Improve Your Personal Life

Caught up in the hectic daily activities of clinical practice and administration, health care practitioners can easily lose sight of long-term goals … easily forget what they set out to accomplish for themselves and for their loved ones. Yet proven strategies exist to help busy professionals achieve happy, healthy, productive, and well-balanced lives. To help you regain some perspective, an expert in life planning and personal productivity presents the following tips.

“To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in Familiar Studies of Men and Books1. Simple as that goal may sound, most people get so caught up in the day-to-day activities of living that they never come even close to realizing their full potential or their lifelong dreams.

Physician assistants and nurse practitioners, like other health care providers, are particularly vulnerable to this “activities-of-daily-living” trap. Starting with The Oath of Hippocrates (“With purity and holiness I will pass my life and practice my Art…. Into whatever houses I enter, I will go into them for the benefit of the sick….”) and ending with the rigors of daily practice, health care demands personalities willing to place the needs of others ahead of self. Does this leave the practitioner with no time to pursue personal goals and dreams? Sometimes. But there are ways to assure personal growth and fulfillment, which ultimately improve a provider’s ability to care for others.

GOAL PLANNING: WHY BOTHER?

Goal planning challenges the individual to give life a preplanned direction by employing specific exercises and strategies. Through goal planning, a person can take the shapeless life “direction” that most professionals have fermenting in the back of their minds – that fatalistic voice that says “work hard, do your best, and let whatever happens happen” – and learn to control many of the key events that ultimately give form to a person’s life.

The first step in goal planning is to ascertain the control you do have over your life. Try this exercise: First, on a clean sheet of paper, list the past five years vertically along the left side (1994,1993,1992,1991, and 1990). Next to each year, list the most important event that occurred in your life during that year. Now examine that list and estimate the percentage of control or influence that you had over those events.

After using this exercise with numerous groups, I’ve observed that most people exert a significant influence over at least 80% of the most notable developments in their lives. Too few, however, take the time to reflect on their influence, allowing themselves to drift into believing that external forces really chart the course. Seeing how much control you personally exert over your life helps you to realize that you really are in charge, and that you can chart a course to success.

How does someone actually plan for success in advance, rather than letting things happen and hoping for the best? Skeptics still balk; even though, in retrospect, they acknowledge some influence over events, they do not concede an ability to plan these events in advance. To some degree, their argument is true: Goal setting is not a crystal ball, nor does it carry with it any guarantees. But goal setting definitely improves your odds for a successful outcome.

Many companies use “Management By Objectives” (MBOs) to motivate their work staff to higher levels of achievement. This is a simple method of translating an organization’s business objectives down to each individual’s specific contribution. For instance, if the goal for your entire office is to see 500 patients each week, your individual objective might be to see 125 of those patients personally.

In one review of studies on MBOs2, 66 out of 68 studied (97%) attributed positive results to their use. In fact, in 28 studies using objective measurements, productivity was shown to increase by 44%. The studies also showed that when commitment on the part of the management is high, results are even better. When goals are personal and individual, rather than corporate or vague, they are more readily adopted.

TARGETING YOUR GOALS

To get the most out of each aspect of your life, start by creating a life plan from which to set specific goals. This way you’ll know where you want to end up. Setting goals “programs” our minds: The goals we set direct our mental focus. Subconsciously, the mind works continuously to satisfy the expressed need.

Notice that, here again, I said “life plan,” not “career plan.” Goal setting has application far beyond one’s career. In fact, those people who set only business-related goals decrease their odds of having a well-balanced, happy life: Those who direct their subconscious to solve only business problems risk creating lives that focus on careers and neglect all other areas.

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Goal setting is a powerful process for thinking about your ideal future, and for motivating yourself to turn this vision of the future into reality.

The process of setting goals helps you choose where you want to go in life. By knowing precisely what you want to achieve, you know where you have to concentrate your efforts. You’ll also quickly spot the distractions that would otherwise lure you from your course.

More than this, properly-set goals can be incredibly motivating, and as you get into the habit of setting and achieving goals, you’ll find that your self-confidence builds fast.
Achieving More With Focus

Goal setting techniques are used by top-level athletes, successful business-people and achievers in all fields. They give you long-term vision and short-term motivation. They focus your acquisition of knowledge and help you to organize your time and your resources so that you can make the very most of your life.

By setting sharp, clearly defined goals, you can measure and take pride in the achievement of those goals. You can see forward progress in what might previously have seemed a long pointless grind. By setting goals, you will also raise your self-confidence, as you recognize your ability and competence in achieving the goals that you have set.
Starting to Set Personal Goals

Goals are set on a number of different levels: First you create your “big picture” of what you want to do with your life, and decide what large-scale goals you want to achieve. Second, you break these down into the smaller and smaller targets that you must hit so that you reach your lifetime goals. Finally, once you have your plan, you start working to achieve it.

We start this process with your Lifetime Goals, and work down to the things you can do today to start moving towards them.
Your Lifetime Goals

The first step in setting personal goals is to consider what you want to achieve in your lifetime (or by a time at least, say, 10 years in the future) as setting Lifetime Goals gives you the overall perspective that shapes all other aspects of your decision making.

To give a broad, balanced coverage of all important areas in your life, try to set goals in some of these categories (or in categories of your own, where these are important to you):

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The purpose of this website is to help you grow as a conscious human being. This includes guiding you to discover and accept your life purpose; inspiring you to feel more motivated, energized, and passionate; helping you shed disempowering relationships and build a network of loving support; teaching you how to achieve stable financial abundance doing what you love; and encouraging you to make a genuine contribution to humanity — so you can finally experience the kind of life that deep down, you always knew you were meant to live.

You aren’t here to struggle and suffer. You’re here to express and share your creative gifts, to give and receive love, and to be happy. It will take time, but this site can certainly help you get there, and the vast majority of resources here are free.

This site will help you make conscious decisions in your personal development journey and courageously follow through. This means having the maturity to take 100% responsibility for your health, your career, your finances, your relationships, your emotions, your habits, and your spiritual beliefs. It requires taking a deep look at yourself, consciously deciding what kind of person you truly are on the inside, and then getting your external reality to be congruent with your inner being. The goal is to help you achieve outstanding effectiveness while maintaining internal balance, where your thoughts, feelings, actions, and skills are all working together to create the life you truly desire.

Personal development is hard work. It takes time, consistency, and patience. If you’re only here looking for shallow quick fixes and you aren’t interested in real, lasting change, this isn’t the right place for you. This site is designed for people who are serious about personal growth and willing to commit to it.

This site will help you learn to live more consciously, to summon the courage to face the unfaceable parts of your life, and to solve the deep problems you’ve not yet been able to solve. You’ll learn practical ideas to make important changes in your life, both big and small, so you can get your life on track and start living up to your potential.

This site can’t teach you to be perfect. Perfection isn’t the point. The point is for you to get yourself onto a path of practical, positive growth. It’s very likely that this site will be of tremendous assistance to you on your journey.

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