Assessing Your Life & Assigning Values and Priorities
Week 2: Assessing Your Life & Assigning Values and Priorities
- Identifying the top 8 areas of your life
- Self-assessment of current life and scoring
- Exploring personal values and priorities
- Aligning values with daily actions
Welcome back!
On Week 1, you:
- Obtained supplies
- Identified and designed a space
- Designated a time and routine
- Meditated on a vision of what you want your life to look like
Today, using your designated paper, you are going to draw a pie chart with 8 sections in it. Start at 1:00 and begin writing the sections, one per pie slice. The 8 sections are:
- Relationship with family
- Relationship with friends
- Mental health
- Physical health
- Hobbies and Interests
- Spirituality
- Finances
- Environment
This doesn’t need to be fancy unless you really want to be creative! I will say this and repeat it several times throughout this training: Some areas might overlap as you go, i.e., physical health is good for mental health and can also sometimes be hobbies, and possibly earn an income.
For clarification, these areas are not precise because they are meant to give you space to make each area specific to you and your life. Let’s briefly break down the sections. You will not do anything with what is listed below at this time but are preparing for the next step for today which is assessing and scoring. So, when assessing and scoring, keep in mind that:
- Family: You can use immediate family or designate immediate family then extended family. For example, immediate family might be your partner and children, or it might be your parents and siblings. Extended family would include aunts/uncles, grandparents, cousins, and even those non-blood-related family members.
- Friends: These might be neighbors, friends you know, friends you’ve lost touch with, or friends you would like to have but have not yet met.
- Mental Health: This could be learning, journaling, therapy or counselling, life coaching, or even things that will help such as quitting smoking, getting enough sleep, or reading self-development books or even taking this course!
- Physical Health: You can identify how healthy and fit you are, if you are eating properly, or like I stated earlier, getting enough sleep. It could be an ergonomically correct chair or desk.
- Hobbies & Interests: Things you enjoy doing already or areas where you want to learn, such as taking piano lessons, or you read a book from time to time but would like to read more.
- Spirituality: This is meant to be a broad concept and may or may not be religiosity. I always describe it as identifying things that bring you peace and calm. These are things that encompass a person’s life purpose, connect to others, a place of inner growth and self-discovery. This area might be your connection to people in this world, groups, or even something or someone beyond this material world. It might be your connection to nature or time in the sun to get that much needed Vitamin D. This area might encompass rituals and practices from attending church to reading tarot cards to going to AA meetings to making sure you walk in nature regularly.
- Finances: This is about making money, paying bills, saving and budgeting, and higher learning; it all depends on what you want in the future and where you are now.
- Environment: Another “vague” area which might include anything from buying a new lamp, re-modelling a room, moving from an apartment to a house, moving from the city you live in now to somewhere else.
Using the broad strokes defined above when identifying what these 8 areas mean to you and your life and your personal goals, you are now going to score all 8 sections on a scale from 1 to 10 with 10 being perfect and 1 being “not at all”. Keep in mind that there is likely not one area that is “perfect”. I might love the job I do, but I could always stand to make more money, work less hours, have a better desk, or even work from home. In scoring, you can write the score in the pie chart or immediately outside each of the areas. Use the first score that comes to mind and write it down! Here’s some traveling music!
<insert music> maybe music choices (rock, classical, indie, country)
You are nearly done with this section! This course absolutely includes tasks and strategies that will take you step-by-step to creating a plan and it definitely does not take only a few minutes to re-create and re-design the areas in your life that you want and need to give attention to!
Now, choose and number, the top 3 areas that are most important to you in your life. No one will see this unless you share it so don’t worry about hurting loved ones feelings by not making them #1 if that’s not where right now in your life. If you are getting ready to start college, you might love your family, but your priority at this time is higher education and getting a career to make money and buy the things you really dream of like a great car or home. Again, you can write this inside the section or outside next to it, whatever resonates with you.
Finally, this last step is asking you to take into consideration, now that you have identified where you are in your life with these sections, AND, you have labelled the MOST important things to you in your life at this time, answer these questions:
- Where do I spend all my time and efforts now?
- Does my time align with my values and priorities?
- If not, what might need to change in order for me to live consistent with those priorities?
- Where do I want to spend my time in the future?
Many of us find that the answer is we spend out time working and that job just might not be at the top of our list of values and priorities. The goal of this course is not to “even out” where we spend our time but rather to identify areas that we want to see change and create a plan to do so. Sorry to tell you that you might need to continue working that 40 hour a week job!