The Amazing Me Project: Think, Do, Live: Be The Project Manager of Your Life

By Gallagher Paul

The Amazing Me Project came about through years of experience managing various traditional projects within my career coupled with a drive for personal development and unfortunately, a need for self-help.

When looking for ways to better manage my life it struck me that a lot of the tools and structures that I used within project management could be utilised within my personal life. Before long, I had developed a system for becoming the Project Manager of my life!

The Amazing Me Project will give you a framework for setting powerful goals in your life and will help you break down those goals in order to better manage all of the aspects of your life that need to be kept in balance throughout your Amazing Me Project.

This book teaches you that without a strong sense of belief in ourselves, our mind, our purpose and our goals we will not accomplish the things we say we want to accomplish. The Amazing Me Project will show you how to create this sense of belief and how you can start to visualise what it is that you desire in life and manifest it into reality!

Intertwined with the teachings of The Amazing Me Project Management Structure, the book takes you on a journey of my life and will show you how I got to where it was in my life when I just had to make a change. The changes I made allowed me to create this project management structure and my story will show you that you too can make massive changes in your life that benefit not only you but your friends, family and others.

With a strong purpose, exciting goals and a drive to succeed you will be able to create an Amazing Me Project Plan. The book teaches about how affirmations, visualisation and meditation practices can assist us throughout our project right from the beginning when we are deciding on what it is we actually want in life all the way through to when you have in your hands everything that you had told yourself you wanted.

This book really will make you an Amazing Me Project Manager. These tools are simple to learn, simple to put into practice and extremely powerful when you decide to commit and truly believe that you can do anything you set your mind on.

So become the project manager of your life. Set your goals, manage your project and live your life as you decide!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gallagher Paul
• Release date: Jan 16, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463657935

Book preview

Part One - What Led Me To Here?

This is a book about Project Management. I assume you already know this because it says so on the cover. You’ll know this because of what you already know about this book and what it was that inspired you to pick it up and read it. For me, what this book is however is not the book I intended to write. How I came to write a book I did not intentionally mean to will become clear to you along the way. You will understand how I began with the outline of a book about project management techniques with a sole purpose of helping others to achieve their desired outcomes, and how that same outline changed into something else along the way. As I wrote, it took on a new purpose. It became a book that is an honest account of me being someone who had convinced themselves that they knew what they wanted in life. Upon completion of writing the book, I had changed. I had become a person who knew what their outcome in life would be; a person that could see it with clarity, definition and purpose!

Just like a lot of books of this type I’m going to begin by telling you a story. And like a lot (or most) of the other books of this type, mine is not one of happiness, success nor joy. The thing is however, when I look back on it now, there was no real reason for that to have been the case. In fact, I actually experienced happiness, success and joy regularly over the course of my life; I just convinced myself that things had always been bad.

I could probably start this story at a distant point in my life from as far back as I can remember to be honest with you. I could give you a rundown of all of my life’s woes and how I was wronged, how I didn’t have the right opportunities, the right support or the resources one assumes they need in order to have an amazing life (you know, the usual things people attribute as the sources of their unhappiness), but that is not the purpose of what I am to achieve from writing this book.

You see, when I now look back on my life I realise that none of those things were true. What I also realise now is that I did not genuinely think they were true at the time either. What I do now see is that I took everything I had for granted. There was nothing wrong with my life that could not be improved upon. My biggest problem really was that I had no idea of what I actually wanted both in and from my life. To anyone looking in from the outside I had a great life. All the way from birth through to right now I have had all the opportunities, support and resources to have created the life that I now know that I am worthy of, but at the time I had no idea what that life was, nor did I appreciate fully what it meant to feel gratitude for the things that had so far contributed to where I had already reached in my life.

It took me a long time and a few false starts to fully understand what it was that I had to do to change my way of thinking and thereby change my life. On paper, my life was fantastic, what did I have to complain about?

Below, I’ve given you some of the main highlights of my life, all the way from my birth through to the time when I realised that a change was needed in order for me to have the life I wanted:

I was born to parents that had careers, owned their own home, were surrounded by their extended family and had a great social life

I never went without food, clothing, shelter nor entertainment

I holidayed and travelled abroad

I had a great education, from primary school all the way through to A-Level

I was supported by my parents in my choices for further education and higher education

I received my university degree and was fully supported by my parents during my studies

I created a career for myself

I got married, had children, had money and a house

Looks pretty good right?

