Three Essential Steps To Complete BEFORE You Start Designing Or Developing Your Homestead…That Will Make Everything Else Easier Or Unnecessary.
*Creating a Minimum Holistic Goal is a pre-requisite step for Holistic Ecosystem Design clients. The work you put in to your MHG is the foundation for good design and successful implementation of a homestead that fits you, your ecosystems, and your values and vision for your life.
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If you aren’t sure what this Minimum Holistic Goal business is all about yet, and you arrived at this page because you’re looking for a process to steer the design and development of your homestead, I invite you to watch the short video below and continue reading.
To my fellow Sovereign Homesteader ~
You are a rare breed of human.
How do I know this?
First off, most people aren’t interested in homesteading, or what they think homesteading is.
The fact that you are already are puts you in a small, select group.
Secondly, most people that have the homesteading mindset aren’t consciously designing their lives and homesteads to maximize their personal sovereignty. Instead, they’re mashing together what they see other people doing to create what they hope will work to create what they think they want.
But most people (homesteaders included) haven’t done the deep introspective work to really know what they want.
And it’s not their fault either – that vast majority of people spend their lives in a system that actively discourages this kind of introspection and self-knowledge.
Sure, most people would say they like the sound of things like ‘personal sovereignty’, ‘freedom’ and ‘resilience’. But what do these things actually mean, in practice – in the flesh and the day-to-day mix of life – to you?
How can you intentionally design and then actually create more personal sovereignty in your life?
It’s NOT by doing what everyone else is doing – that’s obvious.
It’s not by searching for a pre-packaged solution – your life and your context are too unique for that.
And besides, that’s what most homesteaders are looking to get away from – the cookie cutter life that mainstream corporate consumerist culture has been programming us to submit our life energy to from the moment we were born!
The answer that I have found, and seen proven true without fail through all of my years of designing landscapes and homesteads, comes down to one word:
Process.
Most people don’t have a process for consciously designing their lives.
None of us were taught processes for of introspection and self-reflection in public school – no way!
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The ‘powers that were’ don’t want you carefully examining your life! If you did that, you might realize all on your own that squandering your life energy doing something you hate to buy stuff you don’t need to fill the giant ‘meaning hole’ in your soul isn’t actually what you’re here to do!
In reality, most people live in reaction mode – moving distractedly from one “shiny” thing to another – without ever doing the critical introspective work to know who they are, what they value and what kind of life their authentic self is actually here to live.
Because of this, most people who choose the homesteading lifestyle will, at some point, and potentially always, experience at least one of the following:
- Analysis Paralysis. Without a clear vision of what they want, or a process to test the alignment of their decisions with that vision, it’s very easy to slip into ‘analysis paralysis’. They simply stay on the starting line – talking a game but going nowhere.
- Overwhelm. When homesteads are designed and built without regard to integrating the many systems into a seamless, self-reinforcing whole the amount of unnecessary work generated to keep them functioning and producing increases exponentially (all of which has to be done by you!). This saps energy for critically evaluating, redesigning, and improving systems – until ultimately they’re just treading water, all the joy that started them on this path evaporated into bitterness.
- Experience the bitter pill of committing a Type 1 Error. A Type 1 Error is a basic thing done wrong that makes it almost impossible for anything to be done right afterwards – the kinds of things that for as long as they exist or are present on your homestead, they cost you time, energy, money and peace of mind. The chances committing a Type 1 Error increase dramatically if you don’t follow a principled design process.
The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way. At all. Ever.
If you’re willing to calibrate your internal compass at the start of your journey (or whenever you realize you’re lost!) you can avoid these common pitfalls.
To discover your truth, you have to go inside yourself.
The answers to questions like…
- What do I value most in life?
- What do I want my Quality Of Life to be like?
- What things must I create to realize that Quality of Life?
- What are the conditions of my land, my relationships and my community that will be required in order to sustain my desired Quality of Life?
…all come from within.
No one can discover them for you. No one can speak them with the same gravity and emotional weight as you will. No one can offer you a shortcut. I sure can’t.
