Pillars of a Satisfied Life

This week, I have a tool I’d like you to take a few minutes to ponder.  It’ll take about 10 minutes, which is a low investment for the high payoff you could receive.

As I talk to folks about goals, so many are lost–they think that maybe having a big goal or two for the year is a cool idea, or even something they “should” do.

But they have no idea where in their life they should be thinking about goals, other than the typical lame goals of “get healthier”, “improve my marriage”, “increase my net worth”, blahblahblah.

First of all, these aren’t even goals (according to my methodology), they’re only WISHES.  I know, you’ve heard me say that a hundred times by now.  Most people only have wishes.

So here’s a tool to use to consider where you could use some leveling-up in your life.

It’s called the Pillars of a Satisfied Life. Thank you Ben Dean for this wonderful tool.

It’s simple.  And if I was techie enough I would’ve embedded a bar graph in this post.

But you can still scribble one out on a piece of paper!  

Here are the 10 areas of life I want you to consider.  Feel free to add other areas that I don’t have on my list.

1- Job/Career

2- Physical Health

3- Personal/Professional Growth

4- Living in Alignment with Your Core Values and Priorities

5- Stress Management

6- Rest, Renewal, Rejuvenation

7- Supportive Relationships

8- Intimacy

9- Finances

10- Family Relationships

I want you to rate yourself, on a scale of 1-10, for how satisfied you are in each area, where 1=minimally satisfied and 10=highly satisfied.

I realize this number may fluctuate for some of these life areas, eg, perhaps your career satisfaction changes from week to week.  If so, then just average out what your career satisfaction has been over the last 2 months.

If you’re a visual person, make yourself a bar graph, with these 10 areas of life on the “X” axis (horizontal), and 1-10 on the “Y” axis (vertical).  If you have no idea what I’m talking about lol, just move on 🙂

Once you’ve completed your rating of each area, sit back and take a look at it.  What thoughts do you have?  Any surprises?  

Now my next question is important:  are there any of these areas that have a lower number than you’d like, AND you would like to turn it into an actual high-impact GOAL–a goal that is well-crafted and greatly increases your chance of achieving it?

If so, see what you can come up with! 

If you’d like to kick this around WITH ME in a brief 20-minute convo, go ahead and click on the link below or copy it into your browser, and you’ll receive a version of this exercise in a form that I created, and once you complete it, it will get forwarded to me.  Then I’ll contact you and we’ll figure out when we can chat and discuss your results.

For those interested, here’s that link:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSceH5phaiq_wjV03PtjOTProEAjFiUs0yix3Xne-ANTAVhqgA/viewform?usp=sharing

Either way, do the exercise, as this will get you thinking about how satisfied you are with these different areas of life, and then you can take the next step and create a goal to bring those numbers up.

And remember, feel free to customize this however you want. In my opinion, I’ve selected areas that are important to me and probably most people, but you may have other areas to include that are more meaningful to you. And if you end up with more than 10 pillars, that’s ok!

Take good care until next time.

Sean