Your Priorities – Make Them Clear and Conscious
What will you eat for breakfast in the morning? Or is breakfast a meal you skip entirely (along with the thirty million other Americans who don’t eat a morning meal), because it isn’t a priority?
Actually, at the moment I’m not really thinking about breakfast. I’m thinking about choices. And when I think of choices, I automatically think of priorities. Consciously or not, we all have them.
Suppose you’re having a great conversation with your teenager. Your cell phone rings. Is it more important to answer the phone or to continue your conversation? What if their cell phone rings? Same answer? Or do you expect your teenager to have a different set of priorities from your own?
Suppose I arrive home from work and my wife wants to go out for dinner. I’m a little tired and would rather eat at home. (This has actually happened.) Should my priority be to please my wife and go out to dinner, or to please myself and stay at home? Generally my priority is to please my wife, but would that change if we’ve eaten out for the past three nights?
For most of my life I’ve been a fervent member of the “live to eat” club. While eating breakfast, I started to think about what I was going to enjoy for lunch. And then after that for dinner. No wonder I weighed 207 pounds when I graduated high school, and even more as an adult. A few years ago I changed my priorities. Now I eat to live, and as a result I’ve lost more than fifty pounds. Maintaining a more reasonable weight is easy because I never feel deprived. I no longer think about when or where or even if I will be eating dinner tonight.
It is a given for me that my priorities always center around other people. My wife is my number one priority, other family members my next priority, and close friends or business associates my third priority. Of course, my priorities are also situational. If a close business associate is having a life-threatening surgery, helping them would be at the top of my list.
Years ago my brother consulted me about his finances. I asked him, “What do you want to be doing in five years?”
He said, “I don’t know.”
“Do you have any financial goals?”
He thought for a moment. “No, not really.”
In other words, he didn’t have clear and conscious financial priorities. This is not uncommon. If next Saturday I want to visit my daughter in San Jose and yet find myself in San Diego instead, it would indicate that my priorities were not clear and conscious.
Meanwhile, I would be happy to elaborate, but I have an appointment across town in forty minutes, and being there on time has now become my first priority.
Alan