We all strive for happiness and our goals are a means to achieve that. However, research shows that our ability to predict what will make us happy is poorer than we think. Part of self-awareness and self-leadership is knowing what your goals are and setting your priorities in order to achieve them, but something we often don’t consider is that our priorities shift constantly as we grow and as our circumstances change.

The biggest challenge to setting your priorities is identifying your target. Happiness is a great goal, but what does it truly mean to you? What does it look like? Does a ‘happy life’ imply a life of experiences or a home full of prized possessions? Happiness is a common goal, but it takes on a different form for every person.

Once you understand what it is you want, and that your priorities are a moving target, moving towards and achieving your goals becomes a lot easier and less frustrating.

Fortunately, this isn’t as challenging as it might sound.

Feelings and Purpose:

What are you feeling and why is this important to you? With that understanding, the next step is to ask yourself what your purpose is, how it manifests in your day-to-day life and how you would like for that to change in future.

Reach for your Vision:

Before you can begin setting goals, you need to first identify your finish line. What does ‘success’ or ‘happiness’ look like to you? How can you measure it or your progress? How will you know when you ‘get there’?

Fortunately, an easy way to start is with the Wheel of Life diagram. a circular graphic broken up into various categories - financial situation, relationships, personal development, and more – which you assign scores to, indicating how satisfied you are with each of these categories in your own life. Central to using the Wheel of Life is to return to it after several months and repeat the exercise, allowing you to chart overall satisfaction and progress in any given area.

It is one thing to track your growth and progress, but it's a different challenge to predict where you'll be in 10, 15, or 20 years. The best we can do is take a guess, but when it comes to long-term priorities, an easy way to gauge what is and isn’t really important to you is to write your own obituary. Assuming you live to a ripe old age, what would you want your obituary to say about you?

As grim as this sounds, this exercise reveals to us what we want our legacies to be, what we deem truly important, and what kind of impact we want to have on the world.

In order to truly self-lead, we need to know what is important to us and how we intend to achieve our goals. Our lives change constantly, people come and go, circumstances change, but our core values largely remain unchanged.

View the video related to this blog.

Other articles in this series include:

• ‍Self-Leadership: What is it?
• Self-Leadership: Benefits for the Self
• ‍Self-Leadership: Benefits for Others
• The Link Between Self-Leadership and Self-Awareness

‍See the playlist for more topics.

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