In my 12+ years as a life coach working with individuals one-on-one, or in groups, I have helped people bring more meaning into their lives by taking some simple, concrete steps. It isn’t difficult for most, but balancing our lives requires a desire for change—and some help.  Take these nine steps to achieve more balance in your life: 

Step 1: Identify What’s Important. Articulating what’s important in your life creates a strong sense of peace and helps you set priorities. Start by putting your feelings and thoughts about what’s personally important to you in words or in pictures.  Describe those feelings and thoughts to people you trust.  What are your deeply held values, your most outrageous, courageous, and cherished hopes and dreams? Think of this process as creating a mission or vision statement to inspire and ground you. It is likely to remain stable for years, but should never be carved in stone.

Step 2.  Create a Simple Structure. Select seven or fewer important areas of your life to focus on.  (More than seven at one time is too much for most people.)  You can choose broad areas like work, family, friends, spiritual growth, recreation, and life maintenance activities (such as health, livelihood, finances, adequate sleep, laundry, and so on). Or, you can identify “focus areas” according to your various life roles,  such as mother, sister, worker, husband, athlete, artist, community contributor, or friend.  Defining your roles—as originally recommended by author Stephen Covey--will help you highlight areas that are either important to you now or will be in the future. 

Step 3:  Guess and Test. You might want to think of goals as units of life-planning that realize your vision.  These interlocking building blocks come in all different sizes:  long-term, short-term, mundane and vision-based. Often, we’re not climbing one ladder of achievement so much as weaving a richly textured tapestry.  Most goals are made up of many tasks.  Goals answer the question: what’s my best guess about how I would know I was living my best life in each of my areas of focus?  In your ideal life, what would you change? What relationships would you spend your time on?  What qualities of personal character would you cultivate?  Get beyond general abstractions and vague "someday goals." Reframe the traditional concept of goals into concrete and specific “guestimates.”  Think of them as research projects that need to be tested by experience.  Pay attention to what your experiences are telling you. Think through the underlying reasons that these goals are important to you. You might think of these core reasons as “heart goals.” 

 Step 4.  Create a Personal Planning System. The path to lost opportunities is paved with faulty memory.  A basic life management system should support your memory with lists and calendars. A good system starts with a life management datebook or planning calendar. If you’re already using a system that works for you, integrate new ideas into it rather than starting from scratch.  Start what I call a DreamCatcher memory list to record big picture projects and goal possibilities. Also create a Possible Action List (PAL) for nitty-gritty tasks from the mundane to the sublime.  PAL is a place to record tasks so they won't be forgotten.  It is not a to-do list of items you have decided to do yet.  If you later decide they are important in creating your best life, items from your PAL memory will become action items.  These chosen action items work their way onto your weekly or daily planning calendar and “to-do lists” that implement your vision.  You can also create a logic flow chart to help you imagine a possible path to your objectives and visualize the beginning, middle, and end of a project.  Timing charts can “rough-out” when action items might be best started and finished.  Keep your planning tools where you can always find them. 

Step 5.  Meet with Yourself. Schedule an appointment with yourself twice a week.  At the first meeting, develop a simple plan for the whole week, including the weekend.  Review your memory using the DreamCatcher and PAL.  Each week you may not work on all areas of focus, but they should be reviewed to be sure you are not neglecting any of them over a reasonable period of time.  Select a few important projects and their action items that will make a difference in each chosen focus area.  Put them on your planning calendar as time-based appointments or on a realistic daily “action list” divided into morning, afternoon, and evening. Decide whether these are possibilities you want to remember (like go to the movies if you feel like it) or firm commitments (like go to the gym twice this week).  At the mid-week second meeting, assess where you are and re-set the plan accordingly.  Daily quick reviews and reshuffling of schedule should occur throughout the day, but especially at the beginning and end of the day. 

Step 6: Get started.  Find any starting point and get going.  It doesn’t have to be the “best” starting point. You could pick the most appealing or fun thing, the easiest thing, or the hardest thing.  It won’t matter because once you’ve started, you build on the experience of overcoming inertia.  Remember that things in motion tend to remain in motion.  Use the “heart goal” behind your stated objective to increase your motivation.   The reasons behind our goals motivate us and keep us going.  That's the juice.

Step 7:  Set Your Own Pace. Make your pace one that won’t make you miserable.  If you want to increase your time commitment to what’s important, learn to say “no” a little bit at a time so you can say “yes” to new priorities.  Bite off a little more of these priorities each week or each month.  Biting off too much at the beginning is the easiest way to get discouraged.  Start small and be kind to yourself.  Stay focused on creating a life that won't be filled with regret 20 years from now

Step 8.  Commit and Keep It Flexible. Perhaps it’s a paradox, but it’s important to both commit to your “test goals” and stay flexible.  Even as you move forward with intent and commitment, watch for the unexpected, those serendipitous opportunities that present themselves.  Any plan is only as good as life proves it to be. Avoid planning your way into oblivion. At your planning meetings with yourself, learn to trust the feedback life gives you and be able to let go of a plan that is not proving itself out.  You may discover as the “research data” comes in that your best guess about goals isn’t creating your best life after all.  Commit and remain curious about the outcome of your “research project.” Prepare to change course if your assumptions aren’t supported by the facts

Step 9.  Get Support and Find Role Models. Surround yourself with people who will encourage and support you.  You can join a formal support group (such as my Goals Support Circles) or build a network of trusted friends.  We aren’t born with life-management skills; we learn them.  I often recommend two life-management classics, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey and Wishcraft by Barbara Sher.  You might also want to hire a coach to help you get started.  Look for role models who embody new and positive habits of mind and behavior. 

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Laura Worth, MSW, is a Life and Relationship Coach.  Since 1995 she has offered coaching to maintain balance, focus, and the simple enjoyment of deeply purposeful living.  She customizes practical, day-to-day systems to keep your important things in view.  Laura offers individual coaching, groups, workshops, classes, and "Getaway Coaching." She coaches in-person on Vashon Island, Washington and in the Seattle/Tacoma area.  In addition to face-to-face services, she coaches by phone and by e-mail worldwide.  Contact her at 206/463-9283, worthy@coachworth.com, or www.coachworth.com.