Don’t Let Your Goals Get in the Way of Your Best Life (Living a Level 10 Life)
When you are chasing your big goals, it is easy to lose focus on other aspects of your life that are critical to your well-being. One of my favorite strategies to ensure that I am not getting off track is to use a strategy called Level 10 Life.
Level 10 life is a concept created by Hal Elrod, author of the book The Miracle Morning. This holistic approach represented most often by a 10-part circle, takes into account all the aspects of your life. Taken as part of a monthly review, you are empowered to reflect and take action to improve the aspects of your life that you want to improve.
“If we’re measuring our levels of success/satisfaction in any area of our lives, we all want to be living our best lives at a ‘Level 10’ in each area. Creating your ‘Level 10 Life’ begins with creating an honest assessment of where you are.” — Hal Elrod
One item that I feel is key to note in my approach is that I am a firm believer in harmony over work/life balance. Having perfect balance is rarely achievable and causes us undo stress. A focus on harmony takes out the stress of perfect balance and shifts to an ebb and flow between different aspects of our life.
With that in mind, having the Level 10 Life in my toolkit helps me make sure that harmony continues. Without this tool, there is the potential that I may focus too long in one area (say work) at the expense of other important areas (relationships).
With the Level 10 Life in my toolkit, I keep myself grounded in those things that are most important to me — my values, my roles, and the aspects or categories that encompass my life. Hal’s approach doesn’t include values and roles, but I’ve found this critically important if I want to ensure I am living a life that is aligned with what is most important to me.
Let’s get continue our journey to Becoming the CEO of You by outlining what your Level 10 Life looks like.
1. Pick the top 10 categories
The categories are the top ten areas of focus within your life. These categories can be anything you want but should resonate with you. Categories to consider:
- Work/Career
- Partner
- Family
- Friendship
- Health
- Leisure
- Entertainment
- Household
- Learning
- Mentoring
- Creativity
- Community
- Spiritual
- Professional Development
- Personal Development
- Environment
Here is what my Level 10 categories are:
For mine, “Development” encompasses professional and personal development as well as learning. “Relationships” encompasses both friends and family relationships, but I have a separate category for “marriage” instead of “partner”. Remember, these categories are for you so adjust to what resonates with you and aligns to the values and roles that are important to you.
2. Reflect on your values
In my post on values, we went through the exercise to define what your values are in life as they shape your mindsets, beliefs, thoughts, and actions. When you look at the categories you selected, do you see them clearly reflected within your category selections? For example, if you value being spiritual/religious but don’t have this as a category, you need to revisit what your categories are.
Alternatively, you may have a value that you’ve outgrown that you need to remove and/or update. Remember, values change as we grow as individuals so it is not necessarily a bad thing if those values go away to make room for the new.
3. Think about your roles in life
Reflecting on your roles and how those map to your categories is another good gut check. In our lives, we all have different roles that we fill. Some of these roles we’ve chosen and other roles have been given to us. I’ve found reflecting on your roles is an important addition to the creation of your Level 10 Life as you may have a role that is critically important to you, but you forgot to align to a category.
If I can’t see a clear alignment between the categories and my roles it is an indication that I might have a role that no longer fits me (for example, a volunteer role that has I have given all I can to and deserves a new champion).
Here are some of the roles to consider:
- Husband/Wife
- Son/Daughter
- Father/Mother/Step-father/Step-mother
- Grandparent
- Brother/Sister
- Uncle/Aunt
- Friend
- Boss/co-worker
- Volunteer
- Coach/Mentor
- Entrepreneur
- Teacher
- Student
- Athlete
- Activist
4. Evaluate each category
Here comes the fun part. Find a quiet place to sit down and reflect. I like to have colored pencils, markers, or highlighters on hand for the exercise along with my favorite drink.
Take out your Level 10 template and add the category labels to the sections. On a scale of 1–10 with 1 being the lowest/least satisfied and 10 being the highest/best experience possible, rate each category. You can make this as pretty or simple as you want. Mine has a rainbow of colors and hangs up in my office so that I can see it every day.
6. Identify your actions
For each of the categories, write down the actions that you are already taking. Often, the areas that are highest are the ones that you’ve been spending the most time in or already have established goals in that area.
For the categories that are low, ask yourself the following:
- When was the last time that I invested in time in this area?
- What prevents me from investing time?
- Are their mindsets that I have that make me avoid this area?
Answers to these questions can indicate where and how much work will be required to improve that particular area. For example, if it is relationships and a relationship with a family member that lives with you that could be easier to address that improving a relationship with a family member who lives across the country.
Without over-analyzing, write down what it is you need to improve in that area and some ideas of what actions you could take.
7. Prioritize your approach
While we’d love to be instantly living our best life, the reality is it takes time, attention, and work to improve in any area (let alone multiple areas!). In many cases, it also requires input and/or engagement from others. This is where it becomes important to reflect on where is most important for you to focus and what areas may need less attention.
For example, if it is critical for you to build skills and build them quickly for your job, not taking actions in your environment or leisure/entertainment/ fun categories can be acceptable to not have any actions against. However, if your environment is key to you being able to focus and reduce your stress levels, that might be an area that you have actions against.
8. Revisit weekly and monthly
Your Level 10 Life is something you are living every day so should be something that you revisit at least weekly and monthly. I have embedded my Level 10 Life review into my end-of-week review and as part of my Sunday prep. Both the review and prep allow me to see how I’m tracking against the actions I committed to and to course-correct for any changes that might have occurred.
My monthly review is when I grab a new Level 10 Life template and re-assess where I am sitting within each category. At this time, I go through the steps above, though typically not roles or values. Roles and values get re-assessed either during my yearly review or during major milestones or life events.
If you’re new here…
We are on a journey to helping you Become the CEO of You so that you can become the best version of yourself. Over the course of the month, we’ll cover knowing yourself, creating goals, adopting mindsets, embracing habits, and practicing self-care. You can find all the posts in our publication Living to Learn. You can also find my random musings on my personal page here.
