Priorities - what's important to you? | Andrew Davidson Psychotherapy

14 Aug Priorities – What’s important to you!

Posted at 09:07h in Communication, Decision making by Andrew Davidson 0 Comments

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Weighing up the moment

I had intended to write about something else this week, but my priorities changed in several ways during the week. There were the usual distractions from others, the challenges of running a business, social media scheduling and family time.

Setting and realising priorities is also an issue for many couples I see. When you start to weigh up your priorities, work takes over, and there doesn’t seem to be much time left for family or your partner. For several couples I’ve seen, their different priorities over the years have become a significant issue between them. Their priorities had changed which ultimately lead them to grow apart. For these couples when I asked, “Now you know what you know about yourselves, what are the priorities in your life that are important to you now?” When it came to answering this question, my patients’ answers had changed from how they saw their priorities before they started to drift apart.

Realising what’s important

For these couples, recognising what was important, changed their priorities. It wasn’t about the emails that needed completing when they got home from work. It wasn’t about the Facebook updates to see what their friends were doing. It wasn’t about the friends they saw each week. It wasn’t about going to visit their parents each weekend. It was about the closeness they felt they had lost. It was about the importance of having the connection they didn’t realise they had lost until it had gone. It was about the small things that mattered which had disappeared over the years that were once abundant when they had started out together.

Our priorities can change significantly over time. Along with these changes, so does the way we see our relationship with our partner, even with our children and our parents. While we might feel they are important to us, they can become less of a priority without us realising it. Once we realise how much things have changed, we can start to re-prioritise what’s important to us.

It can be the simplest of things that could change that would make the difference. For me, it was when my wife asked why I was looking at my mobile phone so frequently. Was it so important that I needed to check it all the time? I realised then that it wasn’t important. I needed to stop looking at my emails. The emails could wait, but what couldn’t wait was being with my wife for the day. I wanted to give her my undivided attention and let her know she was important to me.

What is important to you?

Now it’s your turn. Do you know what’s important to you? Do you prioritise your time enough to know what is important to you? If you think work is important, that’s OK. Also, consider who else is significant in your life and whether they should be at the top of your list as well.

In business, we are told to identify our priorities and action them accordingly.

In a 1954 U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a speech to the Second Assembly of the World Council of Churches, where he quoted Dr J. Roscoe Miller, president of Northwestern University:

I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.

While Eisenhower makes a good point about prioritising a workload, what about identifying what’s important and urgent in your personal life?

In his quote, he identifies what is important is never urgent. It, therefore, seems that urgent things can be a distraction from what is essential. In my own example, the sense of urgency was to check my phone for emails, when in fact what was important at that moment was to spend time with my wife.

If you are to decide what is important and what is urgent, what would you put into these categories?

Urgent and important (what you need to do at this very moment)
Important, but not urgent (what you can schedule to do later)
Urgent, but not important (what you can give to someone else to do)
Neither urgent nor important (what you don’t need to do and can stop)

Decide to do something different today

Decide what is important to you and what is urgent. If it’s work related and needs completing, let your partner know why it needs completing now. If the work can wait, then schedule it for later.

For my patients, it was the smallest of things that were important and urgent:

saying hello when they arrived home, with warmth, love and care
when they saw their partner first thing in the morning and last thing at the end of the day, they gave them a kiss
hugging their children, so they felt loved when they haven’t seen them all day
saying goodbye to them when they leave for the day
acknowledging them when they arrived home
holding hands
feeling connected when they were together, as well as when apart
planning their future, even if it was just 15 minutes into the future.

Now is the moment

We all need to be able to prioritise our lives. The key principle in deciding what you are working towards is whether it adds value to your life. Does this also add value to your partner’s life and does it add value to your relationship together? We need to be able to see that our priorities are all in the current moment. Right now. Right in front of you.

Decide what is really important to you at this very moment and make it your most important and urgent priority.

So, what will your priority be today?

Photo by Felix Russell-Saw