It is said that most people spend more time planning a holiday than they do planning their year or the life they want to create. You don’t turn up at the airport and ‘hope’ your holiday will work out – with no passport, no destination and no money. Yet people often turn up to life with exactly that attitude … so here is an exercise to take a step back and think about your life.

Think of your life as a wheel that has many spokes.

On a scale of 1 to 10 (whereby 1 means ‘Not at all satisfied’ and 10 means ‘Completely satisfied’) rank each area of your life and then start to write down how you want that area to be / look / feel / be experienced. Write down your dreams for those areas. Remember to think big and without limitation.

As an interesting side note, in 2004, The Wall Street Journal published the results of a survey on happiness that found that the Forbes magazine list of the 400 richest Americans, on a scale of 1.0 to 7.0, rate their life satisfaction at 5.8. The interesting bit – the Inuit people of northernGreenland and the cattle-herding Masai people of Kenya rated themselves the same as the 400 richest Americans in a similar rating of happiness, despite the fact that their lifestyle in all ways is pretty removed from the lifestyle of the Forbes 400. Hmmmm – interesting isn’t it !