The 360º Look @ Life™ Intro: Your Life is the Most Important Thing in Your Life

Sounds silly, but it’s actually a profound truth that is often overlooked. The reality is success in your life as a whole demands more planning than success in any individual area of your life. Every other part of your life plan has to fit within your overall life plan. If you are going to have a plan for the staffing needs of your company, for example, how effective will that staffing plan be if you don’t have a business plan? It’s the same thing.

In my coaching, speaking and training, I divide life up into ten areas that comprise what I call the 360 Degree View of Life™. It’s a 360-degree view because it encompasses your WHOLE life. Without a view of your life as a whole, it’s hard to see the whole importance of any one area, because every area of your life relates to every other area.

There is nothing magical about the ten areas. Each area identifies something important in and of itself, with as little overlap or duplication of other areas as possible. But ultimately, my 360-degree plan is really just a way of looking at something to help you think about things more clearly. The 10 areas the 360 Degree of Life focuses on are:

Career
Finance
Family
Social
Spiritual
Recreation
Creativity
Learning
Environment
Health

What makes the focus on each of these areas effective is the matter of Relative Evaluation. If I want every area of my life to contribute the most to my life, I have to know what I want that life to look like and I need to know what I value. What is important to me, and what do I value more and what less? One of the most important pieces of information an individual can have is clarity about his or her relative values regarding the larger areas of life.

I don’t believe in balance. I don’t believe in work-life balance or anything that involves the word balance. I believe in life integration. All the parts have to work together and be attended to in some way. That doesn’t mean I put the same amount of energy into all of them. It means I need to be thinking of these ten life areas; and to whatever extent I need or care about each one at any given time, to that extent I need to put energy into it. My belief is that all ten areas require at least a little bit of energy, if I want to be as complete and fully capable as possible.

This blog series will discuss each of the ten Life Areas and how to leverage them individually and as part of a 360º Look @ Life to achieve the maximum from your life plan. It will demonstrate how to conduct a Relative Evaluation on each area, and how to synchronize each area for maximum effectiveness in living your total life.

So stayed tuned!

Kim Sawyer is an Executive Coach and President of theWealthSource™. He provides individual and group coaching, training and facilitation, and he speaks to corporate and professional audiences around the country.