The “S” in FOCUS stands for:

Setting goals

Imagine jumping in your car, with your family in tow, for your much-needed vacation.  Your destination? Yosemite National Park.  You put the car in reverse, back out of your driveway and roll down the street heading towards the freeway.  As you get to the on ramp to the highway you ask your passengers which direction to head – north or south.  They respond with a blank stare.  They don’t know how to get to Yosemite, they thought you knew…..

Going to any vacation destination without a map or set of directions is futile.  So is going about your day, your week, your life without goals!  Setting goals helps you set a certain direction for your life.  To be better focused, you must have goals.  To reach your goals you need to create action steps.  These action steps help your focus to stay on what is important to you.

Goals can also help you evaluate those things that come at you in life.  They help you to make better decisions; if an opportunity presents itself, you need to make sure it aligns with your goals.  If it does not and you take off in that direction anyway, you have lost focus.  Many people have goals for their personal growth, their careers, the financial well-being and other areas important to them.   What goals do you want ?  How can you take action to achieve them?

That’s the tagline of this blog. What does it mean for you? Life is a busy place and it seems that as technology speeds up, so do we. On our “hamster wheels”, that is– running and running yet staying in the same place. We are trying to keep pace with everything that we are responsible for, interested in, and planning for in the future. How do you keep up with everything? There are as many techniques and tips for this as there are blogs on the web. What matters is what works for you.

The first step for making room for life is to identify what is important to you. Let’s look at a few questions to know where our focus should be:

• What makes you happy? What motivates you?
• Who is your life shared with? Who impacts your life?
• Where are you in the journey of life? Where do you want to be?
• Why do you get up in the morning?
• When was the last time you felt in control of your life, instead of your life running you?
• How has you life changed over that past two to five years?

I found a blog recently, Personal Growth Map, that I think speaks to Making Room for Life. The writer, Haider, talks about balance. Not just work/life balance; he identifies that there are seven areas of our life that require our attention. They are:

1. Spiritual
2. Physical
3. Social
4. Intellectual
5. Psychological
6. Professional
7. Recreational

It is obvious that some of these areas require more time than others but inevitably in order to be balanced we must be constantly improving ourselves in every area. With that in mind, I will endeavor to search out and provide a few techniques for each area. These techniques will be discussed over the next few weeks.

Keep in mind that all the techniques revealed here are not meant to solve all the issues in your need for balance, rather these will hopefully be fuel for motivating you. Allowing you to create room in your life to make changes for the better. To help you simplify the complicated and to give you room to be inspired to reach your goals.