One of the most vital things that we do at Planning for Life is to help our clients to define and prioritise their most important life goals. From our many conversations with clients, we know that there are five or six core goals that, when it boils down to it, everyone aspires to. These are:

• Family – our relationships with spouse and family members.
• Spirituality and integrity – how to achieve a deeper understanding of self in this very material world and still maintain a degree of personal integrity that allows us to feel at ease with ourselves.
• Creativity – how we can find the opportunity to be creative in a way that many people find difficult to achieve.
• Community – how we can work within the community and find ways of giving back.
• Environment – helping with the protection, care and maintenance of our planet.
• Place – finding the space within oneself and in the physical world where we can enjoy a profound degree of contentment.

Over the coming months we shall be focusing on these goals in this section of the magazine. We hope that the advice we give will help the busy entrepreneur to lead a more balanced lifestyle and enjoy the fruits of their labours.

In a recent article we talked about How to Make “Me” Time More Meaningful and stressed that “Me” time is not necessarily limited to time devoted to personal enjoyment. It’s important to realise that “Me” time also includes the time that we spend building our personal relationships. When time is at a premium, we need to “live in the moment” and make sure that quality time spent with loved ones counts in the most profound way possible. We can do this, in the main, by making conscious efforts to give ourselves entirely to those spouses and family members who we really love and give ourselves generously to help them to grow and in so doing, increase the strength in our family relationships.

A sure method of developing good relationships is “active listening” - listening to them in a profound way that will build relationships in a way that nothing else can. Listening isn’t about just sitting there while somebody talks – it’s about concentrating fully on the conversation, taking into account the nuances of body language, innuendoes and making sure that we understand fully what the other person is telling us. It involves allowing the person to have their say without interruption or criticism – this will help us build our relationships through the process of building deep and meaningful conversations.

Effective Listening will help us to build the most profound and meaningful relationships with our loved ones. It is one of the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” as described in Steven Covey’s book of the same name. In the book, Covey places great emphasis on the concept of building relationships through the art of empathic listening; Habit Number 5 is “First understand, then be understood”.