Just as important as making the time to sit and reflect on your life as it is today is being clear on what you want your life to be like, or how you want it to look and feel, from here on.
I find that being clear about this makes everything else fall into place. The more specific you can be about how you want your life to be, the more likely you are to achieve it.
Often it is hard to be clear about just what it is we want out of life. Faced with a blank piece of paper, I struggled for a long time with my attempt to list how I wanted my life to look, or how I wanted my business or my body to look. I found it easier to write down the things I didn’t want first of all—that made working out the things I did want much simpler.
Before I started my marketing company I had done a number of different things. I had been a commercial diver, run a small travel company, worked around the world as a sales professional, sold encyclopedias door to door—and much more. I had reached a crossroad in my life where I was trying to decide what I wanted to do. So I wrote down all the things I liked about each of my previous professions, and all the things I didn’t like, and from those lists determined what kind of business I wanted now.
The results were very specific. I had spent a lot of time working outdoors and being cold. Hence today I live in the tropics, but I didn’t want an outdoors job. I used to be on call 24 hours a day when I had my travel company, but I didn’t want to answer the phone at 3 a.m. anymore. I certainly didn’t want to knock on doors to sell anything, but I did want to meet people and to travel.
What came out of the melting pot was a very clear set of criteria to be met by my next business and that’s how I came to be a writer and marketing consultant.
So when we are talking about regaining control of our lives and being able to successfully balance business and life, we need to know exactly what that means to us as individuals.
Writing it down makes it real. The form in which you do it lists, tables, a flowchart doesn’t matter. Write down exactly how you want your life to look. Be very specific. Don’t say you want to spend more time with your children say how much more time. If you don’t want to work as many hours, say how many hours you do want to work. If you want to earn more money, say how much. Specifics become reality. Airy-fairy, non-specific goals rarely get to be achieved.
More specific your goals are, the greater your chances of making them a reality.
