Today, my blog will be very different. What I am writing about should be very important to all of us, but if we don’t acknowledge the importance of this, we may drift through life, as opposed to living a life on purpose!

Today, I am inviting you to take some time to reflect about our lives. We need to pay special attention to areas such as:

• Accomplishments
• Health
• Family
• Financials
• Lessons Learned
• Temporary defeats
• New Goals

 

I understand that these are but a handful of important areas that we should be looking into, but my point is, make this list as long or as short as you’d like to, but use this as a starting point. Remember that this is important homework that nobody will check on and for that matter, that nobody should care about more than you! I also understand that some areas do involve different people in our lives, but every single area pertain to you!

Look at your accomplishments. What did you accomplish this year? Think about them, rejoice them, cherish them. This point is particularly important if you are goal driven. Yesterday, someone mentioned to me, “this year you’ve accomplished a lot.” To what I answered, “well, I don’t know, maybe… Well, they were part of my goals.” Lights went off in my head! I told her, “you know, you are right, I did accomplished a lot and we need to take time to cherish these accomplishments,” but because they are part of some elaborate plan, I assumed that they needed to become true because I had set out to do so! Please beware. As you can see, I wasn’t looking at my accomplishments as such but more as a “To Do” list that needed to be completed. As things were completed, it was time to move on and to add some more “Things To Do.” Based on that conversation, I have decided that as part of my new goals, taking time every month to rejoice and cherish my accomplishments has to be an integral part of my life. You can have huge accomplishments but since you are so caught up in the heat of the moment and other activities, you fail to recognize the importance of your achievement. Let’s work hard on not allowing this to happen! I am changing that starting today! Yesterday, while having lunch with a dear friend, he said to me, “Plan Your Life.” How nice! Make sure that you include in your plan… “rejoice my accomplishments!”

Take time to look at your health. As time goes on, I don’t care how old or how young you may be, we are what we eat! Hence, be mindful of what we put into our bodies and try to add a physical activity 2 or 3 times a week. If you go all out from the get-go, you are doomed! Do 10-20 minutes once or twice a week and work yourself to a sustained 20-30 minutes 3 times a week. A brisk walk will do wonders when compared to sitting on the couch or for those workaholics out there, sitting on front of your computer! Trust me.

Your family is your support core! What are you doing? Are you happy? Are they happy? What can I do to further that happiness? What can I do to get back to happy, if that’s the case? Can I involve them in what I’m doing? Do I need to ask them, tactfully, to give me a bit more space?

When was the last time you looked at your financials? Ok, let me rephrase this, when was the last time you analyzed your financials? What do they mean? Are you making money, loosing, stagnant or spending too much on credit cards? What are your new goals? Just like my dear friend told me yesterday at lunch, did you decide how much money are you going to make next year?

Lessons learned, temporary defeats and new goals. For this context, they go together. When you tried and failed miserably at that new venture. Or you tried this new way of doing things but it didn’t work. Or… more importantly, you are still hanging on to a looser, a method that you know doesn’t work, or a property that is making you loose money every month, or a business that is going nowhere, but your pride doesn’t let you move forward; are all examples of temporary defeats. If there’s something to learn from Mr. Donald Trump is that. If it is not working, let it go, fire them, move on. But that is not the end of it. Reflect on what you did, what went wrong and look for the lessons in the temporary defeats. The most important lessons are in our temporary defeats. I promise you that when you extract the lessons from the temporary defeats, you will be a better person for it. Also, we won’t take the same approach when presented with a similar situation. Also, when we set our new goals, we are going to take into account, what we have accomplished, what worked and what didn’t (lessons learned), and from there we will set our sails or revised path. Make sure that you have a flexible but definite plan. Decide what you want and write it down with dates and a brief explanation of why we want to accomplish that goes. This is important because when you suffer a temporary defeat, and trust me, they will happen, the only way to get you back on the horse are those goals/dreams that keep you moving forward.

May we all use these few weeks wisely to design our Life on Purpose! Wishing you the best. If you have any questions or would like to chat about this further, go ahead and contact me.