 As we get closer to the holidays, we're all looking for a little more balance between our professional and our personal lives. And we can achieve this. It's all about setting priorities. Back leaders, and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. Work-life balance has been a hot topic lately, and there are many different opinions on the subject. Many people are throttling back on their work commitments to prioritize their time to be with their family and their friends. Workers believe that work-life balance is a myth, and that one aspect of our lives will always overtake the other. In my view of the world, we can achieve a good balance between our professional and our personal lives. It's just a matter of setting strong priorities and following through on them. When we talk about setting priorities, we're talking about figuring out what those major goals are in our lives. And those could be things like advancing our careers, building our businesses, spending time with our families and friends, really just about anything that's really important to us. Notice these are not too-do-less kind of tasks. These are really more the big picture, what do we want out of life kinds of things. So the exercise for today is to sit down and to write out those three to five most important things that we want to get out of life. Once we have those written down, we need to share them with the most important people in both our personal and professional lives and see what they think. Now that we've got feedback on our priorities from the important people in our lives, maybe it's our significant other and our boss, maybe it's just a really good mentor that we have, it's time to start following through on our priorities and our daily actions. And this is where we start to apply tools and systems to keep us focused on those priorities and taking action every day to achieve them. There are two main tools that I use to keep my daily actions aligned with my priorities. And the first is my to-do list. What I like to do with my to-do list is make sure that everything on my to-do list is working towards one of my priorities. And if it's not, I have to ask myself, why am I doing this task? Conversely, when I look at my to-do list every day, I look to make sure that every one of my priorities has some tasks that I'm doing to advance the ball towards meeting those priorities. Same thing with the calendar. If something is important to me, I block the time out on my calendar and make sure that I get it done to advance my priorities. There's a lot of tools out there that you can use to create to-do lists and calendars. I just use the basic calendar and reminders app on my phone. And what I like about those is that they let me assign color codes to my priorities. So I have a basic to-do list with a color code for each of my priorities. And there's a color coded calendar with the same color to match. If an event or task is important to me, it goes on the list of the calendar and it matches the color for that priority. It's important to recognize that sometimes in our lives, there are setbacks to achieving our priorities. Sometimes we have to cancel date night with our significant other because a crisis popped up at work. Now, we don't like when this happens, but framing it in the context that our career is also an important priority to us can help us and those around us accept the setback in a more healthy way. And this is the great thing about setting our priorities and sharing them with the important people in our lives is that we can all come from a place of understanding when a setback to one of our priorities does occur. Just a couple more things on priorities before we wrap it up. First, as leaders, our personal approach to setting and following through on priorities will set the example for our team. If we don't set clear priorities and align our decisions and actions to meet those priorities, others around us will have a hard time understanding what we want for the team and struggle with taking action. Also, it's okay if our priorities change over time. Significant life events like marriage, children, or a new career can change our views on life and what's important to us. When this happens, it's important to be honest with ourselves and the important people in our lives and have a conversation about our new priorities. Realigning our actions with these new priorities will help us tremendously to achieve that balance we're all seeking in life. That's it for this episode. Would love if you would share your priorities with us in the comments section and come back later in the week in the blog. We're gonna be talking about some different aspects of life that we might want to include in our priorities list. And the best way for you to get that, click on that globe off to the right. That'll get you subscribed to our email list and bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks for watching today. I really appreciate it. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.