The truth is, many successful people feel cut off between their daily activities and their deepest desires – and a similar inability to do anything about it. Let me be clear; I can’t – and won’t – try to tell you what the content of your personal commitments should be. I won’t suggest that dedicating yourself to social service is better than making partner. Both are worthy goals. I do hope to help you improve the process by which you manage your personal commitments, whatever they may be.

According to an article that appeared in The Harvard Business Review by Donald Sull and Dominic Holder of The London Business School, a similar logic applies in our personal lives, where some of our most binding commitments are frequently the result of day-to-day decisions too small to attract our attention. There are exceptions, of course. Individuals periodically make dramatic commitments, such as changing jobs or getting married. And people who choose certain public service careers, such as the military and law enforcement, may make the ultimate commitment by giving their lives to a cause they believe in. For the rest of us, however, our most important commitments are the result of mundane decisions we make about how to allocate our money, time and energy. Because these decisions are individually small, it’s easy to lose sight of them, and when we do, a gap can grow between what we value and what we do.

The first step in managing your commitments is to take a quick inventory of what matters to you. You probably have at least a vague sense of what you value most, but it’s important to clarify those themes from time to time. This brief 3-category exercise lets you check whether you’re putting your money (and your time and energy) where your mouth is. A systematic inventory of where your money, time, and energy are going often reveals surprising gaps.

A few tips before you began, it’s crucial that you avoid overly vague nouns, such as “money” or “family,” and instead use more specific phrases. “Money,” for example, might be articulated as “providing financial security for my family,” “earning enough to retire early,” or “making more than my business school alumni’s.” It’s worth spending the time to get the language right. “Children,” for example, might be broken out into a few more specific values, such as “raising well-educated, morally responsible children” or “enjoying time hanging out with my kids.”

Don’t be afraid to jot down a value, scratch it out if it doesn’t sound quite right, and try again until it does. There’s no “right” number of values, but most people find that it takes at least five to cover the multiple dimensions of their lives (for instance: professional, family, social, religious, and individual). If the number creeps beyond ten, you’re probably not focusing on the highest priority values or the most critical ones.

Finally, it’s important to write what you honestly value rather than censoring yourself or imposing judgments about whether you should want something or not. This isn’t an exercise in what you (or others) think you should value but in what really matters to you.

The second step is to look closely at how committed you are, practically speaking, to the items listed. The evidence here won’t be in any dramatic actions you may have taken. Such momentous events are comparatively rare in personal life as they are in business. Rather, the evidence will be in the smaller, more mundane commitments we all routinely make that can collectively lock us on a course of action. You can make the exercise concrete by taking stock of whether your daily investments of money, time, and energy are aligned with your values. This week we’ll look at the category of money. Next week we’ll take on the categories of time and energy.

Money
Over the past year, how much money have you spent on each of the values you listed? A word of warning, though: You will have to make some judgment calls. By taking a big mortgage on an expensive house in a great neighborhood, for example, you also buy access to good public schools for your children. Or, by reducing your fixed housing cost (moving to a smaller less expensive home) you also reduce the effort required to cover mortgage expenses, freeing up money, time and energy to pursue other alternatives.

However, you resolve these accounting issues, the next step is to convert the expenditures into a percentage of your household income and plot the percentage against your ranked values. Do the most important values get the most money? If not, there is evidence of a gap between values and commitments.

Joe Hodowanes, a career strategy adviser in Tampa, Florida, offers a free resume and career analysis. Fax your resume to (813) 936-0201 or email it to jmwanes@jmwanes.com For questions, call Joe at (813) 936-0091 or visit www.jmwanes.com on the Web. All Job Search Advisor articles on this website are the property of www.jmwanes.com (J.M. Wanes & Associates). You may download
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