Figuring out What's most important

Here’s a frustrating, but true fact.  When making difficult decisions everything on your list can’t be MOST important.

That may sound obvious, but sometimes it is not clear at all (especially when we are working with teenagers).  When we ask someone to tell us what is important to them about their decision, we frequently hear:

 “This is most important”, “That is most important”, “Oh, I totally forgot about this other thing, it is most important too”.

Or, as one young man told us “You just don’t understand. EVERYTHING on this list is MOST important to me.”

So, why can’t everything be MOST important?  Because with a difficult decision, you are not going to get everything on your list (if you could, it wouldn’t be a difficult decision!).  But you do want to get as much as you can of what is most important to you. 

This brings us to the idea of relative importance.  You might already be ranking things in order of their priority to you, but it might be hard to know how much more important item number 1 on your list is compared to item number 10.  

If you’re feeling stuck clarifying how important your priorities are, try this:

1. Draw a table with two columns.
2. List your factors (priorities) down one column. 
3. Now, give yourself 100 points to spend across your factors. 
4. You can spend them however you want – the only constraint is that you can’t go over 100 points. 
5. We recommend that you do this with a pencil and paper  - you might want to erase – a lot.  And, if you do erase that’s great!  You are identifying the relative importance of your priorities. 

Sometimes that can be enough to make your decision clear.  If not, stay tuned for future posts.

 
If you give this a try, let us know.  We would love to hear from you.