Back on Track in 2021 – Part 5
Putting it all together. In this last month, our Back on Track Challenge had us focusing on our own mind, body and spirit, realizing we are the CEO of this life. We delved into the why, our purpose, what we want out of life. We added some movement, we respect our body. We practiced meditations to increase our mindfulness. Now, this last week we can work on bringing these ideas altogether. Creating a Level 10 life. What Is a Level 10 Life? What exactly does Level 10 Life mean? It means that all areas of your life are balanced and you are living your best possible life! The idea is from an amazing book, The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. It’s basically a way to help you assess your current life situation and then set goals for yourself. We all want to live a better life, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out exactly how to go about doing that. We might pick random goals that we think we “should” achieve, but are they goals that really matter to us? Will they really make us happier? That’s where a Level 10 Life assessment helps! You look at different aspects of your life and decide which you need to improve and which you are OK with. 10 Areas of the Level 10 Life The wheel of life assessment is a circle graph that is divided into 10 sections — one for each major area of focus in your life. Each section has a progress bar to fill in (from 1-10) with how satisfied you are with that area of your life.” A quick note here – it’s kind of impossible to have 10 on all the areas all the time, so when you start thinking of a few areas you want to build up a bit and start from there. Instead of doing 10 for all the areas try to make them all equally good. I really love this technique because I know I can end up putting too much time and effort into just one area and totally forget about others. When this happens, your other areas usually go down, and whether you know why or now you’ll end up not being that happy. So this is an amazing way to remind yourself to think wider, to think about your life as a whole, not just one area. This system tracks 10 areas of your life. Some you may not have ever thought about improving. Family & Friends Personal Development Spirituality Finances Career & Business Significant Other & Romance Fun & Recreation Contributing & Giving Health & Fitness Physical Environment Now, these are just the areas that are suggested by Elrod. But guess what? Your life is yours! So feel free to add, omit, combine, and be creative with your categories. If you want to be more specific (romance —–> marriage or physical environment ——-> home), make those changes. Reaching Your Level 10 Life Goals 1. Assess Your Life Before you start making goals, you should assess your life in the 10 areas that we just talked about. So first, grab a pen and some paper (or your favorite notebook) and settle in. This should take at least an hour. You want to be thoughtful in your assessment. If you’re not sure exactly where to start with your assessment, I’ve thought of a few questions that you can ask yourself. If you’d like even more journaling prompts that cover the majority of these categories, check out this post on self-discovery questions. These questions are about where you are RIGHT NOW. What are the areas in your life that you currently love? What about them makes you so happy? What areas of your life are not going well? What makes you feel that way about them? What areas of your life do you spend most of your time thinking about? By the way, these assessments are often done during life coaching sessions. If you’re interested in life coaching or specifically self-care coaching, check out my services. The basic idea is to give each of the areas above a score out of 10 and then see which areas are lacking and which are not. Yep, it really is that simple. Don’t overthink it; go with your gut instinct. For example, maybe you’ve been telling people for years about how you want to move to a bigger house. If that’s really what you want then your physical environment score wouldn’t be super high right now. But maybe when you go to score that area you instinctively give it a very high score, maybe an eight or nine. If that’s the case, then possibly that big house isn’t really what you want… 2. Record Your Current Life Levels There are lots of different wants to track your progress towards your Level 10 Life. Here are a few ideas of ways to record your Life Levels: Write your level rankings down in a notebook Use Trello, OneNote, or another digital notebook to record your levels Write them on a whiteboard or blackboard so you see them every day Record it in your Bullet Journal Use my Level 10 Life Printable at the end of this post. It doesn’t matter HOW you track your progress, just as long as you do it! 3. Ask Yourself Where You Want to Be Now that you have a firm grasp on where you are right now, ask yourself where you want to be. What does your level 10 life look like? Who do you spend your time with? What do you spend your time doing? How does it all make you feel? So you have an idea of what you’d like your life to look like and maybe even some steps to start getting there. 4. Set Your Goals Now that you can see where you may want to improve or what is out of balance you can start setting some goals! Make Them SMART (Specific, measurable, attainable, relevant,
