Okay, moving right along the lesson three, identifying your priorities. A lot of people have a hard time distinguishing between their priorities and their values. But they're really two very different things. So we're going to explore those differences here. Once you have an understanding of how they're different, you're going to be able to clarify what your personal values are, and then what your priorities are. Before we dive in, let me give you a little overview of what you're going to learn in this lesson.

First, you're going to have an opportunity to take stock of everything you have on your plate right now, I don't know about you, but when I have everything kind of just swirling around in my head, it gets really overwhelming. So we're going to get everything down on paper so that we can start to manage it a little bit better. Second, you're going to be able to evaluate which priorities are truly important in your life and which can be put on the backburner or better yet eliminated completely. And by the end of this lesson, you'll also have a system for identifying which areas of your life get your time and attention in the future. One of the biggest questions I get from people Is that they're not sure how to decide between all of the demands and requests in their lives. Everything feels like a priority.

So if that sounds like you, this lesson is going to help solve that problem for you. As I mentioned earlier, there's actually a pretty big difference between values and priorities. So we just covered values in the last lesson. But as a reminder, values are a person's principles or standards of behavior, one's judgment of what's most important in life. On the other hand, your priorities are something that is more important than other things, and that needs to be done or dealt with first. So the bottom line is that your values are your overall long term guidelines for a healthier, happier and more meaningful life.

Your priorities, on the other hand, are the most important actions that you're going to be taking each day. your priorities will guide your daily life and should reflect your deepest values. The next step in determining your top priorities To complete the personal priorities profile. In this exercise, you're going to be doing a brain dump of all of the different priorities you have going on in your life right now. Then once you have a complete list, you're going to rank your priorities so you can start to identify which ones are actually higher than the others. These priorities will give you some guidance whether you have answers whenever you have the question, Do I have time for this, and I know what comes up for all of you.

So let's talk about some success tips that you can apply in this lesson. If you're feeling frazzled, and out of balance, I can almost guarantee that you've priorities prioritized other people's agenda, meaning you've put everyone else's needs above your own. This is where you need to stop living your life according to everyone else's priorities and start to identify your own. The second success tip I have is to think in terms of seasons. You don't have to prioritize everything all at once. I think this is one of the biggest mistakes that parents often make.

Right now might be more about being a parent. So your career might need to go on autopilot for a while, for a while. Or maybe you have some big presentation at work. So maybe you're gonna have to step back from some of your friendships so that you don't sacrifice time with your kids or your spouse. As a working parent, it gets harder to focus on all areas of your life all at once. Most working parents try to fit it all in to each every each and every day.

But the secret to creating a more balanced life is to make some tough decisions about what's going to get your attention right now and then put the other things off. You can turn your attention to the other things again soon. But right now you're going to focus on the certain priorities that are most important to you, and then put the others on the backburner, and that's totally okay. The final success tip I have for this lesson is to realize that there are trade offs in life. You're the one who's in control of which trade offs are being made, though. So realize that it's a necessity to let go of the guilt of not being able to be all things at all people all for all people all of the time.

Stop letting everyone around. You determine What will get your attention and start making your own choices? I think one of the biggest obstacles that I see is people trying to make everything a priority in their lives all at once. It's really hard to choose between a lot of important things in your life. But if you don't, you'll always feel stretched too thin out of control and exhausted. If you want to feel balanced, you're going to have to start to make some hard choices about what's most important to you and let go of the rest.

It's a little bit of a recap from our success tips, but it's kind of get up the other side of the same thing. The other biggest pitfall that I see most people have the most people fall into, is that they feel like they they prioritize what they think they're supposed to be doing instead of what's really important to them. So to avoid this pitfall, make sure that your priorities are aligned with the values that you identified in the last exercise. So I chose a couple of different books for this lessons recommended resources. The first book is called the power full engagement, managing energy, not time is the key to high performance and personal Renewal by Jim Lehrer. So as we get closer to Module Two, where we're going to be focusing on maximizing your time, I thought that this would be a good book to recommend.

In this book, he talks about energy being the most important resource that you have, as opposed to time. So we all are trying to save time, manage our time, maximize our time, it's all kind of centered around this, this idea of the 24 hour day. But what Larry talks about in this book is instead of focusing so much on time, you might be able to focus more on where you place your energy. You can also ask yourself, like what gives me energy what lifts me up and then what also depletes me and what things should maybe I get rid of in my life that are bringing me down. So I wanted to just put that out there before we started getting into a lot more of the time management stuff. I just kind of wanted to have this baseline established before we got into all of that, because this really isn't about time as much as it is about your attention and your energy.

The second book that I really liked was called overwhelmed, work, love and play when no one has the time by Bridget Sheltie. So I thought that this was a good book to highlight because it deals specifically with the issues that we're tackling here in this program. she explores what happened to leisure, leisure and modern society, and why we're all permanently busy. It's a great book and I thought that it related really well to the priorities and values discussion that we're having in this module. And then also kind of on the topic of managing your time more intentionally. So kind of focusing on the decisions that you make versus how to cram as much as you possibly can into a 24 hour period.

Okay, so that's it for this lesson. Let's go ahead and download the personal priorities profile exercise and get started. So you'll also need the life balance plan that you created earlier. So grab that too and I will see you in the next lesson.