Assessing Your Priorities

In a conversation with a client today, I realized something. The realization I made was that we all need to assess two things in order to reach our goals. We need to assess our priorities and we need to assess our current path. If we take the time to look at these, we are able to test the success and make necessary adjustments to our plan.

Let’s take a look at two important situations. The first is getting started on a game plan toward a goal. The second is at any particular point along the way to that goal. What happens if we don’t assess our priorities before we set out to reach a goal? Well, we run the risk of starting on something that we don’t really need (or even want to) to accomplish.

Take Tim for example:

Tim is a hard-working man that cares about the people around him. The most important people in his life are his wife and two kids. When he was thinking about leaving his company, he was promised more money, a bigger office and a company car to reconsider his decision. As soon as they offered him these things, he took them and stayed with the company. He moved into his new office and continued on his routine. He worked hard (just as he had before) and was being paid more. After another month of the same job he started to feel the same way he did before. He came home to his wife and kids exhausted and remembered why he wanted to leave the company in the first place.

When he first started with this company he was in a customer service position where he got to talk with customers and help make sure they were happy with the service his company was providing. He interacted with people all day, solved problems and even got to teach his coworkers some ways to keep the process going smoothly. I loved his job and would come home energized, ready to enjoy time with his wife and kids. It was after his last promotion that things began to change. He was moved from the role he loved so much into a management role. Sure he was being paid more and had a new title, but he was no longer dealing with the customer. In fact, he wasn’t dealing with anyone. The only things he interacted with were the performance reports of his employees. The only time he got to talk to them was to tell them that they had to improve their performance. This was not the interaction he wanted, so he started to look at other companies for positions like his old one.

When the company offered him more money and perks, it sounded like a great deal. He thought that with more money he could put up with the same job. He thought that it would be easier to cope with his inability to enjoy family time after a long, unfulfilling day. When in reality, he made the decision without assessing his priorities. His priorities were: interacting with customers and feeling good at the end of the day so he could enjoy time with his wife and kids in the evening. The decision to not change companies was based on a different set of priorities. The offer was made by someone else (his boss) and the reward was not what he was looking for. After that month Tim decided to change companies after all. Once he realized that he was not getting what he needed, it was easy for him to go for something that would give him what he needed. Sure he had more money, but money was not what he wanted.

Tim actually did both of these key points in his decision. His priority was happiness, family and the ability to enjoy his work while still able to come home happy and energetic. His current path was not giving him those results. In fact, the opposite was true. He had to take a step back to look at his priorities and then his current path to see if they were in line. So the moral of the story is that you need to do both in order to be successful. Not only do you need to assess both, but you need to make sure that the current path is leading (or going to lead) you toward your goal. Our priorities are just that: PRIORITIES. If we don’t put them where they should be, we base our goals on other factors. Those other factors may be someone else’s goals, something we saw on TV or even an something we once wanted. But remember, once or at some point is not always the same as right now and usually is not in the future.

So, in order to reach your goals: Assess priorities before setting the goal and deciding what path to take. As you go, take time to assess the path and whether it is leading you to that goal that is in line with your priorities. If not, change paths!