In the world of business we spend a significant amount of time coming up with company mission statements and company values.\u00a0 We then set company goals that we believe will help us achieve our company purpose.\u00a0\u00a0 In companies it\u2019s just expected that every company has gone through that exercise.\u00a0 But when is the last time we went through that process in our personal lives? When is the last time we sat down and came up with our personal mission statement? \u00a0When is the last time we sat down and wrote up our personal values that we were dedicated to live our lives by?\u00a0 And when is the last time we set or updated our goals that we believe will help us achieve our life purpose? \u00a0Do we even have a vision of what we want our life purpose to be?\u00a0 \u00a0To discover our purpose we have to ask ourselves questions like:\u00a0 \u201cWhen your life is over and you look back at it what do you hope to have accomplished with your life?\u00a0 What do you hope people will recognize about the life you lived?\u00a0 What are you passionate about?\u00a0 What gifts and talents has God blessed you with that could be used to help others?\u201d\u00a0We have to remember that we are the pilots of our own life – we are fllying this plane so we dang well better know where we are trying to fly it to!<\/p>\n
It\u2019s amazing how life can get so busy that we find ourselves simply going through the motions every day of doing the millions of things that seem to be urgent to get done, and often times we don\u2019t even stop to evaluate if the things we are spending our time on are taking is in the direction toward accomplishing our life purpose.\u00a0 After all, who has time these days to stop and think about it???\u00a0 It\u2019s always go, go, go, with endless lists of tasks, and endless unread emails, not to mention the voicemails you haven\u2019t returned.\u00a0 Then add to that the groceries and the laundry and the cleaning and the children and it goes on and on and on.\u00a0 There is no end to the \u201cstuff\u201d to do every day.\u00a0 So how the heck could we ever take time out to evaluate how we are spending our time?\u00a0 That would require that we have time to take a time-out, which we just established\u00a0won\u2019t ever happen!!<\/p>\n
Does any of that sound or feel familiar?\u00a0 It does to me!\u00a0 So often I get caught up in doing things that need to get done that I never even stop to consider the fact that doing some of those things is not getting me any closer to accomplishing the true purpose that I want to accomplish with my life.\u00a0 So why am I doing them??\u00a0 That is a fantastic question!\u00a0 And one that I need to really consider if I am ever going to get my time balanced and focused on doing the things that matter most.<\/p>\n
When I was the CEO of my last company I used to advise the employees to ask themselves the question \u201cIs what I am doing right now leading me to a _______________\u201d.\u00a0 For someone in sales they would fill in the blank with the word \u201csale\u201d.\u00a0\u00a0 For someone in customer account management they would fill in the blank with the word \u201chappy customer\u201d.\u00a0 And so on.\u00a0 It was a great question to keep people focused on doing only those things that would lead them to accomplish their purpose at work and asking themselves that question would help them to recognize when they were doing something that was just busy work and that wouldn\u2019t lead them to achieve their purpose.<\/p>\n
I realized today that we need to apply that same question to our personal lives.\u00a0\u00a0 We need to ask ourselves \u201cIs what I am doing right now leading me to \u00a0_________________________\u201d.\u00a0 Then we would fill in that blank with the life purpose we have a vision of achieving.\u00a0 It might have things like \u201cbe a great parent\u201d or \u201chelp other people\u201d\u00a0 or \u201cGod\u201d.\u00a0 Everyone can fill in the blank with whatever they want to achieve in their personal life.\u00a0 Asking that question will help us to be more focused and effective with how we spend our time.\u00a0 It will also help us to eliminate the things that are simply \u201cbusy work\u201d and that are not helping us to achieve our purpose.<\/p>\n
So my suggestion for the week ahead (because I need to do this myself!):\u00a0 Take the time to write down your life purpose, list out your personal mission statement and relook at your goals that you have set for yourself.\u00a0 Then as you go through each day ask yourself if the things you are spending your time on are leading you toward that.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Have an amazing Monday everyone!\u00a0 I can\u2019t believe it is already MARCH – WOW!\u00a0 Time flies \u2013 but it\u2019s time to take control of that time and make sure it\u2019s being used to fly your airplane\u00a0where you want it to go!!!<\/p>\n
~Amy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the world of business we spend a significant amount of time coming up with company mission statements and company values.\u00a0 We then set company goals that we believe will help us achieve our company purpose.\u00a0\u00a0 In companies it\u2019s just expected that every company has gone through that exercise.\u00a0 But when is the last time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[632,633,515,555,631,51,7,365,76,29,38,64,80,53,112,78,54,79,130],"class_list":["post-2600","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-accomplishment","tag-busy-work","tag-control","tag-direction","tag-effective","tag-family","tag-future","tag-goal-setting","tag-goals","tag-god","tag-leadership","tag-life","tag-mission","tag-motivation","tag-self-improvement","tag-time","tag-time-management","tag-values","tag-vision"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2600","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2600"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2600\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2604,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2600\/revisions\/2604"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2600"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2600"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.amyreesanderson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2600"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}