How are you?... (Really)

Recently I phoned a colleague to ask one small question... And before I knew it we were on the phone for 90 minutes! It's amazing how powerful it can be to just ask someone (if really care about the answer) "How are you?"….

One thing that came out of this conversation (and many others I've had over the years), is how much time and effort we tend to put into work and how we want to be thought of as a high performer, but there are also so many other elements in our lives that we perhaps don't focus on…

If you put all your effort into just one aspect of your life and something outside of your control massively impacts it then you could be left feeling empty. Is it better therefore to invest your time into a number of different areas of your life, so that if one element is impacted, it's not the end of the world as you have other areas to prop you up?

So what are the different areas? The way I look at it is through these 8 areas, the first 5 are quite self explanatory but I've given you a brief explanation of the last 3. But feel free to swap in different elements if you have parts of your life which are key to your happiness…

1. Career
2. Money
3. Friends and Family
4. Love
5. Health and Wellbeing
6. Personal Growth (developing yourself to grow and move forward)
7. Fun and Recreation (downtime to recharge your batteries)
8. Physical Environment (where do you spend a lot of your time… Your house, the office, your car, a hotel if you work away a lot)

Now, look at these elements again.

How would you score yourself out of 10 for each element, with 0 being "I'm not happy with where I'm at" and 10 being "I couldn't be happier right now". And don't forget that this is personal to you… For example, with health and wellbeing; One person may score themselves a 10 if they clock up 10,000 steps on their Fitbit every day (I never manage it by the way!!), for others they may only score themselves a 10 if they run 3 marathons a year! (I won't ever fit into this category either!!)... The key thing is, it's personal to you….

The idea isn't to score 10 out of 10 for every element of your life (none of us are superhuman I'm afraid!) but how do you achieve a balanced 7 or 8 in all aspects? If you have some really high scores and some really low scores then how will your life feel balanced? And if you're scoring low in all areas is that where you want to be?

So how do you score yourself?
Are you where you want to be?
And if you wanted to focus your efforts on 1 or 2 elements of your life to improve, which would they be?

If you didn't score a nice even 8 on every element (I'm yet to meet someone who does by the way!!) Then take a look at my GROW blog to work out your action plan to really make a change. 

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