Crafting Your Life Pillars
A Guide to Your Own Self-Improvement Plan
If you are familiar with content creation, then you may have heard of using “pillars” to organize your content ideas. This basically means that you pick 3-5 categories to plan your content under, such as entertainment, promotional, educational, and engagement. However, we are not here to discuss content creation, but how to tackle our plans for the New Year! That being said, I’m going to explain how using the idea of pillars can help organize our annual plans and goals. In this post, you will gain a few ideas for your own life pillars to work on and how to go about using them. Let’s get started!
What are Life Pillars?
A pillar is described by the Oxford Language Dictionary as, “a person or thing regarded as reliably providing essential support for something.” Therefore, we can imagine that life pillars work the same way by providing support for us throughout our lives. It would only make sense that we have stable and strong supports to keep us going. It is important to identify our life pillars and really discover how to strengthen them. Of course, you can’t just put your focus on one pillar. If only one is stable and the others are weak then you would have one lopsided and unstable building — or life. If you are unsure where to start, don’t worry, because I will list some of the common pillars to work on.
In last year’s post, I talked about working on some of these pillars in my own life such as, physical health, faith, relationships, gratitude, and financial.
8 Life Pillars
1. Physical Health
This can mean anything from working on your fitness to ensuring you have better health and wellness throughout the year. Understandably, this is one of the biggest pillars because if you aren’t at your best physically, then how can you expect to tackle your other goals over the next 12 months?
2. Education/ Learning
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. ”
Maybe you are a college student, like myself, or going back to school later in life. Or maybe you want to change careers and learn a new trade. I like to learn French in my spare time, even if there is a chance it may not be useful in the future. Additionally, most of us have to deal with continuous education in our careers as it becomes more common to collect as many certifications as possible to prove our qualifications. Whatever your goal is, education is a top priority that needs to be factored into your support system.
3. Spiritual/ Faith
No matter the religion, it is easy for most people to push their faith into the background. Adding it to your list of life pillars will ensure you remember to bring it back to the forefront of your life.
4. Relationships
This can involve friendships, romantic relationships, familial relationships, and work relationships. Do you want to prioritize quality time with certain people in your life or garner a better relationship with someone? Personal support is a huge foundation in our lives and deserves as much attention as the rest of our pillars.
5. Gratitude/Positivity
Some of us *cough, cough* need to work on our outlook on life, especially when stress or frustration kick in. Staying positive, no matter the challenge, is one thing I will definitely work on in the new year. It’s also important to remain grateful for what we have in our lives.
6. Professional
Of course, this is referring to your career and how you can improve on this important facet. Are you satisfied with your profession? If not, how can you improve job satisfaction? If you are satisfied, what are the next steps you want to take in your career this year?
7. Financial
This can relate to the monetary goals you have in your career or goals you have for a side project. How can you improve your finances this year? Do you want to save up money for a fun trip or project? Maybe you want to work on decreasing your debt this year.
8. Passions
If you have hobbies, like blogging, then it’s important to not forget about setting goals for those too. If you don’t have a hobby, maybe it’s time to set out finding the perfect one or start something you’ve always thought about doing.
Those are eight pillars to work on when planning out your new year. You can, of course, add more pillars, or only do two or three. The amount is up to you and how much you think you can handle.
Now how do you ensure that you stick to making progress with these goals throughout an entire year? Well, I’ve thought of a four step plan to ensure you stay on track and succeed at meeting your annual expectations.
How To Organize and Make Your Plan for Success
Identify Areas You Want to Improve and Habits That You Want To Change
The first step in reaching your goals begins with identifying specific habits and areas that you want to improve on. The list above is a great place to start. There are also many Pinterest boards and Instagram reels about things to work on in your life. However, stay true to what you feel your life needs. There’s also no need for a long list, 2 or 3 goals is enough to keep you busy for a year.
Figure Out Which Goals to Prioritize Above the Rest
Once you’ve written out your goals, you need to prioritize your pillars. Your list should be arranged from most to least important. As I said in a previous post, sometimes it’s ok to put the least important goals on the back burner if you get overwhelmed. Focusing on the most important will ensure you at least check off some things by the end of the year.
Brainstorm ways to accomplish each goal
Now this is where the real “planning” comes into play. You can’t just make a list of things to do and not have a well thought out plan on how to achieve your goals. If your goal is to improve on fitness by improving your cardio or losing weight, then you could write out all the ways to help you do that like, join a gym, hire a personal trainer, find a friend to train with you, find the best at home workouts, etc.
Begin Gradually Implementing Habits and Principles Into Your life
Making a list of habits or principles for each pillar in your life will help give you an idea of how to accomplish your tasks. Suppose you want to work on dental health, so you don’t have to visit the dentist as much because as a child you had a scary dentist and developed a deep-seated fear of all dental professionals. If that is the case, then you could add oil pulling and regular flossing as habits to implement in your everyday life.
It’s not as hard as you think to form a habit, good or bad. The amount of time it takes will differ from person to person, but repetition is the key because many habits will become muscle memory over time. Just remember that it’s extremely hard to correct bad habits once you’ve got them. As a classical pianist, this was drilled into me fairly quickly. Always ensure you are implementing good habits and be quick to correct bad ones from the start.
More examples:
For Gratitude and Positivity, you could make it a habit to write in a journal everyday what you are grateful for. You could also try finding a new positive quote to stick to your mirror everyday as a reminder.
For relationships, you could mark down one day a month for a family night or date night.
For passions, you can set a reminder to spend a certain amount of hours each day to work on your hobby.
In Conclusion
It’s important to remember that you don’t have to tackle all your goals at once. You have plenty of time in the year to plan out and slowly make progress on your goals. It should be rewarding and fun, and not overwhelming or stressful to check off your goals.
