During the past year I developed a seminar entitled TThe Eight Drivers of Satisfaction. In the seminar I talk about being happy in eight dimensions of your life with the result of putting an action plan in place to work on those areas of your life that are most important to you and that you are least happy with. In the seminar we examined the following eight areas:
- Professional satisfaction – How satisfied are you with your current and future career potential?
- Financial Satisfaction – How satisfied are you with your current and future financial status
- family satisfaction – How happy you are in your family relationships.
- Health Satisfaction – How happy are you with your physical and mental health?
- leisure satisfaction – How satisfied are you with the quality time spent on leisure activities?
- inherited satisfaction – How happy are you with the legacy you are leaving behind if you die today?
- Relationship satisfaction – How happy you are with the relationships built and maintained with friends and loved ones
- spiritual satisfaction – How happy you are with your spiritual life
Since developing the webinar, I’ve found several uses for the content, including helping a colleague evaluate a major career change, and more recently using it as an annual personal planning tool, which is what I’d like to talk about more. At the beginning of the year, many of us start with some goal to achieve, that is, lose weight, get a better job, etc. I am an advocate of doing so, with two distinct requirements:
- The goal setting exercise should look at your life holistically rather than just one aspect of your life,
- The goal should be expressed in terms of what you can realistically be satisfied by the end of the year, not some lofty goal that you know deep down you won’t be able to achieve.
By meeting those two requirements, this year I decided to look at my life from the point of view of each of the eight satisfaction drivers and think of 1 or 2 items that I would be happy to achieve by the end of the year. I have more aggressive goals in some areas and less in others. The point is not to try to work yourself to death trying to achieve a hyper-aggressive goal that deep down I know I won’t be able to accomplish; it is being realistic about what I think I would like and need to achieve.
To help you in your planning, I have included a simple Excel spreadsheet that you can use to help you in your planning using my eight satisfaction factors with my congratulations. The spreadsheet contains four columns:
- The area of satisfaction
- How important is that area of satisfaction to you (extremely important, very important, somewhat important, not so important, not at all important)
- What result would you like to achieve by the end of the year?
- What you need to do to achieve the result.
As you begin your goal setting journey, remember to keep a few things in mind:
- Be realistic about what you commit to doing
- Evaluate your progress periodically
- be persistent
- Don’t be afraid to change your goals if something in your life changes.
Lastly, while this can be an effective tool to help you develop good goals, at the end of the day it’s just a tool. You have to take action and be disciplined to achieve the goals you set for yourself.
Here’s to a happy and happy new year!