soon. Today we are launching our website. If you are reading this from somewhere other than our website, I encourage you to visit www.idojo.com. On it, you can:

• Find more information about building Self Authorship.
• Ability to get notified by email when the product launches.
• Subscribe to our "A Better Life" newsletter.
• Read about two ideas that could change your life.

We all aspire to a better life. We maintain that the limits on a better life are determined mainly by our Self Authoring capability. We can develop this if we want; IDOJO can show you how.