The first thing to do when you tackle your personal finance situation is to sit down, take a deep breath, and ask yourself what you really want. This is a really personal question, and, fortunately, you are the only one who can answer it. To find true answers you need to look within yourselves.
What makes you happy?
You read well. You first need to know what defines your happiness. This feeling help you uncover some of your main values, and help you see what you want from life. Your values, and their relative importance, are key to a happy and a healthy life. Defining them precisely can be a long and demanding process *. We are not going into a detailed one here; after all, Rich Snail is not a NLP blog! No, we want to simply find out what makes you happy, so as to later define clear & definite SMART goals.
Which behaviors makes you truly happy?
You need to write down all the behaviors and situations where you feel happiness. You may find out that some of them can make you feel guilty and happy at the same time. Do not be afraid, write them down. Once you have your list, review it, and try to uncover new ways to find happiness without guilt for the entangled-feelings-ones. The resulting list will be your guideline.
Extract your values
The list you just wrote down will help you define your core values as every behavior or situation where you find happiness correspond to a value. You need to go through your list and find them. Analyze, decorticate, penetrate each behavior / situation to extract the value(s) answered there. You should end up with a small list of values. Once you wrote the list down, take a minute and congratulate yourself. We can now start defining and refining your goals.
* You can read the following article NLP & Values to discover more on the value topic.
