Focus On What Is Important In Your Life

Focus on What’s Important in Your Life

“If you don’t love yourself, nobody will. Not only that, you won’t be good at loving anyone else. Loving starts with the self.”—Wayne Dyer

By: Laurence Tabanao Gayao MD

On the last day of the year 2021, I am awake before everybody else, alone to myself with time to reflect on my life. The past two years was rather tumultuous to say the least. Since the start of the pandemic what we see around us globally on a daily basis may turn our stomach and make us sick with anxiety, sadness, and fear, fortunately we can do something about it. Perhaps, everything that is falling apart around us is doing so for good reason; it simply has to go and there are better days ahead of us.

Yes, this is a crazy world we live in, where so much seems to change minute-to-minute and so much of it seems out of our control, but one thing remains within our immediate control—taking back ownership of and responsibility for ourselves.

There are many would like to control of our lives. We have politicians with their empty promises to solve all our problems, influencers giving us suggestion of things we have to do or have so we could be happy.  Yes, we need to take ownership and responsibility for ourselves. When we do that, we can be more effective in our response to change in a way that moves us forward and upward in the evolutionary spiral, both personally and collectively.

Your life may gotten away from you, the demands upon you are making you feel overwhelmed, anxious, depressed, and/or deeply concerned about the future. Your work-life balance is unfairly skewed away from quality time for yourself, your family, your interests and hobbies, and/or your community. Then it’s time to stop and refocus on what’s most important to you. Find a way back to all that really matters. It is important to evaluate what you’re actually doing with and for yourself every day. Determine how essential or important it is to you, and make the necessary changes that best accommodate your needs, interests, and desires. Remember the distinction of what is yours and the rest of the world.

Even the practical aspects of life, such as career and finances, must be carefully considered in order to allow for a balanced view. For example, you have to understand if it’s practical and feasible for you to cut back on your hours at work, or if you can work closer to home or even from home. It may take for you to change careers by going back to school to retrain, or if you can split your job/career to include opportunities to not only make money but to put your interests and passions to work for you. You can cut or consolidate your expenses in exchange for having more hours that are not work-related or to pursue other more important interests. I know from my own personal experience I would have benefited pressing pause button to reevaluate and put some balance in to my life to benefit myself and my family early on in my life.

Here are some essential things to consider when you decide to refocus your attention in order to determine what is most important in your life, and how to get there.

1. Determine what things you value the most about your life. Choose five of these as a starting point, a basic model around which to structure the life you are trying to create. When you consciously make these choices you remind yourself what things in your life you can’t and won’t do without. These represent the backbone of your life. All too often we forget what people and events have shaped and continue to shape our lives. They mold us into the people we are and the people we want to become. They support and encourage us in every possible way. This underscores the fact that relationship is important is important both in our social and spiritual lives.

2. Decide what commitments are most important to you.Evaluate which commitments are in keeping with the five things you value the most about your life. Commitments are obligations that you enter into and represent your promise to steadfastly see a relationship/project/contract to its conclusion. Keep your essential commitments, renegotiate them if necessary, but consider completing the existing commitments you’re obligated to complete and refuse to take on any new ones. That way you focus on those commitments that are most essential to you and your life.

3. Assess the way you use your time.Most of us have a daily routine, with many fixed activities and chores. Evaluate which things are absolutely necessary and important for the five areas you identified as having the most value for your life.

How much time do you spend communicating? Assess the amount of time spent online, emailing, texting, and on your cell phone. How can you cut back on the amount of time you spend doing these activities? How many times do we walk into restaurant with people sitting around the table focused on their smart phones barely talking to each other? I friend told me, “I have a group of friends, that eat out together and agree on the rule that who ever picks up the phone unless it rings during their meal pays of for the meal of whole group.”

Assess how much time you spend on a daily basis watching TV, listening to the radio, on the internet, reading newspapers, and magazines. Consider decreasing your consumption and instead, receive basic information from a worthy source(s) only ONCE a day. So much that is presented in the media is repetitive and redundant. People have become afraid that they will miss out on something if they aren’t constantly in touch. But if you really think about how much of it really have a direct impact on our lives.

What would you do with all the time you’d have available if much of these activities were radically decreased or curtailed?

4. Get rid of clutter in every area of your life. Do you really need everything you have? Give anything away you have not used in the last two years. Certainly, someone else can use what you no longer need. You can even sell items, furniture, clothing, etc. you no longer need. Likewise, periodically get rid of emotional and psychological clutter, those ways of being that no longer serve you. Too often, we continue to do things routinely, often in a way that has little to do with how we have evolved over the course of time. We need to let old things go in order to make room for the new things and ways of being that truly reflect who we are and where we are.

5. Spend more time with the people that matter to you. Assess how much quality time you actually spend with family and close friends. (For many of you, this will probably be one of the five things you identified as most important to you.) As life evolves more people may enter our sphere. These people may fall into various categories of importance—acquaintances, colleagues, friends, partners. It’s necessary to sort out how we interact with these various people and to assess the meaning of each of these relationships. Time is precious—we need to use this time wisely and with those that matter most.

6. Make time to be alone. How much time do you regularly make for yourself? When was the last time you did what you love, what you feel passionately about? Give yourself more time (and the permission) to express your creativity. Take care of your body, mind, and spirit which allows you to really feel alive and present in your life. Remember that before there was so much information at our fingertips, we weren’t staring down at screens on devices that represent so much of our “connection” these days. Take a walk and reacquaint yourself with the sheer beauty around you. Make each breath count.

Life is about finding beauty in its simple pleasures and realizing that simplicity is the essence of happiness.

drgayao.com

I came out of medical school in 1971 and after residency in Family Medicine at Texas Tech University Health and Science Center I practiced for forty over years traditional medicine in the specialties of family and later in emergency medicine. All along I accept being called a health care provider. Most of what I did however was acute intervention of the results of illnesses that were mostly brought about by an unhealthy life styles. If the patient had high blood pressure, diabetes, sleep apnea, congestive heart failure, and other illnesses I prescribed them medications and mentioned that they needed to loss weight and exercise, in a perfunctory manner. Patients kept on coming back mostly getting worse with time. There was no systematic effort to alter the life styles that lead to these problems.Early in my career I studied on my own exercise physiology and nutrition, and diligently applied it till I got too busy in my profession and I gradually gained weight and eventually had elevated blood sugar and hypertension just like most of my patients. I after retirement I got back into the fitness program and delved into study of life style induced illnesses. It has made me realize as expensive and highly technologically advance our health care is, it has basically is neglecting promoting health as evidenced by the fact we in the US have the highest per capita expenditure for healthcare but our life expectancy is among the lowest among developed countries. Health business is misdirected in its focus and it is one of the largest industries in the US, good for profit for providers but bad for consumers. I now desire to share as much as possible the gospel of a healthy life style which is the key health and happiness.

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