Here’s a great exercise to help you find balance in ALL areas of your life.
First, write down, if you would, the five areas that you can think about when setting goals and creating balance in your life. Or rather, creating “harmony,” because I believe balance is an over-used and misleading word.
What were your goals were going into this year? How are you doing on those goals? (What month is this?)
You are in one of three places – you are either blowing your goals away, or you are kind of on target, or you are going, “Holy heaven, I am so far behind, what am I going to do with myself?”
Write down these five areas: financial. Money is not the most important thing in life, but according to Zig, it is right up there with oxygen.
The people who go, “Oh, no no no, I don’t care about making money, I just care about making a difference,” I say with the sweetest of smiles on my face, “You lie about other things too.” If you are just working to make a difference, go volunteer somewhere. We all work to make money.
But many of us also want to work to make a difference. Listen, you can do both. They are not mutually exclusive; you can make a difference and make money. That is what I love about what I do. I get to do both, and we will talk about how to the measure that.
Physical is number two. These are not in any order, I am just listing them. Third word is relational, which is your friends, your family, community, relationships.
Fourth word is recreational, or you can use the word balance here. Then the last one is spiritual.
So, financial is money, that is a pretty easy one to understand. Physical means health which includes appearance. Recreational means the things you do for fun, outside of work, what you enjoy. Relational is family, friends, community, making friends, keeping friends, building memories, serving your community, loving on your family, asking forgiveness from or giving forgiveness to your family, whatever the dynamics are in your relationships.
Spiritual means having true 100% certainly that tomorrow has a great plan for being better. Spiritual success means having peace, it is non anxiety, it is non depression, it is the opposite of those things. For me, it is really being certain God has got this. Now, if you don’t know if you even believe in God, then maybe spiritual would be for you, “I’ve got to determine if God is real.” Okay, that is a good goal. See, there are no right or wrong answers here.
So there are your five areas. Remember the goals you set at the beginning of this year for all five. Now choose the top three, and write down what your one year goal was for that area. Then list some of the successes that you have so far this year. You need to have some successes to look at.
If you chose physical as one of your top three, where did you want to end up? Write it out in as much detail as you can; not just, “I want to lose 50 pounds,” but how do you want to look, how do you want to feel, if the goal was physical?
If your goal was in the money area, how much do you want to make, what are you going to do with it? Relational is memories, forgiveness, laughing, building new friendships, whatever it looks like for you. Recreational, maybe if you like to read to relax during time outside work, what books are you going to read?
Write it out in as much detail as you can, only for these three areas (not all 12 core areas that I always teach about, and not even the five we touched on earlier). We are only doing three. Where did you want to be when the year started?
Don’t worry about whether you are going to get there or not. Just be honest with yourself. Don’t be gauging and adjusting, like, “Oh, I am not quite half way there, I better lower the goal.” What was your goal when you started this year? Now, obviously you are processing through in your mind, “If this is what I set for the year, what do I have left to do?” We’ll get to that!
There are three groups of people we touched on earlier – there is the group of people who is blowing it away, there is the group of people who is pretty on target, and then there is a group of people who is falling short.
Nobody that I just mentioned has to not achieve the goal; we can all achieve the goal, but we need to remember that big dreams need great systems. In our company, we believe in people and their dreams. We know we are able to make your dreams come true because we give you systems. Big dreams need great systems.
Now think about what is left to do. What action steps do you need to take in order to achieve the goal you have set for the year? If you can get more specific, that will be good, because the more specific your plan can be, the more likely you are to achieve your goal. If you are interested in getting ahold of a system that can help, click here to get a recording from one of my Goals Workshops.
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