Your top priorities make it easier to plan and organise your life intentionally.

Living intentionally means that you deliberately decide how you want to live – and what you want to do to create the life you want.

It means that you don’t let life just happen to you and purely react to its circumstances and challenges.

Instead, you actively define what’s important to you and how you want to experience and live your life.

You are well aware of your priorities and proactively make changes that move you toward the life you want to live.

Your priorities give your life direction and guidance.

Planning your life with intention doesn’t have to be an intimidating or overwhelming exercise.

If you regularly check and update your priorities, you are well prepared to act and react confidently when faced with bigger or smaller decisions in everyday life.

Your priorities also direct and guide you when you must manage a significant life challenge:

• • A planned transition like entering retirement, becoming an empty nester, downsizing,
  • or an unexpected event like divorce, the loss of a job, a critical illness, or the death of a loved one.

How do you choose your priorities – and direct your life in the way you want it to go?

The following exercise will help you decide what you want to focus on whenever you feel it’s the right time to plan your life intentionally.

For example, at the beginning of a new year. Or when you’re going through a major life change. Or whenever you feel a bit stuck or lost.

EXERCISE:

Step 1: List the important areas/topics of your life. (You can use my template worksheet to get started.)

Step 2: Rate on a scale from 0 to 10 how satisfied you feel about each life topic.

Step 3: For each topic that is not fully satisfying, decide how important it is to make changes now (or soon, like in the coming year, next month, etc.).

Step 4: Choose your top three priority topics.

Step 5: Define the desired changes for each and make an action plan.

Steps 7, ff: Take the first action step. And then the next. …

Example:

The person who filled in the example worksheet assigned the highest priority to topic No. 1, ‘Significant other’. She is currently single and wants to change that.

Besides this area, she has four other topics with a higher priority rating. I recommended going through these four again and picking 2 finally.

Because focusing her attention on the top 3 priorities will help her also to focus her energy and time, and her actions and activities.

This super-focus on the desired changes will help her realise them more easily and quickly.

NOW IT’S YOUR TURN!

Worksheet

You can give yourself an easy start and use the list (see above) of life areas/topics to evaluate your priorities.

DOWNLOAD THE WORKSHEET TEMPLATE HERE.

The worksheet will be useful and help you do the exercise as fast as possible – even if some of the topics aren’t relevant to you. Or if you feel highly satisfied in many areas of your life.

->     Leave the satisfaction-level space empty for those topics that are currently not important to you. (Like in the example worksheet: topics 13 and 14.)

->    And when you go through the list again to assign priority ratings, leave the spaces for those topics that have a high satisfaction rating and currently don’t require any changes empty. (Like in the example worksheet: topics 2, 5, 11, and 17.)

Don’t walk away after filling in the worksheet!

Instead, take the next step(s):

Use what you now have – the awareness of your top 3 priorities – to define a few significant goals for the next phase of your life and create a broad action plan. And then start moving, little-step-by-little-step. Start living the life you want.