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. However what is meant by a balanced life, whilst it is true that goal setting is usually the domain of your career especially sales and professional careers 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.
So we need to examine how to write goals and set out a goal setting process so that we can achieve balanced living by achieving goals.
You may have come across the term SMART Goals or even S.M.A.R.T. goals standing for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Tim 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. I much prefer SMA goals, Specific, Measurable and Attainable; after all if they are attainable they must be realistic.
Whether you realise it or not you set goals every day of your life, for everyone makes decisions as they move through the day, a decision can only be made by a goal setting process.
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.
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.
The window alongside each of the categories is for marking where you are now related to that category.
Mark yourself against these questions on a scale of 1 to 10 1 being the lowest and 10 the highest how you rate yourself against these questions.
Now do the same exercise for the other floors in your tower of life:-
Social and Cultural (Do your circle of friends enhance your life, do they contribute to your life or take from your life; 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)?
Family and Home: (Is your family life the way you want it, have you achieved your dreams)?
As you do this and achieve your goals no matter how small you will begin to enjoy life satisfaction and bring you life in balance. 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.
Get A Balanced Life Full Version
