The past few days and the next couple, I’ve happily abandoned any plans of “productivity” but it was worth it to know everyone is happy. I even got a lovely present from my father today because of my efforts in cooking Christmas day lunch/dinner.

On Saturday though I will knuckle down to main goal for the holidays which I’ve decided is to find my vision, I would say again but I sometimes wonder if I ever had it. I know I never really took enough time to regularly reinforce it - so the second step is to work out ways to review that vision.

To facilitate the reinforcement, I am going to build a vision board but first I need to put together a list of the life areas that I want to concentrate on besides my business visions (though they are the most urgent). Having such a list also serves as a checklist so that things that are actually important to having life balance aren’t ignored.

So I had a look around the blogosphere to see if I could find some suggestions…

Suggestions for a List of Life Areas

Ellesse Chow at GoalSettingCollege.com has a great post on creating a vision board using vision board software and with glue and paper. The software she recommends is pretty cheap so I think I will try it out. If you subscribe to her RSS or email list, you can get a free copy of her 34 page PDF Goal Setting Tutorial. In it she talks about 10 dimensions:

  • Health & Fitness
  • Mental Well-being
  • Emotional Condition
  • Physical Attractiveness
  • Human Relationships
  • Living Environment
  • Social Activeness
  • Spiritual Happiness
  • Career Development
  • Financial Wealth

You use these dimensions to do a stock take on your life and where it is not going so well, you look to see how you can make it better, what needs to change and tease out the goal/s that are hidden.

She also categorises goals into one of four areas:

  • Personal Development
  • Career & Economic
  • Adventure
  • Contribution

I find that differentiation a little confusing and doubt I’ll bother with it. From what I can gather, the goals are what you use to create your action plans, the dimensions are what you use as the basis of your visioning - you paint a picture how these dimensions will look when you have accomplished your goals. In any case, Ellesse chooses to concentrate on only five of her ten dimensions:

  • Health & Fitness
  • Living Environment
  • Social Activeness
  • Career Development
  • Financial Wealth

Debra Moorhead, after going to a Christine Kane Vision Boarding class (Christine gives some good instructions on vision boarding and matches different types to different personalities), chose to use the following five areas:

  • Financial
  • Relational
  • Intellectual
  • Physical
  • Spiritual

My Working List

I could keep looking for more lists (there are heaps out there) and may come back to this in the future. However, I’m looking for progress not perfection. Also, and this is an important point to remember, Life Areas are very personal. Some people will want a “Career Development” sector, for others, it will be just “Family” or it will be “Business Development”. There’s no definitive list that you have to follow.

I’ll make my finalised list on the weekend where I’ll work out the areas that mean something to me, and I will also decide on the Life Areas that I want to focus on over the course of the next year (no more than 8 and hopefully even less than that).

So here’s my current working list:

  • Business Development
  • Business Networks
  • Health and Fitness
  • Living Environment
  • Physical Appearance
  • Personal Productivity
  • Personal Skills/Development (maybe personal productivity can live here)
  • Financial Abundance
  • Intellectual Development (aka Learning/Study)
  • Community Contribution
  • Spiritual Development
  • Family
  • Social Networks
  • Personal Relationships (perhaps these last three things could all go under one heading but I see them as very different)