5
 Determine Your Priorities

Decide what you want, decide what you are willing to exchange for it. Establish your priorities and go to work.

—H. L. Hunt

As the Great Recession began in August 2007, many of our clients were forced to radically cut spending. I (Daniel) was really feeling the pressure from a rapid loss of clientele. This was the beginning of a near-death experience for our company. My business partner, Barry, and I decided to take a day away from the turmoil and see if we could get some clarity. We took our fly rods and journals to the Deschutes River. Barry went upstream, I went down.

We met up several hours later. “What thoughts came to you?” Barry asked. I told him that I felt we were in the early stages of a very challenging season. My days were consumed with activities focused on keeping us afloat. Rather than being strategic with my time and priorities, I was being reactive and running from fire to fire. During my reflection time, I felt led to pull away from the business to gain some perspective and think of ways to innovate.

This was extremely counterintuitive for me, but it felt like the right thing to do. Plus, I knew my teammates would be able to handle the business without me for a bit (a great goal for any leader). As I headed out, I told Barry to call me only if the company somehow ran out of cash, which was a real possibility. The edge of the cliff wasn’t far off.

I spent a few weeks with my family in Mexico and then two weeks with just my wife as we celebrated our twentieth anniversary. While I loved my business, my Life Plan reminded me of what was truly important. This time away was a rich, healthy time for me and my family. It was also an amazing thing for my business.

It was during this sabbatical that I crafted the content for a new product that saved the company’s bacon—the Building Champions Experience. In addition to one-on-one coaching, it pushed the company into the conference space; reversed our losses; allowed us to serve clients in a fresh, new way in the middle of tough economic times; and positioned us to be a leader in the executive coaching industry. In the midst of economic trials that came in 2008, I doubt I would have been able to devote the necessary attention required to create and launch this huge new offering without the space that came from that sabbatical.

We tend to think effective people are busy. Not so, unless they’re busy with the right things—and many people aren’t. When things in our business or life get busy and hectic, we often lose sight of our priorities. But by keeping the truly important things front and center, we often get the perspective we need to make better decisions.

The people who live and lead with the most joy and contentment are those who have clarity about their priorities. They know what they do best and fill their days with more of those activities. If you can delegate, delay, or drop it, it may not be a priority for you. Or it shouldn’t be.

We’re not saying that if you figure out your priorities, your life will be utopian. But you might as well stack the odds in your favor, right? You have a limited supply of days. The wisest among us understand there are just fifty-two Saturdays in a year to be present with their kids. Are there other things to do on a Saturday? Of course. But if you don’t figure out how to say no to good, you won’t get to say yes to the great.

As we said earlier, a Life Plan is the answer to three powerful questions. Now it’s time to answer question 2: What matters most?

What’s Best for You?

This may be a question you have never considered. Perhaps you have let others decide what should be important—perhaps your parents, your spouse, or even your boss. We all face tremendous pressure in this regard.

External expectations about who we are and what we should do have a way of co-opting our value system. Many are told, for instance, they should go to college and perhaps even pursue an advanced degree. But why? Have you seen the statistics on jobless graduates? News outlets regularly run stories on the problem. It’s practically a whole new genre of journalism—the indebted-graduate-who-can-explain-Ulysses-while-ringing-up-your-latte feature. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being a barista—as long as you want to be one or can afford to pay your college loan from the tip jar.

The reality is that despite the intense social pressure, college isn’t for everyone. In their book Is College Worth It? former United States Secretary of Education William J. Bennett and liberal arts graduate David Wilezol rate the lifetime return on investment for several major colleges and universities. It turns out that high-performing high-school seniors would actually lose potential earning power if they went to certain colleges rather than go straight into the workforce after graduation.1

You have to do what’s right for you. There is no point keeping up with the Joneses if they’re going someplace you don’t want to go. But you have to choose where you want to go before you can avoid the cultural drift. In this chapter, we want you to determine what’s most important to you. What’s essential? What are your priorities?

Identify Your Life Accounts

Start by thinking of all the various compartments that make up your life. Most people can organize their lives into seven to twelve distinct areas. We call these Life Accounts. Over the many years of coaching, here are the nine most common:

Note that the Life Accounts diagram is made up of three concentric circles emanating from the center—you.

