Balanced Personal and Career Goals

A consistent theme across many personal development approaches is that true happiness lies in developing a balanced life, through goals that address not only work or financial gain, and not only specific relationships or charity, but a mix of these areas relevant to the individual.

Not everyone will place the same weight on any particular area, so a structure to help assign priorities and understand where we are against these priorities can be useful in making an informed decision on what action we take and to help build a feeling of success or impetus to change as we achieve or fall short of our own expectations of ourselves.

Even if we are actually already doing all the right things in line with our personal development goals, the act of making an informed decision about which area(s) hold the most importance can in itself make a big difference to people, as it can provide a real feeling of success and re-assurance.

Areas of development focus

Here are a few examples of improvement categories that can be found in personal development books and websites (referenced).

Awaken the Giant within: How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Life:

• Physical
• Mental
• Emotional
• Attractiveness
• Relationships
• Living Environment
• Social
• Spiritual
• Career
• Financial

How to be Brilliant: Change Your Ways in 90 Days!

• Vision
• Career
• Personal Development
• Health
• Close Family
• Money
• Relationships
• Contribution

http://www.healthfun-ps.com/:

• Health
• Wealth
• Relationships
• Career
• Spirituality
• Home and Lifestyle

http://www.maximumbalance.com/community/node/111:

• Health
• Mind
• Body
• Soul
• Relationship
• Partner
• Family
• Friends
• Career
• Individual
• Team
• Functional
• Finance
• Income
• Budget
• Investing
• Giving
• Individual
• Family
• Corporate

Using the development categories

The real value of these categories is in how we put them to use.

There are a number of ways to use a list of development topics like this: below is a simple approach you can follow (based on the instructions you will find in any of the resources above). The key thing is to ensure you select a balanced set of topics so that you cover more than just a single development need.

For each development category:

1. Use a 1-10 score (subjective) to score yourself in terms of how "strong" you feel that you were in that area 5 years ago
2. Write a short sentence explaining why you set that score
3. Repeat points 1 and 2 for how you feel about each of the points now
4. Repeat points 1 and 2 for how you would like to feel about each of the topics in 5 years from now

This will provide you with an insight into where you were, where you are now and where you would like to be, and the piorities you have against each.

You can use this structure to help choose improvement goals that move you towards your aspirational state and to ensure balance across areas (there are various good articles and books on objective setting, which will not be covered here e.g. search for SMART objectives as one widely used technique).

Focus on the short term for quicker results

However, to see even quicker results, it's usually more effective to set specific shorter-term actions based on these insights and track progress against them. e.g. make a list of actions and things to do over the next two weeks, and in two weeks time do the same exercise for the "now", and repeat every two weeks, tracking progress.

This will:

1. Ensure focus is placed on smaller, achieveable things that you're more likely to actually do,
2. Provide a feeling of success and progress as you actually do specific, tangible things towards your goals,
3. By reviewing the categories regularly, keep your focus on the areas that matter to you and help you maintain the feeling of direction and progress.