Bringing Harmony to Your Life

Posted by admin | Posted in Articles, Main Content | Posted on 01-05-2009

Living a well balanced life is the target of the majority of people it is the key to achieving personal and professional goal setting and success in your career. A question needs to be asked, what is meant by a balanced life, whilst it is true that goal setting is usually the domain of your career especially those in business to live a balanced life means setting goals in every part of your life business and personal. In fact those who set goals in each area of their lives have greater life satisfaction than those who only set career goals thereby decreasing their odds of having a happy life.

Many people need to discover how to write goals and set out a goal setting plan so that they can achieve balanced living by reaching their goals.

You may have come across the term SMART Goals standing for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time related goals. Whilst this is a fairly successful format for those who are very familiar with goal setting it can prove to be complicated for people who do not know how to set goals. Setting Specifi; Measurable and Attainable goals is my way of setting goals and I recommend this formula to you.

Are you aware that you set goals every day of your life, for everyone makes decisions as they {move through the day# are faced with different daily tasks}, a decision can only be made by a goal setting process. You think of something you want, work out if you think you can do it, and take action to attain it, that is a goal setting process. {Obviously there are a few factors in the process that require expanding.# Of course you could elaborate some points.}

To get a balanced life you need to write goals for each section of your life – I call this the TOWER OF LIFE. So let us first identify the floors in the tower that will benefit from personal goal setting.

I want you to draw a Building that is like a tower with six floors and has three windows on each floor; I told you goal setting was complicated!
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On the first floor (the ground floor if you are not in the USA) in the left hand window write the words Physical and Health. On the next floor up write Mental and Educational. The next floor up write Family and Home; on the next Spiritual and Ethical; then Social and Cultural finally on the top floor Financial and Career.

In the windows alongside each of you categories give yourself a mark as to where you believe you are in relation to that category. To do this you need to ask yourself some questions, for example working downwards in the window next to where you wrote Financial and Career ask yourself questions such as; “Do you enjoy your work? Do you feel you make an effective contribution? Have you reached your full potential? Have you achieved a good standard of living?”

Mark yourself against these questions on a scale of 1 to 10 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest now you rate yourself against these questions.

Apply the same process for the other floors in your tower of life:-

Social and Cultural ” Have you got a friend you can have a serious discussion about your life without feeling uncomfortable; Do you have interests outside of your career – Sport; Theatre; Family?”

Spiritual and Ethical “ Are you aware of your Core Beliefs – these make you what you are; What is your relationship with religion, or do you accept the idea of an architect of the universe and life itself. Remember your religion can be based around an invisible deity or a god within yourself?”

Family and Home: “Is your family life the way you want it, have you achieved your dreams?”

Mental and Educational: “Are you still trying to learn something every day; Do you invest in your education on an ongoing basis?”

Physical and Health: “Are you satisfied with your current state of health; Are you the correct weight for your size and build; Are you fit enough to do the things you want to do?”

Now that you have asked yourself this type of question and others you may add, and marked yourself from on the scale of 1 to 10 make a note of all the areas where improvement can be made I suggest where your score is less than 5, if you have none below 5 then pick the lowest score and check that you have been totally honest with yourself.

Now you need to look at those areas where you could improve your score and set yourself objectives to raise the score towards ten where you can. As you do this and achieve your goals no matter how small you will begin to enjoy life satisfaction and bring your life into true harmony. Repeat this goal setting process on a regular basis for as you get to ten on your scale you will think of improvements you can make even when you reach ten and the process starts again.