Episode Details

How long since you've taken a step back from your professional life and considered where it's taking you? Is your current professional activity taking you to somewhere you want to be in 10 or 20 years? Is it leading you towards inner happiness? It's easy with the pressures of mortgage repayments or rent, perhaps kids, and just the normal expenses of life, to push on, head down bum up. The problem is that can lead you to a destination when you are perhaps in your 40's or 50's and with plenty of working life ahead of you, of middle management restructures, possible redundancies, and industries changing. Or perhaps the outlook for your profession is good, but will it take you to your personal goals? How many people throw their whole life into their work, only to neglect their family and home life, and then one day find themselves divorced, or just distant from their kids and partner? So today we're going to ask the question, "is your ladder against the wrong wall?". So you're climbing the corporate or professional ladder. There's the normal politics and set-backs, but on balance, you're progressing, you're moving up. But have you paused and looked at what's at the top of that ladder? Is it actually where you want to be in 10 or 20 years? And if you were at the top of that ladder, how's the view? In reaching that pinnacle, are you living the life that you aspire to? The aim of today's audio blog is to get you to take a step back and consider whether in fact you are on the right ladder. You've only got the one life. Let's make sure you don't look back in your old age and regret how you used it. The first step in determining whether your work life is taking you in the right direction is to develop your goals, and for this exercise, it's the medium, and especially the long term goals that count. Where do you see yourself at 50, 60, or 70? Will you still be living in the same city? The same country even? Do you hope to have family around you, perhaps even later in life some grandkids? Or would you anticipate a life interacting within your particular communities, be they professional, cultural, or geographic? Setting out some long term goals is such an important foundation stone, not just in a financial planning context, but in a broader life planning context. A goal that my wife and I set several years ago is that once our youngest child completes secondary school, we'd like to be able to live in a foreign city for 2-3 months each year. We don't want to be tourists. We want to continue working, just remotely, and experience what it's like to really live in the city – to read the local news, to develop in your head a bit of a mental map of the area, to hopefully get to know a few locals, and just take in the little differences. Now it's still 8 years away, but when I'm thinking about how I grow my business, or even if I grow my business, I'm in part thinking about it with a side thought as to "is this going to help me be able to work remotely for 2-3 months a year one day?" Similarly my wife works in tourism, and she determined that as a sector, it was where she wanted to be. But the employer that she had worked for was not where she wanted to remain. So in thinking through her next step, we again discussed, "well, how is whatever you do next going to help in us achieving our goal of being able to work remotely for 2-3 months a year?". It was a factor in deciding that a good solution would be for her to buy a business in the tourism sector that she can develop, and build it over time so that working from the other side of the world for a few months each year would be possible. In developing your goals, a common framework to use is called SMART goals. This acronym stands for: Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Time bound Regular listeners will know that with each Financial Auto