Channel: James Grage

Category: People & Blogs

Tags: setting prioritiesmaking decisionssuccesslife hackfitness goalsgoals

Description: Setting priorities is critical if you want to take control of your life, your success and your happiness. It’s especially important for anyone struggling trying to figure out how to achieve their fitness goals. In this five part video series, I'm going to be covering what I think are the most important mental life hacks to help you think more clearly, be more objective, eliminate those mental barriers, and make better decisions to improve your life. Setting priorities straight is important for our success, and it makes sense, right? We can't focus on everything. When it comes down to making better decisions it boils down to what are the things that are most important to us? But setting priorities means more than just knowing what's important to you. It's also understanding the hierarchy or the relative importance of one priority to another. Now, when we feel that battle within us, that struggle or that resistance to make ourselves do the things that we know that we need to do, oftentimes it's because there's simply a conflict with our own priorities. This is that battle of “you versus you”. Here's a really simple example. Let's say on your list of priorities you have the desire to be more comfortable also on the list, but falling below that is a desire to get in shape. To achieve your fitness goals. But then what happens when you have a really bad day and you get all stressed out? You’re probably going to gravitate toward your comfort food. So what's that going to do to your fitness goals? It’s going to derail them? Of course. It's a simple tug of war between the strength of your desire, for one priority over another. And if your desire to be comfortable is stronger than your desire to be fit, then it's an easy win for comfort. So what's the takeaway? Well,your goals have to match your priorities and the strength of your desire to achieve that particular goal has to be stronger than any other conflicting priorities. So here's a simple and easy exercise that I want you to do that's going to give you some clarity and help you resolve any potential conflicts with your priorities. What I want you to do is simply write down your top five priorities, but here's the thing you got to be honest with yourself. Don't bullshit yourself. Don't write this list based on the way you want to perceive yourself or the way that you want to be in the future. I want you to write it based on how you are right now and the way you live. Now I want you to pick a goal that you've had for yourself and compare it to your list. How does that fit in with your top priorities? All right. So we've got our top five priorities written down. We have a goal written down that we would like to accomplish. Maybe it's a goal that we've struggled with before. Now, the whole purpose of this exercise is to extract these things out of our head and put it down on a piece of paper here. And this gives us a lot more clarity. So now that you've done that, I want you to focus on four different things. The first one, look at your goal and see if that even fits into your top five priorities. Because if it doesn't, well, then of course, you've been struggling with it. The second is look for potential conflicts between priorities like we talked about with the tug of war. The third one, look for opportunities to create some synergies between your goal and your priorities. For example, I would like to ride my mountain bike more. Outdoor sports isn't exactly on my list of top five priorities, but hanging out with my friends more is. So there is an opportunity to combine those two things. Now, the last one, this is a bit of a gut check. You've got to ask yourself, how important is that goal? Because that is the whole purpose of this conversation, is talking about how important things are to us, how much of a priority is it to us to accomplish that goal? And too many times we'll have a goal that we want to accomplish, but it's not important enough to actually follow through on it. So you’ve got to ask yourself, do I want to accomplish it? If you do, you got to fit it into your top five priorities. If it doesn't fit in, then you're probably going to have to set it to the side for later when you're willing to invest the time and the energy that you need to in order to succeed. That's it for the first video in this installment. Now, if you struggle with being indecisive, then make sure to check out the next video series, which is Life Hack #2, Eliminating Indecision. Now, my mission is to share everything that I've learned that's helped me find success in every bad situation. I'm James Grage, and this is the Resistance. Make sure to hit, like, subscribe. And to share this with a friend who might be in need. And I'll see you next video.