Setting goals for 7 key areas in your life

To experience outer joy it is important that you design your own map of what you might be interesting in experiencing in life. If you don’t design your own map and routes then other people will put you on their map and route. With a good map you can still get lost but navigation will be a lot easier and much more fun.

It is healthy to make some plans and decide where you want to go in at least the following 7 fields of your life. But feel free to add fields if you feel something is missing for you. And be sure to come back once a year to update it with your newest life experiences.

Your personal health & wellness;
-) physically
-) mental/emotionally
-) spiritually
-) working with your shadow aspects
Your family life
Your financial life
Your work, career in life
Your leisure activity
Your social life
How to handle addictive substances

Now be creative, give yourself room and imagine what you would like your life to be for each of these areas. Imagine your ideal future in each of these areas. Let it be playful, free and fun. Simply by thinking about these things and figuring out what you would like can make a huge difference already since once you have a direction suddenly the roads leading there will become clearer and easier to choose.

Now if you want to take it a step further it is great to also imagine what your worst case scenarios looks like for these 7 areas. This will give you an image of the future you want to avoid.

After having explored these different areas of your life and you have thought about and explored both what you do want and what you don’t want it is time to start setting some goals in each of these areas of your life.

Once you have set your goals it can be good to go over them to evaluate them and plan them out in more detail on how to execute them. A great method I have used myself for this is the Future Authoring part of the Self Authoring Suite.

They go through the following goal steps in detail and let you consider these aspects and also help you make it very concrete on how to work out your goals and how to take action upon them in great detail.

1. Evaluating Your Motives
2. Considering the Broad Personal and Social Impact of Goals
3. Considering the Detailed Strategies for Goal Attainment
4. Identifying Potential Obstacles and their Solutions
5. Monitoring Progress towards Desired Goals

It’s a great tool and I really recommend using it to map out your life on your own terms. The best way to find outer joy is if you lead a life and follow roads that you designed yourself and that lead to destinations you belief are worth getting to.

Here an explanation from Jordan Peterson about this Self Authoring program.