I'll throw out one example from myself - how I used TLP to figure out what I want to do with my life (career).
For the longest time, I've always wanted to be a performer, playing the piano for anybody and everybody I could possibly come in contact with. Hell, I'll still like that now! Performing for other people and arranging new music is something I adore doing; I especially love the reactions I get from people after I'm done playing. Meeting all the people, seeing how ecstatic they were to see me, it all makes it incredibly worthwhile. I just want to rush back up on stage and do it all again one last time.
However, I also love writing. Not nearly as much, but I love to type and write my opinions and share what I know (such as in my blog - link in my signature!) I couldn't imagine giving up this side of me, either.
I could make a decent living via piano playing, especially if I lived in New York City or Los Angeles, and I'd never be out of work. However, the hours are often long, it's a lot of playing, and it doesn't leave you time to do anything else. For example, playing in theaters for Broadway shows isn't something I object to doing, but it's not something I would actively seek out due to the aforementioned reasons. Piano playing would become a slightly better than hand-to-mouth existence. I'd be making money via my talent that I'm absolutely best at, but I'd be miserable. Not a lot of money, not a lot of freedom. No actual performing for people.
I know I could make a decent living blogging; with all the information online, creating a high income online is entirely possible. I love writing, so writing every single new post isn't a chore at all, I adore doing it. There's not much about blogging that I dislike at all, actually, but whenever I focus solely on that, it's not very filling. It feels like a part of me is missing. I get so much joy out of connecting with other people and knowing I'm making a difference, but I feel like my best self is still yet to be achieved. I don't get that feeling when solely piano playing.
I became torn. Do I focus solely on piano playing, knowing that it's going to zap away my free time and become a hand-to-mouth existence? It wouldn't actually be performing at Radio City Music Hall like one of my dreams is, but at least it would be playing, however dull it sometimes gets. Or do I focus solely on blogging, hoping that some of those feelings go away over time? I can see myself as a full time personal development blogger, but five years down the road I can also see myself upset that I didn't really go full force at my piano career. I could get a full time income blogging and have all the free time in the world... which would lead me back to piano playing, which is what I wanted to do in the first place!
Decisions, decisions!
This is where Truth-Love-Power came in. I went slightly backwards, and first used love, then truth, then power:
Love. Love states that you need to connect with what you adore and love. To me, it's both music and writing. It's not necessarily doing one or the other at some points (most times it's music over anything else), but if I'm disconnected from doing one, I'm unhappy. Blocking piano practice and blocking my ability to write is one and the same. When I become blocked from doing one or the other, I become annoyed. After thinking about the concept of love, I realize I have to connect with both of them in some way in the perfect career, to make myself happy. I can't disconnect with one, otherwise I go down a path I don't want for myself. I'll become unhappy.
Truth. Truth states you have to be brutally honest with yourself and your desires. What's the absolute truth of everything you're dealing with, without sugarcoating anything? Essentially, the truth is everything I mentioned above. I had to be brutally honest with what makes me happy, how each career choice makes me feel, what the downsides of each career is. If you need refreshing, scroll back up to reread. I'll be waiting.
This is where I came to my decision: Instead of focusing solely on one or the other, it's best if I used both to create my perfect life. For one, I can start putting my piano works, arrangements, and musical life online to start promoting myself to a larger audience. This would be more effective than all the simple piano jobs in the world. At the same time, I can my skills and knowledge to build a personal development blog to create an online income. I get the very, very best of both worlds! Eventually, I won't have to rely solely on hand-to-mouth, smaller piano jobs to create income, and I'll have total freedom when my website starts pulling in some money. I know I can make that happen if I focus, so I'm excited.
A great income blogging can pay for things like rent, food, and so on, and would leave me with free time to pursue the piano jobs that may grow the largest fan base or be most fun, but not necessarily be the most profitable.
I won't have to be the starving artist anymore.
Power. Power states you have the ability to make everything you want happen by the actions you take, the habits you have, and so on. Power here would mean taking the action steps necessary to create the income generating website, creating piano videos for YouTube, recording songs for MySpace, and so on. Power wasn't so much the problem, but knowing exactly what to channel that power in was.
So as you can see... the framework worked brilliantly well for me. I'm extremely happy with the solution I came up with; it's very, very effective for what I'm after, and I feel like at this time it's the very best solution I could have come up with. Of course, I won't know until the future, but as long as I don't let one area slide (such as neglecting piano playing to create the website, or go fully after piano playing and slack off on the website) everything should be absolutely fine.
Right now I'm beginning to realize that my creative self-expression either via piano playing or blog writing is one and the same. It's the act of creating a brand new work, sharing it with an audience, seeing their amazing reactions and how I've influenced them, and then repeating that process over and over again is what I love. It's taking a lot of soul searching and understanding of myself to fully comprehend my feelings, but the path so far has been so, so cool and amazingly interesting. TLP really works!
I don't know if this was necessarily the clearest example, but I hope it helped and was at least somewhat interesting to read. There's a lot of more subtle aspects of the framework that I'm still comprehending, and I probably accidentally claimed a concept in Truth that really belongs in Authority, but I'm pretty sure I have the basics down.
This was a lot of words to type!