What is not included in that list are what I would have called ‘the bad’ things that happened in my life. When I was eleven, my parents divorced. After that, immediate family members became ill. I had some problems at school. Through this, I started to create my own internal and external issues with people and the world in general.

Despite all of those terrible things happening however I still was fortunate enough to have received all of the good things that formed the list above. I am being slightly facetious here when I refer to ‘those terrible things’. Yes, they were terrible at the time and they did have a big impact on the person I allowed myself to become, but I now understand that I should not have allowed them to impact me as much as I told myself they did.

Did you catch what I intentionally said there? "I should not have allowed them to impact me as much as I told myself they did". I know now that nobody can make you feel a certain way, just as nobody can make you believe a certain thing. The only person that can make you feel or believe anything is yourself! Sure, people can influence you and they can try to convince you of their own opinions, agendas and beliefs, but when it comes down to it, you are the only person that can have that kind of defining impact on your mind.

It’s probably around this point that you are beginning to think hang on, I thought you were going to tell me a story? Well, you are right in thinking that. I should get a move on and tell you what it was that triggered me to start creating the life that I knew that I was worthy of.

Settle back and enjoy the ride!

Fuerteventura, Canary Islands, Christmas 2017

Imagine the scene if you will. It was one of the days leading up to Christmas and I was sitting by the pool in the mid twenty degree heat with most likely two (or three) Pina Colada cocktails next to my beach chair at what was most likely 10:30 in the morning. I had finished work for that year a few days earlier and I would not be back in the office until early January 2018. My wife was sunbathing on the chair next to me. My children were being kept entertained in the hotel’s kids club and both of my wife’s parents, and my own father were relaxing somewhere or other in the resort, wherever it was that they had chosen to park themselves for that particular day. This trip marked the third Christmas in as many years that my family and I had come to this very same hotel to enjoy our Christmas celebrations. Work (and life) had been tough as usual in 2017 so for the next week or so, and at that moment in time, I was planning on doing as much relaxing as I could.

One of, if not my biggest problem back then was that I was never happy! I even used to say that to people, and even more dangerously, I would say it to myself. I was known at work as ‘the miserable guy’. Even though that name was said so in what I know was meant to be an endearing way, it was still the character that I was perceived to be, and also, the character that I allowed people to see me to be. I also told myself that I was not even able to remember a time that I was happy. What did happy mean anyway? Even if I did want to ‘get better’ how would I know what needed to be done? How would I know when I was better if I had no benchmark to a time of happiness and content that I longed to return to?

One thing that I had always told myself was that I could do anything. I told myself that I was confident in my abilities, in my intelligence and in my drive to succeed and accomplish things. I told myself this and I believed it! I thought I believed it anyway. Now when I look back on it, was I trying to convince myself that I was all of these things or was that really how I was as a person? If truth be told, I do not know anymore, but if I had to guess I think it was a bit of both. I do know that I have certain abilities. Even back then, I prided myself on being able to learn new things and to come up with new ideas. I truly did believe then, and still now, that if I really want to know and learn something then I can. I knew this back then because I had done it so many times so I could not contradict my way of thinking as I had proof of it in a so many ways. What I knew then also was that I learnt a lot of these things for the wrong reasons. I was very aware also of what this wrong reason was and I often still find myself guilty of thinking it even now. What has changed in me now however is that I know how to combat that way of thinking. What I am alluding to here is the feeling of importance and of being looked up to that I thought I was receiving as someone who had these abilities, as someone who had acquired certain admirable skills and knowledge. I found that I did these things because I wanted people to know that I could do them. I wanted people to know that I had certain knowledge on a range of subjects. This made me feel, or I told myself that it made me feel good and it massaged my ego to know that I could do all of these things and that other people could not, or that I could do them ‘better’ than they could. Just writing those sentences now has me thinking of what an odd thing that was to do. What I now know is that nothing of this nature can make you feel good. Only you can make yourself feel good!

So, back to the pool in the sun.

As with many people around December I started to think and hope that the coming new year would be different. Next year will be the year where everything will come together for me, I can just feel it. I would tell myself things like this whilst reading my business books and self-help books in the winter sun. I would be inspired with a new concept or technique that I just knew would transform my life; the thing that I had been doing wrong all this time or a new magical something or other technique that I had never tried before.

The equation was so simple:

Read book + Do what the book says to do = Happy Life

It just looks so easy on the page, how could it ever go wrong?

