As we head into the new year it is usually the time we reflect on our life and on what we want to achieve in the months ahead. Often we have one particular area that we want to become successful in, perhaps our career or maybe our fitness or weight.
Over the last thirty years I have always started January by listing my aims for the coming year, and setting my goals. Career and financial goals were typically the most important for me and I would have detailed plans of what I was going to make happen.
As I got older though, I began to notice a few problems with my methods. Yes, I was meeting my business goals, and yes, the bank balance was increasing. But my health wasn’t so great. I was eating on the run, quick convenient junk food, and my weight was climbing upwards. I was working hard long hours and when I got home I either wanted to sleep or was short tempered and snappy. My wife suffered and our relationship was going nowhere fast. It was probably lucky we had no children as they too would be taking a back seat to business. Clients and colleagues were replacing long term friends for nights out, and my social life was just an extension of my business life. I had no spiritual life to speak of, I worshipped the dollar first and foremost and nothing else was really important to me. I had always been interested in personal development but now had no time to read the books and listen to the audios that I used to and as a person I was stagnating, not moving forward at all.
It was at this point, during an enforced period of downtime (otherwise known as man flu) that I read Born to Win by Zig Ziglar, one of my personal heroes, which contained his approach to goal setting, the wheel of life. Here is a picture of the wheel for you.
My approach to goal setting had always been business related. I didn’t really think anything else needed attention as it wouldn’t make money or get me a promotion would it? And yet, whilst I was having career success, my personal life was not that great and I certainly wouldn’t consider myself particularly happy. Looking at this wheel of life I set myself an exercise and you could try this too. With the centre of the when being zero, and the rim being 10, I placed a dot on each line indicating how happy I was with that area of my life. Once I had done that I joined the dots. The picture now looked like the web of a spider on crack! And that was my wheel of life!! No wonder I wasn’t having a smooth ride!!! So, I took stock. The ideal would be to have every dot placed on the rim of the wheel so now I could see what areas of my life needed particular attention paid to them, and set my goals accordingly. Business/career wasn’t going too badly so the goals could be roughly in line with last year. Physical goals though? Losing 10kg would be a good start, and regaining my fitness was vital. So I put goals in place around my diet and set my diary to include three or four early morning swim sessions each week, plus a bush tramp (in the Hunuas which are on our doorstep, so no excuse) on weekends. And family goals – making time to cook a meal each week, loading the dishwasher instead of just dumping stuff on the worktop, coming home and having a conversation instead of putting on the TV immediately I walked through the door. Just little things to me, but they meant a lot to my wife and our relationship flourished again. I also discovered meditation and factored in time every day to have at least ten minutes of meditation, which calmed my mind, made me focus more clearly on life and allowed me to concentrate much better on everything.
So my challenge to you for 2017 is to look at your own wheel of life and THEN set your goals, and see how much more smoothly you can travel through the year.