When it comes to achieving your career or personal goals, you will find no shortage of advice and hacks online to guide you. The problem is they can vary from being very helpful to harmful. Harm can result if, following the advice leads to negative impacts on other key areas of your life.
If you are out to achieve meaningful, and important goals worth pursuing, then there is a certain wisdom in examining four specific, universal, and essential areas of your life. By doing so, it significantly improves your chances of success and happiness. The four key areas are:
- Personal wellness: Take a moment to examine your physical, mental and spiritual wellness and ask yourself if you have what it takes to pursue your chosen goal.
- Relationships: Developing and maintaining harmonious relationships at home, work and in your community gives you positive energy, and increases your motivation to pursue your goals.
- Cashflow: The focus here is understanding how much income you need now, and in the future, to support your life goals.
- Life goals: Finally, you will have more freedom and satisfaction to pursue your chosen life goals when your personal wellness, relationships and cashflow are in harmony with each other.
To help visualise these essential four areas of your life I have created an infographic below:
What makes these four key components universal and fundamental to achieving your life goals? Let’s examine these in more detail:
1) Cashflow: A narrow-minded focus, based purely on income, does not consider what impact it will have your relationships, personal wellness or even if that is the main goal of your life. A better approach is to understand your expenses (both fixed and discretionary), current income, and then what you need to support your relationships, personal wellness and ultimately your life goal. To highlight this point, the Dalai Lama was once asked what surprised him the most about humanity, and he replied:
“Man. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money. Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.”
2) Relationships: For us in western society, pursuing personal achievement and status is strongly linked with success and “happiness”. Getting your loved ones, and those closest to you on the same page with your life goals can help immensely to foster the support, and positive energy you need. Business success coach Grant Cardone once shared with his audience that some who were following his 10X philosophy found other areas of their life began to suffer. The issue was not the goal, but rather creating harmony between the four areas in the Purpose-driven goal model.
3) Personal wellness: We instinctively know the importance of taking care of our personal health and vitality. It is a fact of life that our physical, mental and spiritual health can, and often does suffer, as we pursue the necessity of meeting our work and family commitments. If your personal wellness is constantly being challenged over time, then it may be wise to stop and consider what changes can be made.
4) Life goal: Here is where the magic happens. We all have a unique set of circumstances and personal challenges we face. If we have taken the time to review our cashflow, relationships and personal wellness then pursuing our life goals are far more attainable. Now we can pursue our “why” or worthwhile life goals, with less friction and more happiness.
Take a moment to review these four areas of your life to increase your self-awareness and make the necessary changes you need. If you need help making these necessary changes, then feel free to get in contact with me.