The Circle of Being. The innermost ring is a collection of activities focused solely on you in relation to yourself. It includes your spiritual, intellectual, and physical accounts.

The Circle of Relating. The second ring is a collection of activities centered on you in relation to others: your marital, parental, and social accounts (e.g., friendships, church or synagogue, book club, and so on).

fig083

The Circle of Doing. The third ring is a collection of activities dealing with you in relation to your output: your vocation (job), avocation (hobbies), and financial accounts.

This diagram is not a fixed or rigid model. It’s just a way to help you recognize that your life is more than just one account. It is more than work. It is more than marriage. It is more than money. It is an interrelated collection of interests, responsibilities, dreams, and activities.

Your job in this section of the Life Plan is to create your own “Chart of Accounts.” You want to write down a list of Life Accounts that are important to you.

We suggest you start with the nine depicted in the preceding diagram, but you are free to add and delete as you see fit. This is about your priorities, not ours. Your Chart of Accounts can have as many accounts as you want. We have seen Life Plans with as few as five accounts and as many as twelve.

For example, Jerry has nine:

Hannah has eight:

As you think through your own list, here are four considerations:

  1. Your Life Accounts are unique to you. If you are currently single, you might not have a marital account. If you are newly married, you might not have a parental account. You also may not be at the stage of life where you want to add an avocational account (an area of interest or hobby you pursue outside your main occupation).
  2. Your Life Accounts can be named whatever you want. Choose whatever name is meaningful to you, though we find it’s best to apply specific names to the accounts when applicable. You can also choose an account that is broad in scope (e.g., a single account for your entire family) or narrower in scope (e.g., accounts for each member of your family—which can be really helpful because everyone has different needs). Again, it all depends on what is important to you and how narrowly you want to focus. The only thing we would caution you against is developing a list of more than ten to twelve accounts. In our experience, the individual accounts lose their meaning when there are too many.
  3. Your Life Accounts are interrelated. For the purpose of discussion, we are asking you to list them separately. But this is only a model, not reality. In reality, you exist as a whole being with a whole life. If, for example, your health is poor, it could negatively influence your marriage, your work, and possibly even your spiritual life. Try as we might, we can’t isolate the influence of one area from the others. Still, we want to list them, so we can give the appropriate amount of attention to each.
  4. Your Life Accounts will change over time. We have updated our Life Accounts regularly over the years. How we prioritize them changes too. (We’ll have more to say about this in the next two sections.) The important thing is to develop a list that reflects your life now. Remember, as we said in chapter 2, your Life Plan is “a living document that you will tweak and adjust as necessary for the rest of your life.”

Once you have your list of Life Accounts, it’s time to evaluate how you fare in each.

Determine the Condition of Each

We can’t improve what we don’t assess, so this is a time to review each account and determine where you are. We have a tool for doing this that we will share with you in a moment. But first we want to explain why we chose the term Life Accounts.

Everyone understands how bank accounts work. They are a place to deposit your money, pay your bills, and accrue value. Moreover, each one has a specific balance:

Some accounts have a growing balance. You have more than you need. You are spending less than you take in. The balance is increasing. If most of your accounts are in this condition, your future is secure.

Some accounts have a consistent balance. You have what you need. You are spending about what you take in. The balance is holding steady. If most of your accounts are in this condition, your present may be secure, but your future may be in jeopardy.

Some accounts have a declining balance. You have less than you need. You are spending more than you take in. The balance may be overdrawn. If you have too many accounts in this condition, neither your present nor your future is secure. You risk going “bankrupt.”

Now, take this financial metaphor and apply it to your Life Accounts. Each has a specific balance. Some are growing, some are holding steady, some are declining or are overdrawn. For example, you’re killing it in your soccer league, but your family misses you on weekends. Or maybe you’re beating your goals at work, but your health account is overdrawn—you’re eating too much junk food and you are not exercising regularly. Or perhaps you’re in great shape physically, but your marriage has gone flat—you and your spouse have become like strangers living in the same house. Or maybe you have lost your job, but you have a wonderful circle of friends who stand with you.

