About Your Instructor & the Course Contents

Tillbaka till: Permaculture Design Your Life

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The text below is essentially the same as in the video presentation. And that’s how this course is structured. -Each lesson follows this structure.

By using both video and text, you can choose the best option for you to recieve the content. By watching the video and then reading the text, you will also automatically repeat the content, which everybody knows, enhances the learning process.

In the text below each video lesson – there might also be additional text, resources or downloadable material, so alway make sure to check for that anyway!

Good luck with your life design!

Dagar

Lesson 1: About Your Instructor & the Course Contents

My name is Dagar Groblad, and in this first lesson, I will tell you a little bit about myself and how this course came into being.

I actually created this course initially for myself. The reason was, I felt stuck in life, and I needed to find out for myself what I really wanted in life. What were my actual goals and visions?

After finding my goals, I needed an efficient and systematic way of reaching them.
So I thought to myself, why not make this journey into a web-course, so that others can benefit from it as well.

Sometimes, the most difficult thing is knowing what you really want. what is your passion and what motivates you? I want to help you find out, unless you already know of course.

Whether you have goals or not, – In this course, we will systematically work with your dreams and visions, making sure you find what you want, and then show how you can set goals based on that and work towards those goals in a smart way, by integrating different well-proven personal development techniques combined with the design framework of permaculture, which is also what sets this course aside from other goal setting courses in a fundamental way.

One of the most important lessons, both in this course, and in life in general is how to handle hardships and setbacks, so I have dedicated one part of this course to that as well (The Growth Mindset).

We will talk much more about the course content later, but let me just give a quick presentation of myself and why I think I am the right person to lead this course.

Presentation of Dagar

I was born and raised on a very small farm in southern Sweden, and I remember my childhood as being filled with play, joy, and experiences in nature. We didn’t have a lot of money, but I was always happy and had free access to the outdoors.

I believe this shaped my personality and my aspiration to restore the balance and harmony between humans and nature.

I realized early on that society is constructed in an unhealthy way and that we really need more people who dare to be different and by that change our reality and perception of what normal is.

But it was extremely difficult to know how to do this, and over time, like so many others today, I was affected by anxiety and depression. In my case, it was about a feeling of helplessness and hopelessness for the state of the world and humanity’s boundless exploitation of nature.

I was fortunate to come into contact with self-sufficiency at the age of 20, which gave me new energy and something to fight for. I felt that I could at least take care of myself, and perhaps I could find my harmony with nature by becoming self-sufficient.

This passion drove me for many years and helped me overcome my depression. It was also during those years that I adopted my current most important life philosophy:

The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.

It was along that path of self-sufficiency that I met my wonderful wife and we had three beautiful and amazing children. We bought a farm in 2009, the same year we had our firstborn son. This is where we would spend the coming fourteen years together.

If I only knew how hard these years was going to be!

The first ten years on the farm would prove to be the most challenging time of my life so far. They included financial hardships, burnouts, and the struggle against constant feelings of depression and hopelessness, which I could not afford to let get the best of me.

As a young father, this was also a time of identity search and spiritual questioning, which certainly didn t make things any easier.

To make a long story short and to explain where my experiences come from, much of these problems stemmed from not having the right approach to our dreams and goals.

We started too many projects at once and didn’t have a clear path laid out for ourselves, which turned everything into a big mess of animals, farming, weeds, finances, children, family life, and everything else that life includes.

And Eventually, we hit a wall and had to take some drastic measures to free up time for both reflection and to be able to breathe a little.

For us, that resulted in the decision to sell all the animals, as they were what consumed most of our time. It was an extremely hard decision that felt like giving up on life in a sence, since the animals were like the heart of the farm in a way. This became an important lesson for me and for us; what can we do about a difficult situation and what do we need to sacrifice to get to a better state?

Just to give a picture of how life looked like on the farm, I’ll show a few pictures here. Life as an aspiring home-steader, without any economic- or mental support, sure wasn’t easy.

