"Setting Goals" - Priorities

Get Your Priorities In Order!

Before you even begin to set your goals, it is necessary to look at both our current order of priorities as well as our ideal order. Often these do not match up because we do not take the time to even think about what our ideal order of priorities looks like. First what are some common priorities in our lives?

· Faith

· Family

· Work

· Self

· Friends

· Fun

Go ahead and rank theses 6 basic priorities in your life as they stand currently, be honest with yourself and feel free to add any others you would like. Often we feel our lives are chaotic and usually it is because our priorities are either out of order or lack any order at all. When this is the case, what do we base our decisions on? We either base them on what we currently think is most important, we base them on time, or avoid making decisions altogether. I always recommend making an ideal priority list for life in general and especially when adding any kind of goals to our lives. Yours can look however you would like, my ideal order looks like this (not that my current order always does):

· Faith

· Self

· Family

· Friends

· Fun

· Work

So really, our first goal is to maintain our ideal order of priorities as best we can. Once we have established our ideal order we can use it to base our decisions. That is, based on my ideal order if there were a conflict with a faith-oriented activity and say work-related activity, I could always defer to my priority list and either find away to do both activities without sacrificing other priorities or turn down the work activity. That is not always an easy decision. There are bills to be paid, but I have personally found that often you are respected more when you have clear boundaries than not. Of course, we can always reshuffle the order if we realize that our ideal order is actually something different. Err on the side of caution; sometimes we can trick ourselves into thinking something is more important to us than it is. The world will not end if I reschedule and appointment now and again or tell my friends I’m spending time with my family. Do not completely neglect your priorities, but work to balance them accordingly.

In the next “Setting Goals” article we will look at some strategies for defining goals and how to fit them into our ideal order of priorities.