The Domains of Life

There are many facets to life. People can only focus on so much in a day, a week, or a year. These days, there are many additional distractions that vie for our attention and our time. Now more than ever, careful prioritization is needed to ensure that we each expend our time and resources on the commitments that we declare are important to us. Typically, people make commitments – whether implicit or explicit – in the following areas of life.

  1. Home (your living space and the areas around it)

  2. Partner (your mate, spouse, or that special someone)

  3. Family (your partner and children, if any, and parents, siblings, and other relatives)

  4. Friends, Neighbors, and Colleagues (your close friends, casual friends, neighbors, and associates)

  5. Career (your current & future field/job, skills & work-related talents, and the plan to develop & use them)

  6. Finances (your possessions and money, investments and financial planning, and your relationship to it)

  7. Physical Health & Fitness (your habits of diet & nutrition, exercise & sports, and your experience of dis-ease)

  8. Mental Health & Emotional Growth (your ability to get along with people, maintain an even keel, deal with adversity, and channel energy into positive and powerful contributions to the world)

  9. Cognitive Health and Intellectual Growth (your formal education, practical education, pursuit of life-long learning, and critical thinking skills)

  10. Spiritual Health & Sense of Ethics and Morals (your relationship to the sacred, the universal, the religious, and your spiritual growth path)

  11. Personal Growth (your relationship to introspection, self-reflection, values, and examining your beliefs and motives, in relation to both your own psyche and the various communities of which you are a part)

  12. Hobbies and Interests (your choices in your leisure time)

  13. Participation in Organizations and Society (the rights - and responsibilities - that come with being a member of various communities. There are two basic kinds of organizations for our purposes here.

    The first are organizations we (or our parents) actively choose to join - your church/synagogue/mosque/religion, your employer, any social or volunteer organizations, or other loose affiliations we consciously choose.

    The second are organizations we passively choose. These include the family into which you are born or belong, your school (district), your neighborhood, your city, your state, your country, your world, and your universe. People are often cynical about these organizational memberships that sometimes seem "forced" on them. But personal responsibility demands that we act powerfully as individual agents who have actively chosen to belong to / remain in these organizations (family, neighborhood, state, country).

Know what your primary commitments are in life, and focus the majority of your efforts on them.

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