Welcome to Ever Better Today: the daily podcast for creating your optimal business, career, or overall life in ten minutes or less. I’m Lisa Conners Vogt, Executive and Leadership Coach and founder of Ever Better Coaching and Consulting. To learn more about me or my work, check out everbetteru.com. Let’s jump in! 

Welcome to episode two of Ever Better Today. Today our deep dive topic will be setting and sticking with your lifelong priorities. 

As you go through your life, you're going to have lots of decision points. In fact, every minute of every day you have a decision about what to do with your time, what you could be listening to, what you could be watching, who you're speaking to, and who you're spending time with. 

There are so many different options that we have in our lives and those decisions that we make add up to a lifetime that creates your legacy. 

So what are your priorities? These might shift slightly as your life evolves and your circumstances change, but for the most part, they're going to remain pretty consistent… at least the top three or four! 

Right now my priorities are:

• First of all, my physical and mental health.

• Second would be family relationships.

• The third for me would be developing my business and working with my current clients.

• Fourth would be friendships.

• And fifth is reimagining my home.

I invite you to consider how this relates to your life and whether or not your priorities would be the same or different at this point. 

Okay, so first of all… physical and mental health. When I work out, it elevates my mental health. It's very important to me, and I can feel the difference when I walk, go to Pilates, or when I lift weights. I really feel the difference mentally. 

So that's why I combine those two, but I also spend a good amount of time listening to a positive podcast or a guided meditation on Insight Timer or some other app. 

When I'm at home, I will often have, in the background, very uplifting music. Often it's classical music, and often it's more calming. 

I always have my own coach to help me elevate whatever it is I want to do in my life, and sometimes I'm working with a therapist. Last year as I was going through my divorce, a therapist was very helpful to me. I think that more and more people in the United States are working with therapists, and I totally applaud that. 

So that's physical and mental health. Second for me is my family relationships. 

First comes my son, Conner, who’s 22. I told you about him better in episode one. I will make decisions based on whether or not it allows me to spend time with him, do activities with him, and do something to serve him. 

I am not to the point where I'm spoiling him or treating him as though he's not an adult. Nope! That's not the case. But I'm looking for quality time to spend with him. 

Then would be my parents. Can I make time to spend with them? This usually involves a trip of some sort: going to their home or going to some other place where they're going to be so that I can help them out and spend time with them. 

Then there are my brothers. I have three brothers and many nephews and nieces, and I enjoy spending time with the extended family. So I'll make decisions based on whether or not it's going to allow me to spend quality time with my family. 

Third would be the category of developing my business and working with my clients. That includes creating this podcast, by the way, because that's part of developing my business. 

Oftentimes, I'm looking at how I can work all three of those categories I mentioned into one day or one morning. Here's an example of something that I did recently: 

I went to visit my parents and I knew I had a meeting with a client that I didn't want to change. So, I arranged a workspace for myself where I could set up Zoom and have some quiet time to work with this client for two hours in the morning. 

And then I went for a walk and was able to spend the rest of the day with my parents, helping them with whatever and just spending time with them. I was able to hit all three of my top priorities in one morning. Cool! I feel really good about the decisions that I made that day. 

My fourth category is friendships. I have a widening circle of all kinds of people: in different walks of life, in different businesses, in different careers; people who have different perspectives on things. Those friendships have become very important to me.

And as I've gone through some challenges over the past 10 years, I would say I've come to really value those relationships even more than I ever did in my lifetime. Seven years ago, I went through a breast cancer journey. I'm fine today; I thankfully had great medical care and great support from friends and family. 

And I learned that I could really rely on my friends. Some of them had gone through breast cancer journeys themselves, and some not. But they were very willing to come and celebrate with me; to be with me when things weren't great; to help me get to appointments; whatever I needed, they were there for me. 

And last year as I was going through my divorce, again they were there. For me, I made a point of reaching out to someone every day, whether it be a friend, a therapist, or a coach (and oftentimes my coach is a friend). So I was able to blend all those priorities, and this has led me to have a much fuller life. 

There have been points in my life where I felt like I hadn't spent enough time cultivating and developing friendships, but that was because I was focused on my work and my family relationships. I was raising my son but also working a very intensive job, and I felt a lack of friendships. 

There were times when I really felt like I wanted to do something with a friend or someone different than the people I had been talking to over the past week. I was feeling like I was limited in the number of people that I could reach out to. So over the past 10 years, I've really prioritized creating and maintaining friendships. 

My fifth category is reimagining my home. Now, this is a category that two years ago wouldn't have appeared on my priority list. So when I say that things might slightly shift as your life evolves, this is a really good example of that. 

I think the top four priorities have always been about the same for me, but reimagining my home is not something that would have been up there. I'm now an empty nester, like a truly empty nester, because my son is launched in his career and I am no longer married. So, I am free to reimagine my home and create it as I want it to be myself. 

I'm spending a lot of time painting furniture, learning how to decoupage, and doing all sorts of experimental things in my home that I wouldn't have done otherwise. I'm changing light fixtures, I'm changing doorknobs, and I'm looking at the kitchen and thinking about how I want to change it. This is all a very long-term project, but I'm taking it piece by piece. 

Ultimately, my goal is that I can do a home swap. There actually is a website where you can put your house on the website, and then the goal would be to exchange it with someone else. 

So perhaps I would go live in Palo Alto for a few weeks, and then someone comes and lives in my house. I also am keeping an eye on reimagining my home so that someone else could come and live in it, and it would feel comfortable and welcoming to them. 

I wouldn't be worried about things breaking or losing things. So I'm setting it up in a way that's durable and wonderful for someone else to come live there. 

So those are my top five priorities. My question to you today is: what are your priorities? 

Here are some questions to ask yourself: 

• Of all the decisions about how to spend my time in the past year, what would I go back and change?

• What would I do all over again?

• If you consider the cumulative effect of all your decisions so far in your life, what would you go back and change?

• What would you do all over again?

So consider the past year and the cumulative effect of all your decisions so far in your life. What would you change? And what would you keep the same? Then, if you think about ten years from now, what might you regret not spending more time doing? 

I hope this episode helps you to optimize one thing or to elevate one thought in your life, because small changes add up to major shifts. So keep listening, and let me know what's changing for you. In order to do that, you can send me an email at lisa@everbetteru.com or check out my website at everbetteru.com and click the link to send me a note. 

I'd love to hear from you and learn about how the ideas I just shared apply to your life or business! And if you know someone that might benefit from this information, do them a favor and share the podcast. 

That's it for today! Join me tomorrow for another episode of Ever Better Today!