Was I right in that way of thinking? Actually, yes I was. Telling myself that the coming year would be great and that everything was going to work out for me was, and still is a great first step in creating the life that you desire. Reading books and being inspired is also a very good way to begin and to continue to progress your life forward.

With the sun beating down on me and with most likely three or four Pina Coladas in me by that time, and safe in the knowledge that the majority of my friends, family and co-workers were enjoying the dismal weather that the United Kingdom has to offer at that time of year, I set out to make my plan for the upcoming year.

I was inspired. I knew how to do it because the mentors in my faithful books told me how to do it. I was learning from the best. From people who had done it themselves. People just like me who had transformed their lives into something amazing, into something that they wanted to share with the world so that others could have the same level of success and happiness that they had managed to achieve by doing just what was on the pages of that book. Nobody ever said it was going to be easy, but what all of my new mentors convinced me of within their words in those books was that they were adamant about the fact that it was doable.

I had my smartphone with me (as usual!) and it was already loaded with the notebook app that I used for work and I began to set out the plan that would determine the rest of my life. Within an hour I had goals of all scales and durations. Long-term goals, mid-term goals, short-term goals. I was going to be financially wealthy, I was going to own lots of houses, I would have more travel time, more friends, a better family life and a successful business that allowed me to not have to work in the same manner that I had been doing in my life so far. All of this was mine and it was to be for the rest of my life. It was everything that I thought I ever wanted and it was my definition of a perfect life. It was all there, notated on my smartphone. My plan was complete and it was ready for me to achieve. My goals had objectives and I meant business!

I have worked in large organisations, educational institutes and charities and I like to think that I understand the concept and definition of a strategy within those environments. I would also like to think that I know how to transfer a similar strategy structure into something so that it became relevant to my personal life. For me, and this is not how it was initially taught to me, a strategy is nothing more than an allocation of resource. We ask ourselves, what is it that we are wanting to achieve and how do we allocate and distribute the available resource at our disposal in order to meet the objectives and the goal? Resource comes in all manner of types whether it is people, financial, knowledge, information or time amongst other definitions. It is how we distribute our resources ‘strategically’ and how we choose to utilise them that will determines the success of our goals.

Having spent eleven days on the beautiful island of Fuerteventura it was time for me and my family to pack up our things and head back to the United Kingdom. It was New Year’s Eve when we got back home. One day before my new life plan was to begin. My new plan that was to propel me on my way to wealth, success and happiness…I could not wait to get stuck in!

Story Over – The Highlights of 2018

This is the part where I tell you how my plan came into fruition. This is the part where I list all of the amazing achievements that I made and how I was knocking objectives out of the park, smashing my goals, living a much more fulfilling life, one that I could never have imagined was possible to achieve in just one year. This is the part where I tell you how just like me, your goals are achievable if you follow this simple, yet effective plan.

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news but I cannot do that I’m afraid. You see, 2018 in general was awful. I really did see it as one of the worst years of my life. I’ve had some bad experiences in my time so I will never say that 2018 was the worst ever as it would not be fair, and would be disrespectful to other experiences, people and situations that I have been in. Let me tell you though that all of those things that I had written onto my smartphone…well, they did not come about exactly as I had planned them to.

Don’t get put off, stick with me…there is value in what is coming up in the rest of the book.

I would be lying if I said that I had not achieved any of the things that I had put into my 2018 and beyond plan. I am happy to say that some things did come about as planned. For example, one area that I wanted to improve upon was my fitness. I already considered myself to be physically fit. Sure, I could have eaten a lot healthier, and as I get older it becomes much easier to put on the pounds than it is to shed them, but I was, and still am in good shape. I’m a good runner you see and I had been running regularly for a number of years. I had already achieved some goals in my running such as half marathons and even going that little bit further on occasion, but what I did have my eyes on was The Marathon! I had written some objectives about working towards this marathon distance into my plan including competing in the 2018 Richmond Marathon. This event begins in Kew Gardens, running along the River Thames towards Hampton Court Palace and back again. I also wanted to be successful with my application into the 2019 London Marathon.

Unfortunately however, it was not meant to be as during 2018 I learnt that my London Marathon dreams had been shattered as I received notification that I had not been successful for the 2019 event. All was not lost though. I did compete in the Richmond Marathon as planned and completed it in less than four hours which had been my goal.

Running the marathon is just one example of me actually making an achievement, but let’s just say that the rest of my achievements were few and far between. It does not matter what