Cultivating Mind
Prioritizing Your Life
or, Identifying What's Important
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart”
This Week’s Intentions:
This Week I will...
Become inspired to identify & write down what's important
Contemplate & Meditate on what is important to me and those close to me, and why those things are important
This Week’s Goal: Establish a personal basis for cultivating purpose
Video Transcript:
“Hey everybody, AJ here with the first step in Cultivating Purpose. This first step, we're going to call 'Identifying What’s important.' Now, Identifying what’s important may seem like an obvious thing that, you may think doesn’t need to be dwelled on. You may be thinking ‘i already know what’s important to me, this doesn’t really apply to me.’ Well, I would have thought the same thing for myself. But the more I thought about it, the more I couldn’t believe how never in my life had I ever actually written down what was important to me. To me, it always seemed like a silly exercise because what was important to me was already a foregone conclusion…. But when I actually sat down & started making a list, it gave me a ton to think about. What seemed like a simple task ended up being an hour+ long odyssey of me exploring my own motivations in life. Now, to be fair, I am the kind of person to get lost in thought for an hour about nothing, but I found it to be an incredibly therapeutic exercise. It gave me specific, reserved time to sit & reflect upon my universe and where I stood within it. And that’s what I’m hoping to bring to you this week. If you take some time, and write down a list of what is most important to your life, and you think about why it’s important and how you arrived there; then you will have a basis for living a more purposeful life. You may remember something you forgot was important to you, or you may think of new important things that you previously never evaluated. Also, you may identify important things to you that you are not currently acting on. Perhaps you already knew these things before writing them down, but writing them down could inspire you to think about why these things are even important to you in the first place, and perhaps you may be inspired to plan a way to incorporate those important things more into your daily life. All of this happened to me when I did it. So, below you'll find more information on your action items for this week- the first week of Cultivating Purpose. You'll also find in the collage area below two things- the list that I wrote for what's most important to me, and my friend Heather's list as well. I also included some cool literature I found online about this topic. I hope you enjoy, and I hope you have a great week exploring this purposeful first step in our journey. Namaste."
Original Content
AJ's list of What's Most Important
Heather's list of What's Most Important
Additional Reading & Listening Links:
Related Literature:
The Power of Writing Down Your Goals and Dreams, by Mary Morrissey
How Writing Things Down Can Change Your Life, by Hannah Braime
Action Items for Prioritizing Your Life:
Write down the most important things in your life
Identify someone close to you and ask them to share what is most important to them with you
Contemplate and meditate on why things are important to you, and how those things have changed over time
Evaluate what important items have been ignored, and contemplate ways to re-introduce those things in your life
Make a Goal Board or something similar to align your ambition with your priorities
And as always, remember to be mindful and contemplative while you take these actions