Your Possibilities: Personal Focus

Over the past few weeks, we’ve been sharing with you, our strategic approaches to support you with your career and retirement transitions.

Some of you have said that you want to pivot away from burnout and focus more on your health and wellness. Others have said that you want to focus more on volunteering in your community or with your child’s school. And others have said that you want to make family your number one focus.

No matter the pivot you’re trying to make, it can be difficult without some intentional thought and planning. So, today, we’re walking you through some foundational steps to help you with your change of focus.

As you read through the suggestions below, reflect on what steps you could take to ensure your success.

Life Priorities:

• If you’ve already named that you want to pivot your focus, that’s great! This exercise can also help you to identify your other top priorities.
• You can use your top 3-5 priorities to help guide you as you make decisions about how to spend your time and money.
• What are the things that matter most to you in your life?

Assessment

• After doing the life priorities exercise, you may find that your list isn’t in sync with how you’re living your day-to-day so doing a simple assessment can help give you some direction.
• Take a look at your top 3-5 life priorities and consider answering these questions for each of them:
  • What’s going well?
  • What’s been challenging?
  • What would you like to do differently moving forward?

Success

• As you look at your answers to the above questions, consider what a satisfying life would look like for you, when you pivot your focus.
• We’ve found that writing down details of what success could look like for you, will help you to more fully envision what this transition will look like.
• In 6-12 months, if you’re feeling successful and satisfied in this next phase, what would that live like, look like, and feel like? Consider sights, sounds, smells, tastes, feelings, people, etc.

Obstacles

• Studies show that the people who are clear about their goals as well as their obstacles, AND plan for both, are more likely to find success.
• As you’re pivoting your focus in life, what are the 1-3 obstacles that are most likely to get in your way?

Small Steps

• Review the success you envision, your big rocks, and the obstacles you’ll face, and then consider what your first small steps will be, to begin pivoting your focus to new things.
• What are the initial 1-3 small steps you can take today (this week, this month), to get you around your obstacles and closer to your new vision of success?
• Repeat this step on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis.

Change can be difficult, but remember, small steps taken consistently over time, can lead to big success!

We’re here if you need us.