Brian Tracy argues that relationships drive about 85% of happiness and problems. He recommends clarifying your values, defining your ideal lifestyle, and using gap analysis to realign priorities. A thought experiment: if you had six months to live, what would actually matter.
Balancing work and family is one of the most important of all considerations in the way you organize your time and your life. And we start off with this critical principle. Number one is that your happiness should be your chief aim in life. Not somebody else's happiness, but your happiness. Your happiness shouldn't be second. It should be first. Because here's the rule. If ever you make somebody else's happiness or something else more important than your happiness, you may get that, but you won't ever be happy. Abraham Lincoln once said, the very best way to help the poor is not to become one of them. The very kindest thing that you can do for other people is to be happy yourself. And this brings us to point number two. Point number two is fully 85% of your happiness comes from your relationships with other people. Fully 85% of your happiness comes from your relationships. Now, what this also means is that fully 85% of all your problems also come from your relationships with other people. And one of the primary reasons why we have problems in our relationships, especially the most important ones, is because we don't spend enough time and we don't spend the right quality and quantity of time with them, which we'll deal with in this session. So here's the starting point. Here's a good question. It's how would you spend your time if you learned today that you only had six months to live? How would you spend your time if you learned today that you only had six months to live? We asked this question earlier in this course, but the second part of this is, with whom? Who would you spend the time with, predominantly? What would you want to do with that person? Where would you want to go? How would you want to spend it? What would you want to get accomplished if you learned today that you only had six months to live? You see, the answer to this question will bring you face to face with what is really important to you. Sometimes in our sessions we say, imagine that it wasn't six months, but it was six weeks, or that it wasn't six weeks, but suddenly you learned it was six days and then six hours and then 60 minutes. If you learned this very moment that you only had 60 minutes left in life, what would you do? And how would you spend your time? Who would you want to talk to? Who did you think about when you thought about that question? Because that tells you a lot about what's really important to you. And this brings us to number four, which is one of two of the most famous of Greek sayings. The first one is moderation in all things. Moderation in all things is what the ancient Greeks said. And as a wise old man said, yes, but except for a few glorious exceptions, moderation in all things means that you need balance between your work and your family life in order to be happy and in order to be successful. How can you tell when you're out of balance? You always experience being out of balance with stress, with anxiety, with irritation, with sleepless nights, with sometimes psychosomatic illnesses. Whenever you're out of balance in your life, you begin to feel it and it begins to manifest itself in your relationships with other people. So the starting point of getting your life into balance number five is to begin with your values. We talked about this before, but ask again. What are your values and what is really important to you? What's really important to you? What do you really care about? Because it's only when you absolutely know what's most important to you that you start to feel happy. And here's the rule. Either you run your life by determining what's important to you, organizing the sequence of events, or your life runs you. And many people today are frantic and they're happy, unhappy, and they're anxious and they're tense for a very specific reason. And it's because their life is running them, because they have not put their hands onto the steering wheel of their own life and they're not steering it. An important part of balance is for you to describe what is called the ideal end result. Your ideal vision, or what we say, your ideal lifestyle. What is your ideal lifestyle? If you could live any kind of life that you wanted, what would it be? What would it include? What ingredients would make you the most happy? What ingredients would make you the most happy? Answering this question enables you to do what we call gap analysis. Gap analysis is where you look at your life today and you look at your life as it would be if it were perfect. And you look at the differences between where you are and where you want to be. And you ask yourself what changes would you have to make to to begin to create your ideal life? Especially with regard to the most important people in your life.
It's astonishing, but Most people spend 50% of their time, according to the statistics Time in Motion videotape of workplaces, they spend 50% of their time doing non work related activities while they're in the office or at their place of work.
