Choose Life Goals — Because Personal & Professional Goals Don’t Exist

Every year around this time, just about everyone I know starts to set goals for the New Year. And most often, they’re set as personal and/or professional goals — two separate entities — which often rudely don’t consider the other.

Which is why I now choose to look at my goals as Life Goals.

Simply put, it’s impossible to separate personal from professional — they’re one in the same, and we have to stop treating them like two different things. One affects the other in a positive, negative or neutral way.

This became very clear to me recently when a family member became sick for an extended period of time.

When this happened, most of my “professional goals” shifted to caring for my family, house, shopping, cooking, laundry, etc. Yes, I still needed to keep projects moving forward for our clients (thank goodness for my awesome team), but all of the professional goals for my business went on hold.

And if I were to look at this situation as personal goals vs. professional goals, I would be failing completely at one of them.

But if I take a step back and look at my Life Goal: to be the best husband, dad, person and business owner I can be — but always to put my family first when they need me — then I’m right on target.

This isn’t to say that I cater to every whim my family has. That wouldn’t be healthy for anybody. But when there’s a crisis, they come first.

This new revelation isn’t without conflict. In fact I’ve found that I often have two incredibly good goals that are in direct conflict with each other — and then I have to choose which goal to focus on, at least for the short-term. The decision ultimately comes down to what fits best into my Life Goals — but no matter what I decide, the choice is often bitter sweet.

As you can see, I don’t have all the answers (if I did this article would be longer). But I have found that Life Goals make it easier for met to keep on track in all aspects of my life — for the LONG TERM. I say this because if we get caught up in the short term, when we may be focusing most of our energy on family or business for days or weeks on end, there will be no semblance of balance at all.

But if we take a long-term view, we’ll see that our efforts CAN balance out over time — with great effort being made in different parts of our life at different times.

I wish you a belated Happy New Year, and best of luck with your Life Goals!

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