I had one of those moments this morning I was going through a goal setting exercise where I brainstorm a whole lot of stuff with myself and set goals into 3 separate areas.
1. Personal Development Goals
2.Thing Goals
3.Financial and economic Goals
and what I found is that I had a problem in coming up with Thing Goals, now what was strange about this is when I have done this particular exercise in the past this had always been the biggest and easiest list for me to come up with. Now mind you it has been some time since I have done this particular workshop and a lot of things have changed in my life over the last few years so I got curious as to why my thing list was so short compared to the past.
First thing I did was go back and look at my old lists to see what was on there then I went back and looked at where my life was back then as opposed to now to see what was different and tool I have always liked to use was what I call the life balance wheel where I divide the wheel into segments of my life and rate each area on a scale of 1-10 then draw a line connecting the segments to see how balanced or unbalanced my life is at any particular time and what I noticed was that when my life was the most unbalanced was when I seemed to have the biggest thing lists
Life Balance Wheel
As you can see from the example above sometimes that wheel can be a long way from round and if you've ever driven a car with an unbalanced wheel you'd know the ride can get pretty bumpy and the faster you go the worse the bumps get.
What I deducted from this looking back I realised that I was putting lots of thing goals as a way to make up for the areas that were lacking but what I didn't realise at the time was that putting lots into topping up say career or finances was never going to compensate for what I was lacking in areas like relationships in fact now I see it made the situations worse because I wasn't addressing the cause of the problems I was using material things to mask my deficiencies.
Thankfully these days my wheel is a lot more balanced and I now take a lot more notice of where I need to be working to keep it as close to round as I can. Of course there are still things that I want but now they tend to be things I think will not only enrich my life but also enhance the other areas not create diversions from things I don't want to face.
At the end of the day success is a very personal thing and is very different for each and every one of us. For some it's all about power and wealth, for others its a about self fulfilment and enlightenment but above all I believe it's about being happy and enjoying the journey. All the money in the world is no good if you don't have have health and fulfilling relationships and on the other hand having a great relationship may not be enough if your homeless and on the street living in poverty for all of us we need to find our little niche in the world our own happy place where we balance the needs in all areas of our life. Good luck in finding yours
Have an Exceptional Day
Rob Larney
