Life Planning – New Horizon Partners

Defining Core Values

Our values should be the guiding lights that we use in shaping our lives and making decisions. Values, once identified, help you know yourself. Values show up in behavior, so knowing your values helps you identify behaviors that fit with your values so that you can walk the talk and operate as your most authentic self.

What values are most important to you or represent the person that you would like to be? Below is a list of potential core values commonly used by leadership institutes and programs. This list is not exhaustive, but it gives an idea of some common core values (also called personal values). The common recommendation is to select three to five core values to focus on—if everything is a core value, then nothing is really a priority.

One way to find your core values is to go through a list of potential values and circle those important to you. Again, sort through those selected to find the most important. Continue this process of winnowing until you find the three to five that are really core to who you are and to what is important to you.

Sample Values List

Authenticity
Achievement
Adventure
Authority
Autonomy
Balance
Beauty
Boldness
Compassion
Challenge
Citizenship
Community
Competency
Contribution
Creativity
Curiosity
Determination
Fairness
Faith
Fame
Family
Friendships
Fun
Growth
Happiness
Honesty
Humor
Influence
Inner Harmony
Justice
Kindness
Knowledge
Leadership
Learning
Love
Loyalty
Meaningful Work
Openness
Optimism
Peace
Pleasure
Popularity
Recognition
Religion
Reputation
Respect
Responsibility
Security
Self-Respect
Service
Spirituality
Stability
Success
Status
Trustworthiness
Wealth
Wisdom

See a more extensive list of potential Core Values.

This article is part of a series of articles describing the Life Planning process. To see the other articles in the series, click here. While individuals are welcome to complete this process on their own, partnering with a Life Coach is often more effective. Please contact us for more information.

Life Planning Goals & Action Plans

Having established the direction of your Life Plan by examining and determining your Core Values, defining your Life Purpose, examining the current realities of your life with the Wheel of Life, and envisioning what impact you desire from your life in your Life Vision Statement, you are now ready to begin moving forward with defining how your plan turns into action, the most important step.

Too often in both business and in our personal lives, we are guilty of crafting a plan but then putting it on the shelf to think about some other day. A plan only has value when it prompts movement or change. Good intentions in the plan will have little effect on the course of your life without establishing Goals and Action Plans to move your life toward where you want it to be.

We can develop and gather these goals into two major categories, both of which are driven by the prior steps in your Life Plan. There will be some goals and action plans specifically defined to align your life with where you want it to go, in other words, plans to extract yourself from things that do not fit with your Life Plan and distract your attention and energy from the important things. The other category will be those goals and action plans that are defined to move you further along or accelerate your development in the vision that you have defined for your life.

Elsewhere much is available on developing goals and action plans, so here we will give a very brief overview. Individuals are sometimes capable of developing these goals and actions on their own, but it is often more effective to find a partner or a coach who is able to help you think more deeply about developing the best goals and actions and to help you achieve them through an accountability relationship.

One of the effective tools for defining Goals is the use of the SMART acronym. Goals should be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-specific. In other words, in setting goals we must be able to judge our achievement of them. Of course, one of the challenges in setting goals in the Life Plan process is defining and prioritizing the many goals that might be possible. Often, the Wheel of Life exercise is a big help in this defining and prioritizing process.

Similarly, Action Plans must be specific and sell-defined. We can’t fall into the trap of thinking about doing “something sometime.” Action Plans must be carefully crafted to identified who, what, where, and when. And accountability is often helpful in seeing these actions through, so a partner or coach can be very helpful.

This article is the last in a series of articles describing the Life Planning process. To see the other articles in the series, click here. While individuals are welcome to complete this process on their own, partnering with a Life Coach is often more effective. Please contact us for more information.

Life Vision Statement

“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” – Psalm 90:12 (ESV)

Our lives can be described as a trip. We are somewhere now, and our trip will end at some point. The question that we face is, when we reach the end of this trip where do we hope to be and what will we have experienced along the way? Are we drifting casually toward that destination or purposefully? A Life Purpose Statement and our Core Values are signposts along the way that keep us on course. But a Life Vision Statement is another part of guiding our life priorities and choices.

When you reach the end of your time on earth, what impact will you have made and on whom? How will you be remembered? What will be your legacy? (Thinking here in much broader terms than the financial industry’s definition.) A life plan allows you to be more intentional in defining and determining the impact that you will have.