With a lack of money and constant stress of getting each project ready, it s easy to see why we got burned out…

We did everything! -from moving houses, repairing buildings…

…and taking care of animals, to gardening and dealing with the daily challenges of being a new parent and finding ways to make money. It was a struggle…

Parting with the animals was the best thing we could do, and it was amazing to see the results. We now had much more time to focus on improving our lives and our self sufficiant farm…

…which was our foundation and passion. The weeds slowly but shurley were exchanged for thriving vegetables…

…and the permaculture design, which we knew we hadn’t done, but should have, started to take shape. Just a year after that decission to part with the animals, we were launching our first online courses in self sufficieny and farming. Now, we could start making an income in doing what we loved, instead of being burnt out by it!

Another important step in dealing with the hardships in life, was how to overcome our economic problems. Being a homesteader means a lot of work, most of it unpayed if you’re not careful. During the time, I reasoned, the easiest way for me to handle it was to take a job.

But after a few years working and still being unable to realize our dreams or saving much money, I decided to get a higher education to hopefully make some more money.

This led me on an interesting journey into the world of academia through a three-year university education that would make me an environmental engineer.

After that, I started working as a product developer and site manager at a company that manufactures green roofs. This was an interesting period of life that made me have to change direction in life, from self-sufficient farmer to corporate employee.

It gave me many insights and has shaped my personality and broadened my vision. Some of the most important lessons during that time was that I got a clear insight into production, how society’s machinery works, but more importantly, insights into how I myself could use these skills to realize my own dreams and visions.

I also met very interesting people and entreprenours during this period, which really changed how I look at work and realizing your dreams. You can think what you want about entrepreneurs, but fundamentally they are often very passionate and driven people who don’t care what others think, and don’t let themselves be discouraged by their own failures.

I realized that that’s how I want to be too. That s when I started adopting the mind of an entrepreneur. More about that in the Growth Mindset part of the course.

But one thing that I noticed was often is missing in the minds of the entreprenours I met, was what I would refer to as a true heart. This is what I feel is at my core and why permaculture needs to be added to create the type of personal development that I was searching for.

I wanted to create clear goals, that were in line with my core so that my goals would not just make me happy, but would also in one way or another bring harmony between human beings and nature.

After working a few years in the industry, I decided to fully realize my own dreams and visions, going back to my passion of self sufficiency and education. But I have so many interests and ideas, so how would I structure this?

I realized I would need to use a well structured method. From my experience, I knew that just using my gut feeling wouldn’t be good enough, and would probably result in an unstructured mess of too many ideas and projects.

This gave me the idea for this course. So, I started building this course at the same time as I practiced it myself. I realized that to keep my core while getting a structure to my goals, I wanted to use permaculture design to design my own life choices.

It also hit me that I had so many interests and passions, but I couldn’t tell which one of them was to be the thing for me to create a stable income and a life long interest in my life. It’s easy to think that permaculture is just for farm design or farming in general. But I think the ethics and design principles of permaculture are an ideal guide for transforming any passion, be it farming, carpentry, or even computer science, into a sustainable livelihood that benefits both you, the people around you, but also nature and society in general

So, I made an effort to really try to crack this life nut. How can I use permaculture to design my life, to live life better, without forgetting my connection to nature and good ethics? Could permaculture be the solution?

So I made a collection of all the techniques I had come in contact with, and that I knew were all good techniques to drive projects forward, and for personal development. Then I added some new methods that I thought could complement them, and lastly combined all of this with permaculture, to create the method that you are about to learn in this course.

The Methods of this course

So what are the methods we will use in this course, let s look at them:

We will go through each method in later lessons, but first let’s just see how the methods of this course are structured.

Theory in permaculture.

We will do a quick summary of what the permaculture design system is, how the ethical framework and the design principles are structured, and how this can be used in a goal setting strategy.

Wheel of life

You will then list all areas of your life and make an outline of priorities using The Wheel of Life method.

Visualization

After that you will work on one specific part of your life at the time, using my self made visualization technique, combined with permaculture design to find your dream future in that area.

Back casting and SMART goals

To reach the goals, we will outline a step by step roadmap to reach those goals, using something called back casting.

When the roadmap is set, we will use a method called Smart-goals to create goals that are possible to reach. The SMART goal method makes each goal much easier to reach.

Time Management & Growth Mindset

The methods above will then be acompanied by methods to manage your time and to adopt a growth mindset, that keeps your thoughts postivive, your motivation living, and helps you meet stuggles more constructivley.

In the end we will also talk about the importance of community, how you can find yours, and how feedback from others might help you evolve further in your process.