What I can offer you is a process.
That is what the Minimum Holistic Goal course is all about.
In it I will walk you through step-by-step the exact process for crystallizing your own Minimum Holistic Goal that all of our design clients go through before we ever put pen to paper designing anything for their homesteads.
I use the word crystallizing intentionally here.
See, the content of your Minimum Holistic Goal already lives inside you.
Your MHG is a completely pure expression of your most authentic self – what you value, what you believe and who you are. You don’t need to create anything new – you simply have to uncover those gems of truth that lay hidden within you and bring them into the light of your conscious awareness.
Crystallization is a chemical process that is impeded by the presence of impurities.
The process of developing your Minimum Holistic Goal is the means by which you sift out the impurities – the things that our culture and “leaders” have programmed you to desire since you were born that parasitize your life energy and make you dependent, cowed and easily led.
The MHG process is the crucible that will gather the elements of your heart, soul and spirit after you subject them to the purifying fire of process-driven self-examination to create a pure solution – only that which is authentically you will remain.
From this pure solution, you crystallize your Minimum Holistic Goal – the minimum amount of structured pre-thinking required to start your homestead journey in complete alignment with your values. You can then begin building a life that is a pure expression of your Higher Purpose.
Developing your own Minimum Holistic Goal is going to do three invaluable things for you:
- Give you a clear, concise understanding of who makes decisions and what powers of decision each individual has to allocate the inevitably limited resources available.
- I can’t tell you how utterly foundational this step is to successfully undertaking a large, complex, constantly evolving project – and homesteading certainly is that kind of project!
- Without doing this work up-front, the likelihood of overwhelm and interpersonal conflict increases exponentially. Don’t let this be your story!
- You will get crystal clear on what kind of life you want to live by writing a concise, powerful, and co-owned Quality Of Life statement – and you will learn to test your decisions for alignment with this statement.
- Think of your Quality of Life Statement as the magnetized needle on your compass. It is the thing that will always point towards your True North, and that can always be relied upon to steer you in the right direction, even when you’re in uncharted territory. And if you’re moving in the direction of more personal sovereignty, you will always be in uncharted territory – constantly moving into the unknown and testing yourself.
- Crystallizing your Quality of Life statement is like giving yourself the gift of having a guide on your path to sovereignty – a Gandalf to your Frodo.
- If there was ONE thing that I’d wish for all homesteaders to have – it would be a crystal clear Quality Of Life Statement. Having this in your pocket will make every future decision either easier or unnecessary.
- You will know what you must produce, who you need to work with, and the state of your resource base as it needs to be in order to sustain your desired Quality Of Life indefinitely.
- If you know that someday a great-great grandchild of yours will be born that you will never meet and you already love them, you are a person who cares about their legacy.
- You know that the actions you take today will reverberate through time and affect the Quality Of Life that your future descendants will be able to enjoy. If you want your great-great grandchildren to know that lifetimes before they were born someone loved them, and cared enough about them to invest in them generations ago, this is where you begin.
- The Minimum Holistic Goal asks you to describe the resource base that will sustain your vision of a good life to that future grandchild and beyond – sowing the seeds for multi-generational wealth and prosperity.
The Minimum Holistic Goal setting process is a step-by-step journey to uncovering these nuggets of gold that you already hold inside you – you have but to invest the time and follow the steps to bring them into the light.
With your MHG guiding the way, everything you do will come from a place of joy – even when the going gets tough – which it will – especially during the times in which we are blessed to be living in.
To use another Lord of The Rings analogy – your Minimum Holistic Goal will serve as your Light of Earendil…
Once you do this work you have it forever. It will serve you from this day until the end of your days and your family, community and land you pass on to them for generations beyond that.
If you could invest one day to create a tool that would make living the rest of your life in alignment with your Truth simpler and easier – would you do it?
That’s what the Minimum Holistic Goal setting process will yield for you – if you do the work.
And the best part? There is no cost to you but your time, energy and honest introspection.
Trust the process. Do the work. Reap the rewards forever.
Onward,
– Casey