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July 14, 2022

Optimize Your Personal Life with These 8 Pillars

Optimize Your Personal Life with These 8 Pillars

A few years ago I was pretty content with how my business was systematized.

I had put EOS Lite in place, I was happy with the people in my business, and I had a clear path ahead of me. I knew what I needed to grow the company.

But my personal life was anything but systematized. Things were all over the place.

But after spending so much time on systems, it occurred to me that my personal life could be systematized too, if I wanted to.

Gary Keller's The One Thing helped to give me a framework for that personal systematization: the 8 Pillars of Life.

Start with the premise that all of your business success and wealth creation really doesn't matter if your personal life's not together.

With that in mind take a look at these eight pillars:

  1. Health and Vitality: how's your diet and exercise looking? Are you happy with it?
  2. Thoughts and Emotions: feeling held back by limiting beliefs? How's your general mood been?
  3. Friends and Family: are you spending the time with friends and family that you would like to? 
  4. Love and Relationship: are you in a significant relationship? If so, how is it going? If not, would you like to be? Why or why not?
  5. Growth and Learning: how are you investing in your own personal growth?
  6. Productivity and Performance: what areas can you improve on in your productivity?
  7. Lifestyle and Wealth: is your lifestyle designed the way that you would like it to be? Are your wealth goals in line with the vehicles you currently have deployed to achieve them?
  8. Business and Career: what's the medium and long-term plans for your business and/or career? 

Dedicate an hour or two to answering these questions initially and save them in a place you can access them, whether that's a notes app on a mobile device or in Google docs, etc.

Once you've got a sense of where you are in all these areas, give yourself a score from 1-10. If you're really happy where you are, that's a 10. If you're totally failing, that's a 1.

You should re-score yourself each month. Whichever pillar gets your lowest score, that's what should get your focus for the next four weeks.

The One Thing

The question you should ask yourself each week in the given pillar you will be focusing on is: what is the one thing I need to do in order to make progress here?

For example, let's say you picked health and vitality.

Perhaps the one thing is that you're ordering too much Uber Eats and unsurprisingly, your waistline has started to grow. So you are going to order less prepared food and try to make some more yourself.

Or maybe you've got that food thing handled, but you're not exercising enough. So maybe the one thing is you going to the gym X times a week. You don't have to do that yourself: you can find an accountability buddy or do body weight exercises at home if it's the commuting that is causing friction.

Rising Tide

What's really cool is that even though you are focusing on one pillar, and one thing in that pillar that will make a real difference, you're going to notice that your game gets upped in other pillars too. 

It's an old saying that the practice of one virtue enhances other virtues you might have.

So too with the one thing in one pillar: just a little bit of focus leads to big gains.

Just think: at the end of a year, you could theoretically have spent one month focusing on each of these pillars, and after 12 months you'll be in a much better situation than when you started the year.

And all because you were willing to apply principles of systems to your personal life, not just your professional one.

Photo by Tarang Dave on Unsplash

This article was written by Neel from MaidThis Franchise, a remote-local franchise opportunity for people looking to escape the rate race and reach financial freedom. Learn more here.