The point is, your life is a collection of accounts and each of them requires the right attention. In this section, we provide a tool for helping you assess the condition of each Life Account so you can give it the attention it needs to accomplish your overall objectives.

The Life Assessment Profile is an online tool designed to help you determine if each of your Life Accounts is getting what it needs. You can find it at LivingForwardBook.com.

This online assessment takes approximately twenty minutes to complete. When you finish, we email you a report that shows you exactly where you stand in each of your Life Accounts. This will serve as the foundation for creating your Action Plans in chapter 6.

The conceptual model for the Life Assessment Profile looks like this:

fig088

The goal is to have a positive balance in each of your Life Accounts. But what exactly does that mean? In our experience, people have a positive account balance when they experience both passion and progress. These are two distinct but essential components.

Passion relates to your enthusiasm for a specific Life Account. Are you in love with your spouse? Is that love growing or waning? What about your career? Are you passionate about your work or are you bored with it? Or what about your health? Do you love to exercise or do you hate it? Regardless, this is what we mean when we talk about passion.

Progress relates to the results you are getting in a specific Life Account. Again, what about your spouse? You might love him or her but you constantly fight. What about your career? You might love your work, but don’t make what you think you deserve or haven’t been promoted to the level you want. Or what about your health? You enjoy exercise but are still heavier than you’d like.

To illustrate how passion and progress play out in real life, consider the situation in which I (Michael) found myself after a very successful career in book publishing. I got into the business because I loved books. I was fascinated by the potential they had for changing the world. I also enjoyed working with authors, helping them give birth to their ideas.

But as I moved up the corporate ladder, I found myself working less and less with authors and more and more in corporate administration and financial oversight. I was good at it and got promoted every twelve to eighteen months—eventually making president and CEO. But the fact that the company published books was almost immaterial at that point. My job was mostly about keeping the board happy by growing revenues and cutting costs.

And I hated it. I had certainly seen progress but had lost the passion.

We see these kinds of real-world examples all around us.

Again, the Life Assessment Profile™ measures passion and progress in each of your major Life Accounts. This is not a scientific instrument—but it is a helpful construct for you to evaluate how you are doing in each of the areas that you have determined are important to you.

Based on your passion and progress scores, the profile will plot where you are on a two-by-two matrix or grid as shown above in figure 5.2. For each Life Account, you will be in one of four states:

Drift. This is the state of no passion and no progress. It is the worst possible state you can be in with one of your Life Accounts. If you fall here, you probably experience some disappointment, anger, apathy, or perhaps despair. To escape this negative spiral, something must change. You need to rekindle your passion and figure out how to get positive results. By the way, passion usually precedes progress because it’s the natural driver for progress.

Lift. This is the state of having passion but not experiencing progress. The fact that you are passionate is good, but it is not enough. You are probably excited, but if you don’t begin to see results, this can quickly turn to disappointment or, worse, cynicism. You need to focus on implementing a new strategy, acquiring new skills, or doing something that sparks the progress you want.

Shift. This is the state of experiencing progress without passion. You are moving forward, but you don’t really care. You are not enjoying this area of your life. Maybe you are feeling apathy, dread, or a sense of drudgery. Your heart isn’t in it. You need to focus on rekindling your passion, becoming fascinated with something you haven’t noticed before, or somehow connecting with the importance of this area.

Gift. This is the state of experiencing both passion and progress. It is the best possible state you can be in with one of your Life Accounts. If you are in this state, you likely feel satisfied and grateful. You hope it never ends. You need to figure out how you got here, so you can keep doing it and even take it to a new level.

The purpose of completing the Life Assessment Profile™ is to give you the benchmarks you need to move from where you are to where you want to be in every area of your life. We will use this information when we get to chapter 6, “Chart the Course.”

But we still have one more step to take in answering the question, “What matters most to you?”

Prioritize Your Life Accounts

Stephen worked for a global firm that wanted him to relocate to Hong Kong. It was a major step up, a huge promotion. But it came with costs. He would have had to leave his family for two years. Sure, he’d be able to return home every few weeks, and all the miles he’d rack up would mean it would be easy for his family to visit, but that couldn’t erase the fact that twenty-six nights a month, Dad would be on another continent. If he were away that much, it doesn’t take a genius to determine that his kids wouldn’t care if he was around as they got older.

