It's the beginning of a new year! 2013 is the perfect time to review your priorities and see where you want to tweak them. Priorities change over time. that's fine and natural! We grow and change. Do your priorities still speak to you?

Remember to keep your priorities as general as possible. These aren't specific goals about X pounds or Y dollars. That comes later. This is solely about overall ideas that you want to shape your decision making.

So my current priority list is:

~ help others directly
~ help others help themselves
~ be healthy
~ be serene
~ find the lesson in every day
~ organize my world
~ SMILE

I still like these as my overall directions in life, to then match my goals against.

How are you guys doing?

I am doing Wonderful!
My goals for this year is:
-To eat healthy
-Work on my Bible reading
-Write more
-Learn to come out of my shell an talk to people more freely
-To continue my education in hair, make-up, and on my business degree
-To help others
-Clean up my language (not that its foul but I do slip sometimes)
- Get myself organized

So far so good.....

Dear Brandi -

One year goals are great to have, and those come a little further in the planning process! The idea of this technique is to start "big" and to work one's way down to the one year goals. The idea is that by starting with priorities, you then know that your goals are in service of those priorities. If you do it the other way - choosing goals first - you could end up with goals that are on your list for reasons like what your parents want or what your spouse wants. They aren't on the list because of what YOUR priorities are.

So take a step back for a minute. Don't think about this year, or even five years from now. Think about your entire life. What overall priorities do you feel are important to you in your life? Think in terms of what you want to "be". Happy? Healthy? Serene? Spiritual? What would your overall priorities be in terms of those sorts of items?

I am happy, serene (at times) and spiritual (at least spiritually-minded). But I want to be worthwhile. Useful.

Dear Lori -

Those are great priorities to have! I love the worthwhile / useful one. It's a nice sense that one is being a positive member of the community one is in, small or large.

We are all works in progress . It's fine that we all strive!

Mother Teresa said, "I cannot do great things. I can only do things with great love."

I aspire to that. To do things, large and small, with great love.

Sometimes, I forget. Not that I do things with hate but I forget that even the mundane everyday task can be filled with love. Cooking with love. Doing laundry with love (feeling thankful for all the modern conveniences that make laundry easy today and thankful for the family I get to care for).

Today, for example, I had to clean up after our little puppy and instead of feeling annoyed because he is piddling a lot, I felt thankful and happy for having an adorable wiggly bundle of joy. He makes the entire family smile and laugh!

Lori -

That's so true! I love the cooking with love idea. Food nurtures us. So many people are starving. We should be quite happy with every meal we eat.

Just yesterday I was eating a hard boiled egg and gave thought to all the people who had helped get this tasty egg to me. And the poor chicken who probably had to live in a cage to create it (I haven't sold Bob on the cage-free-eggs-only idea yet, despite numerous attempts). All of those truck drivers and shelf stockers and so on all worked together to move this little eggs from its starting point to me. And now I could enjoy it right when I wanted to.

Lisa, cut out the middleman and get a chicken. :-)

Checking on my priorities: serenity, order, joy, adventure, health/fitness, learning, creativity.

I'm still happy with these. Very. Seven is a good number to focus on.

Order is a my biggest challenge. I need to figure out where I live and what to do with my stuff.

If she did get a chicken, she might have to cage it after all!

I had five wonderful chickens who were free range. They had the best life with the run of my backyard plus an enclosed pen area with a 50 square foot hen house. The eggs were fantastic. But with the feed, the sawdust, the dusting powder, the fresh grubs, etc. it was cheaper to buy eggs at the store. They were more than livestock. They were pets. But my DH did not like the idea of paying so much (in money and labor) to maintain non-laying hens! They stop laying after five years.

Even buying cage-free chicken eggs is cheaper than having your own chickens if you want only the eggs!

This thread is helping me remember my priority which is to do small things with great love. In the past, I would rush through things and find little things tedious or time-wasting. Now I try to focus on the power of this moment. The power of this little thing before me. It is working.

I've got a list of ten priorities. Some of them might seem redundant to others, though.

Create, know, learn, be whole, communicate, reimburse, protect, live, provide and forgive.

I rather liked this exercise. It really helped me assess what's important to me. It's still ongoing as I've been thinking about these since I wrote them down a couple of weeks ago.