At my father-in-law’s funeral and the visitation, I got a first-hand view of the legacy of a man who I greatly admired. His family, his church family, many of his work colleagues, and others who had seen and benefited from his life bore witness to the way that he had lived and the legacy that he left behind. I heard stories of changed lives, successful careers, and so much more that were largely or at least in part attributed to the influence and guidance that he had provided.

In thinking about your life vision or life goals, you might answer the following questions:

How do I hope to be remembered?
What is the ultimate vision for my life?
What do I want my life to be about?
What impact do I hope to have on the world and on people, thinking about some specific people?
If there were no limits, what would be possible for my life?
What do I want for each area of my life?
What will I accomplish?

There are different ways to describe your Life Vision. One very effective way is to write the eulogy that you would hope to be spoken by those important people in your life at your funeral. Who are the people on whom you hope to have an impact? For those closest to you, specifically name them. For groups such as work colleagues, you might classify them together. For the various people or groups, what impact do you hope that you will have had on their lives, describing this legacy in specific terms. In other words, not “he/she was a good person” or “he/she influenced my life” but rather “____ helped me in these three specific ways: ____, ____, and ______”

Wheel of Life

Wheel of Life Instructions

The Wheel of Life is a tool to guide some thinking about the quality or direction of a person’s life. The wheel looks at various areas of your life and then provides a scale from 0 (at the center) to 10 (at the outer ring) to measure satisfaction (or potentially other measures) in each area of life.

Review the twelve areas of life represented on the attached wheel.
Add, subtract, split, or rename any of the areas as you feel appropriate to represent your life.
Rank your current level of satisfaction with each area of life by drawing a line across each segment. Satisfaction might be a cross-product of progress, passion, production, and purpose. Scoring is between 1 (very dissatisfied) and 10 (fully satisfied). Draw a line across that area and shade in the enclosed area.
On an additional wheel, rank your level of desired satisfaction. (While we might all dream of achieving 10, or fully satisfied, in every area, reality tells us that is unlikely, and we might need to make some tradeoffs or prioritize those areas where we want higher levels of satisfaction.)

Some other benefits or uses of the Wheel of Life:

Describe briefly what each area of your wheel encompasses.
Prioritize the areas on your wheel as to which are most important to you. Rank order is one possibility, but it is sometimes more effective to allocate points (perhaps dividing 1,000 points) to each area to differentiate the importance of each.
Describe the basis for your current satisfaction or lack thereof for each area of life.
Prioritize which areas of your life you want to work on. This could be based on the greatest importance, the widest gap in satisfaction, the ease or difficulty, the biggest bang for the buck, etc.

The Wheel of Life will be an important tool later in the Life Planning process as you begin to set goals and define action plans. Understanding the priority, current situation, and desired situation will help you set priorities and define actions.

The Life Planning Process

“So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” – Psalm 90:12 (ESV)

Some people drift through life, simply going with the flow and reacting to or accepting the various twists and turns along the way. Other people live in a very purposeful way, thinking through who they are and who they want to be. These people picture the life they want to live. They then set goals and take action steps to actually live the life to which they believe that they have been called. This process of defining the life that one desires to live and becoming the person for which you have been created, is called Life Planning. While we are not in charge of all that happens in our life, we are able, perhaps even responsible, for trying to find and live out the purpose for which we have been placed on this earth in this time and space.

The elements of Life Planning:

Life Vision Statement – how do you want to be remembered?
Life Purpose Statement – what is the purpose for which you live?
Core Values – what values are most important to you?
Wheel of Life – in the various areas of life, where are you and where do you want to be?
Goals – what are some of the goals that move you to where you want to be and to how you want to be remembered? These will include long-term goals, mid-term goals, as well as short-term goals, such as annual, quarterly, and monthly goals. Which three to five goals are you going to work on right now?
Action Plans – what are the actions that you will take to achieve these goals?

The above list is in a hierarchy of the way these elements might fit together and the order that we might review them periodically. It is most likely that you will develop your life plan in a different order. Often the development of a life plan turns out to be an iterative process in which we re-visit a previous step to revise or clarify. Life plans are also living documents, requiring periodic review, rethinking, and revising as life changes and we progress in our growth and development. The most effective way to develop your first life plan is to focus on these elements in this order:

This article is the first in a series of articles describing the Life Planning process. Click on any of the linked elements to learn more about the process. While individuals are welcome to complete this process on their own, partnering with a Life Coach is often more effective. Please contact us for more information.