At the same time this offer came in, so did another. It was less glamorous, but good. He didn’t have to move. But because he had no clarity on his priorities, Steve had a tough time deciding which position to take.

When faced with a choice like this in your life, what’s the best answer? Start by fast-forwarding the movie of your life. What happens if you put the jet-set lifestyle ahead of your family needs? Steve saw the end of that movie and took the local job.

I, Daniel, had to do the same. At the height of my career in the mortgage business, I received a massive promotion. With it came extensive travel, and I was on planes two to three days each week coaching and developing all of our branch leaders throughout the western US. I was being groomed for the C-suite and had just turned thirty. From a career and income perspective, my future looked better than I could have ever imagined.

Then I realized I was chasing the wrong things. I had a beautiful bride and three young kids, and they needed me far more than my company did. I was clear on my priorities, but the time I was investing in each was out of order. I was on my way to real wealth in a few accounts and bankruptcy in others. My priorities were out of whack. Coming to this realization led to my first sabbatical. It lasted for one year and led to some of the most significant changes in my life. One of those was launching the coaching company that is responsible for the content of this book.

Having priorities is essential. So is having them in the right order. It’s time to take your list of Life Accounts and arrange them in priority order from most important to least important. Obviously all of them are important, otherwise they wouldn’t be on your list. But not all of them have the same importance.

For example, your career is important—but probably not more than your family. Yet, so many people live as though work is their highest priority. Ranking your Life Accounts forces you to decide what takes precedence if push comes to shove. And shoving will happen, guaranteed.

Place a number beside each Life Account, indicating its priority in relationship to the other accounts. For example, Heidi’s prioritized list looks like this:

  1. Jonah and Grace
  2. Ian
  3. My nephews
  4. Brothers and sisters-in-law
  5. Mom and Dad
  6. Colleagues
  7. Friends
  8. Community
  9. Extended Family

Greg’s looks like this:

  1. God
  2. Myself
  3. Terri
  4. Alex and Michelle
  5. My parents and siblings
  6. Career/ministry
  7. Friends
  8. Finances

The order you choose is up to you. This is going to become the plan for your life. Ask, “What is the most important Life Account in my list? What is the one I would not be willing to sacrifice no matter what?”

The only Life Accounts we would recommend that you put near the top of your list are those related to yourself. For you, this might be a single account or three separate ones as we suggested (i.e., Spiritual, Intellectual, and Physical). Here’s why: You can’t take care of anyone else unless you first take care of yourself.

If you’ve traveled by plane, you’ve undoubtedly heard the flight attendant say something like this: “In the event of a change in cabin pressure, panels above your head will open revealing oxygen masks.” If you’ve traveled more than occasionally, you can probably recite the rest of the spiel: “Pull the mask down toward you to activate the flow of oxygen. Cover your nose and mouth with the mask. Place the elastic band around your head and continue to breathe normally.” And then they always say, “Remember to secure your own mask before assisting others.”

Why? Because if you run out of air, you can’t help anyone. Here is a little insight into how we look at life. We have to attend to ourselves first (second only to God for us) in order to be spiritually, emotionally, intellectually, and physically available to others.

If you have trouble with the semantics of putting yourself first, think of it as preparation to serve others. For example,

There will be seasons of self-sacrifice. Sadly, some people put themselves at the bottom of their priority list in every season. This is a bad idea, because you are in a much better position to serve others when your basic needs are met and your “tank is full.”

Lots of Moving Parts

This chapter may lead you to think your life has a lot of moving parts. That’s because it does! So often we delude ourselves into giving attention to one Life Account at the expense of the others. When this happens, it is only a matter of time before the other accounts become overdrawn. When you have too many of these happen at one time, you go bankrupt, figuratively speaking.

A list ranked in order of priority will ensure this doesn’t happen for you. It doesn’t mean that the balance on one of your accounts won’t sink low or be overdrawn from time to time, but if the others have positive balances, you can handle it. And you define what account success looks like. In the next chapter, we’ll learn to create Action Plans that ensure our account balances are positive and growing.