As I mentioned in the August Wheel of Life post, I have made progress on identifying my goals by completing the first exercise of the Goal Setting College tutorial. The exercise asks you to look back five years and score your life, score your present life and score your life five years in the future if you continue as present. This exercise highlighted some interesting features of my life; here are some of my thoughts.
Declining scores
The next line is Human relationships which again isn’t too much of a surprise as it is something I’ve mentioned as part of the Wheel of Life posts. What is a bit of shock is my comment for the future “Not good at organising to meet so relationships decrease”. I can easily see this being the case in the future, but I find it scary that I may lose my close friends because I’m not good at organising to meet them (however I have to admit that Facebook is a great tool to keep in contact with friends).
Career development is an interesting one because my current score is high (7) as I’ve “taken on more responsibility and there is scope for progression”, but that decreases in five years because I “can’t see many long term opportunities in my current job”. Of course, if I take the opportunities open to me at the moment it is likely that I will become aware of future ones, or perhaps I should consider developing this blog and become a problogger!
It is encouraging that I have three areas that have a future score of 8, highlighting that there are several good areas of my life. Financial wealth is a great example of this. We bought our first house five years ago, but should have paid off the mortgage in another five years time (assuming we don’t move or extend the house). This is an area that works smoothly for us as we do not have to think about money very often and we can easily afford everything we want. However, I recognise that by spending more time considering our money we could make it work for us a lot more effectively.
Living environment is an interesting one as it could easily have gone into the declining scores instead of this section. The score increases because the “house is tidier and cleaner with reduced clutter”, however it decreases again because in five years time this house will definitely be too small for us (in fact it is too small now, but we can’t find a house we want to buy).
At first I found it difficult to differentiate between Human relationships and Social activeness, however I decided that social activeness was how active I was at meeting people as opposed to the closeness of my relationships. This starts off as a low score as I did not go out often with people when we first bought our house, whereas this has increased to a score of 8 in five years time because I believe I will be “involved in more groups and more willing to meet up”.
Highlighting danger zones
The next part of the exercise is to highlight future scores less than 3; fortunately I only have one of these, Health and Fitness, and I have already started working on this area.
Interestingly, I have found writing this post a very valuable experience as it has help generated several ideas about where to go next and now I feel excited about the next exercise (the brainstorm).