Wealth is in the heart and the mind, not the pocket -Pharrell Williams

If you ask anyone you know what their goals are for the upcoming year, you are likely to stumble across the same few concepts: job promotion, financial gain, or a fitness goal. These are all great goals, but what happens when you put more time than is warranted to conquering an individual goal? Inevitably, another area of your life becomes affected, and you start heading down the path of living an unbalanced lifestyle.

By no means am I rejecting the idea of setting a single goal and doing anything it takes to get done, that is exactly the strategy I took to write my book and believe it can be very beneficial. However, as your life progresses, it’s vital to place importance on all areas of your life to maintain balance. We see it all the time, the dad who works too much and doesn’t spend time with his family or working on himself, the friend who doesn’t spend time with his other friends because his sole focus is working and his girlfriend, or the one who puts way too much focus on their social life and ends up squandering their professional career. Life’s all a balancing act.

So how then, can one be constantly striving to improve themselves while living a balanced life? It’s all about setting goals for all aspects of your life; even the ones that don’t have immediate reward.

Here are the 6 most essential parts of your life to maintain balance, and continue working to find your personal purpose:

Personal Development Career Health Family Relationships Life Purpose

*Notice financials are not in there, that will always be on your mind regardless of how balanced you are, so why give it the time of day!

These are the Core Six, the most important aspects of your life you must consistently trying to improve upon. If you go too long without putting any emphasis at all towards one of these categories, your life is sure to fall out of balance.

Imagine your existence is like a fine Italian automobile — they are the finest running cars in the world, but if you treat them like a Camry, you will get horrible performance. Treat your body as you should a Ferrari, feeding it the proper fuel, taking care of the internal pieces, and making sure all circuits run effectively.

Sure that works for Career, Health, Family and Relationships, but you might be asking why are Personal Development and Life Purpose separate categories, or even on this list?

To cover the former, Personal Development requires its very own category because more than finances of physique, your confidence level in the world is driven by how developed of a human you are. No one is forcing you to learn a language, pick up a painting habit or write in a gratitude journal every night, but these are all actions you are taking to better yourself as a person.

As for Life Purpose, the question often arises of whether or not this is the same as Spirituality — the answer is sometimes. If you believe that your spiritual existence is the reason you are on this planet, then yes it is your Life Purpose. Set goals on going to meditation classes or scripture readings. If you believe your purpose is helping struggling youths, then your goals should revolve around that. Or, for most of us, if you just have no clue, set goals in all areas that you can explore while trying to find your Life Purpose.

Most goal-setting workbooks are either two things: solely focused on accomplishing one single goal, or a glorified task planner. That is why I created Finding Balance — a workbook that will help cut through the bullshit and allow you to focus on the person you want to become, and set goals in all areas of life to keep it together as much as possible.

My goal with Finding Balance is giving a structure and a resource to set and accomplish goals in the most important areas of life.

Come along for the ride,

Joe