From Chaos to Clarity: Discover Your True Priorities

If life feels hard and exhausting… 

Like way harder and way more exhausting than it needs to be…

If you feel overworked, taken advantage of, and like there has to be more… 

It’s probably because your priorities are not aligned with your values. 

If you think of a house, your core values are the foundation. If there are cracks in the foundation, then it’s going to crumble. 

Everything else in your life flows from your core values. 

But in order for your priorities to align with your values, you have to know what they are. 

I’m going to walk you through a simple exercise I walk all my clients through to get crystal clear on their priorities. 

But before we start, I want to encourage you to buy a journal. Journaling is one of the most therapeutic things you can do. Overwhelm and thoughts and all of that jumble lives in our brain, and this is how you can get it out of your head and onto paper. You can talk yourself off a ledge with one journaling exercise. 

(Okay, I’m going to get off my journaling soap box now.)

Here is my simple exercise for getting clear on your priorities:

Keep in mind: There’s no wrong way to do this exercise. It’s about sitting in a quiet space and getting intentional about what you want. 

First, we’re going to start by looking at 5 areas for change. You can have more than 5, but I think these 5 are a great place to start:

1. Career 
2. Finance
3. Health
4. Relationships
5. Spiritual

For each category, ask yourself: 

If you knew you could not fail, everything would turn out better than you expected, what would you want? 6 months, a year, 10 years from now, get super clear on what you want. 

What does a 10/10 in each of these areas look like? Feel like? 

If you can see it in your mind, you can hold it in your hand. 

After you do that exercise, you’ve probably started to notice some common themes, phrases, or feelings. 

Here are your next steps: 

1. Do a Google search for “Core Values.”
2. Start picking words that align with everything you’ve written in your journal. You can have multiple: 3, 5, 6, 1. Choose the phrases that feel good to you. Here are a few of mine: family, God, service, passion, integrity, community, abundance, empowerment, freedom, and fun. 
3. Draw into those phrases that feel good to you at your core and start forming those values. 

When your foundation is solid, and your priorities are flowing from that foundation, life does not feel hard or exhausting. You feel excited to get up every morning because you know why you’re waking up and what you’re working towards. 

If you want to go a little deeper, I recorded a full podcast on this exercise. Access it here

Don’t forget to share this blogpost with a fellow sister in the law who needs it! 

I’ll catch you next time. 

Erin