Relation Between Goals
When you first sit down and begin thinking about how you want to improve your life, the task can seem pretty straightforward at first. Most people want a balanced approach that will improve the quality of their life as a whole. A common strategy is to break your life into different categories, and set a goal in each of these categories. These categories are usually very general in nature and appear to be mutually exclusive, such as:
Now we can set a goal in each category:
- Career – Find a better job
- Physical – Lose 20 pounds
- Emotional – Become less stressed
- Financial – Get out of credit card debt
- Family – Spend more time with the kids
- Spiritual – Find ‘Inner Peace’
As we start to look at these goals together as a group, we can see how the categories that we created are not so clear. Most, if not all, of these individual goals depend on other goals to be completed. For example; to lose 20 pounds, we may have to adopt a lower stress way to live (since excess stress can lead to weight gain). To spend more time with our kids, it may require us to get a better job that gives us more free time. Finding inner peace may allow us to come to the realization the we don’t need to use our credit card for trivial purchases as much.
Even if your goals aren’t strictly mutually dependent, adopting a holistic approach to life improvement is much more effective. When you are working on multiple goals at once, you experience success on a more regular basis. Regular positive feedback and balanced life improvement creates a more sustainable environment for achieving your goals. So make sure that you take the time to think about how your goals are related to one another before developing a plan to start working on them.
