GOALS

Quite often we talked about dreams and goals but ask ourselves whether or not we have set important goals in all six areas of life and those are our personal life’s goals and not goals set by other people?

Have we written intangible goals such as quality of relationship with spouse and other family members? Most people focus and set only tangible personal goals such as cars, houses, education degrees, etc. As the results, there is only very little time left or maybe none for realizing the intangible goals.

Financial and career goals are absolutely important but they must be pursued in balance with goals in other aspects of life. Actually all the six aspects of life are tied together like spokes of a wheel - Wheel of Life^TM as defined by Paul J. Meyer.

To achieve all those intangible goals, we will need to set aside ample uninterrupted time to be spent with our loved ones and friends. It should actually be our ultimate purpose in life to have intangible goals such as quality relationships before anything else. But the worries of not getting enough income put them far away down the priorities list. In order to get our life under control, we need to make the priorities list based on the importance of the activities and whether or not those activities will bring us happiness and sense of fulfillment.

When we found out that we have no spare time, before we decide to stop doing some of the activities and start doing something else, first take some time to look at all of those activities as we may just need to change the priority level of some activities. Then before we make firm decision on activities that we want to discontinue to give us time to pursue other more important personal goals, look at the results of those activities especially in the areas of financial and career that we have achieved so far to see how effective and efficient we have performed.

• Do we have the knowledge and the right skills in doing the activities?
• Did our competencies support or hinder us?
• Do we have habits that are preventing us from delivering results on time?

The fact that we all spend more waking hours in doing financial and career related activities than other activities, our inabilities to carry out our responsibilities in this financial and career could be the causes of we running into problems in managing our overall time.

Once in a while, we might face a surge demand of our time in this financial and career area. It is okay but if we often do not get our work done  in the financial and career areas due to inadequate skills and/or knowledge so we will have to spend more time and that means lesser time for other areas of life, we need to fix those problems first immediately.

Bear in mind that to achieve a balanced life we need to set intangible goals in the other aspects of our lives. To be a Total Person^TM that live a balanced life needs time and it could not be achieved instantly without good and consistent practice of goal-setting and planning. Sometimes we even have to endure painful processes.

Adjust ourselves from time to time. Be flexible to the external changes and we will eventually achieve our dreams and goals although the paths and/or methods to achieve them maybe different from what we have planned.