Return on Investment

When I coach business owners, entrepreneurs, or independent contractors, we talk about return on investment, ROI. We often times think of it only in a financial or real estate investment or business context, however, have you ever thought about it as it relates to your personal life?

How are you spending your time? What activities are you doing? Who are you spending time with? Our time is an investment – a lot of times costs us more than our financial investments. I often hear people say they don’t have time. “There’s not enough time.” “If I only had more time.” “I ran out of time.” On a different note, these are all limiting beliefs – and I say this from experience since I used to use the “excuse” of time…all the time!

But I digress, since our time is such a precious commodity, why do we allow it to be wasted? Why do we allow it to be used/abused? Why do we spend it on people or things that we really don’t want to engage in/with?

When you have several opportunities of how to spend our time in any given day, how do you choose which of the activities or events to attend? We can have different reasons for using our time the ways in which we do. Pleasure, entertainment, quality time in relationships, financial gain, networking, educational, developmental, etc. Since there are many reasons we may want to do various activities, it comes down to priorities.

You’ve probably heard or seen a quote that says something like, “If it’s not getting you closer to your goal, it doesn’t need a place in your life.” I completely agree. So, what’s your goal? The challenge with so many is that they spend their time recklessly and aimlessly because they aren’t clear about their goals, what they want to get out of their goal or what the activity can truly do for them. Just because someone chooses to go to a baseball game with friends over a business networking event doesn’t mean they chose wrong, it just means they prioritized fun and quality time with friends over work for the evening.

Balancing our goals, both personal and professional, can be tricky for some. But it doesn’t have to be. Once you get clear as to your priorities, you then begin to attract things that are aligned with those priorities and allow anything else (a non-priority) to fade away. It can take some practice for people pleasers and those that have learned to allow other people’s priorities to creep into theirs, and I also know that is no way to live a fulfilled and happy life. But, here are three steps that are:

Identify. Prioritize. Invest.