Focus Your Life for the New Year with These Three Questions

Picture: matryosha (Flickr, creative commons)

Happy new year! If you’re anything like me, you’re probably in a reflective mood right now contemplating all you’d like to achieve in the year ahead. Actually, this time last year I spent a few weeks rethinking much of my life and work. The process included clarifying my sense of mission, what I’d like to achieve by the end of my life, and setting some goals for the year to help move me forward. Here are three exercises that can help you do something similar.

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Three Exercises to Focus Your Life

Tony Campolo is professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University and author of more than 35 books. In this interview (first aired on the Open House show in 2006 and podcast here last year), Tony and I talk about various aspects of his life and work. Along the way he shares three exercises that helped focus his life, which have since helped many others. Try setting aside some time this week to work through the questions for each of them.

1. Your life mission in a sentence

When I ask Tony how he’d sum up his life, he gives this third-person reply: ‘He challenged young men and women to minister to the poor holistically; preaching the good news of Christ and ministering to the needs of the poor, socially and economically.’ In one sentence he distilled what his sense of purpose is.

Q: What is your life mission in a single sentence?

2. A life goal to achieve

‘When I was forty,’ Tony says, ‘my friends and I took two days off by ourselves. We said to ourselves, we’re forty years old and if we live to be eighty that will be wonderful. We’re at the halfway mark. What do we hope to achieve in the next forty years? We talked and then we eventually wrote our responses down.

‘What I concluded that I needed to be doing the rest of my life was this: I wanted to so live and so give myself to other people that when I hung up my sneakers when life was over, there would be at least 200 young men and women working among the poor in urban America and in Third World countries doing holistic ministry—bringing people to Christ, carrying on programs of education and cultural enrichment, carrying on programs that would enable the people they were serving to live the kinds of lives that God had called them to live.

‘That’s what has kept me ticking all these years. We were very specific.’

Q: What specific goal would you like to achieve by the end of your life?

3. What they’ll say at your funeral

‘I think it’s important for every person to take a tablet of paper and a pencil and go off somewhere and ask a very simple question. Here it is: When my life is over and I’m lying in the casket, and they’re having the funeral service and people are talking about me, what do I hope they are saying? Write those things down.

• What is your family saying?
• What are your friends saying?
• What are people at your church saying?
• What are people in your neighbourhood saying?
• What are people around the world saying?

‘Write those things down, then put them up on a wall and everyday ask yourself if you’re becoming the kind of person that people will say these things about. Define your goals, define your purpose, know what it is that you want to become—not just what you want to do, but the kind of person you want to become.’

Q: What would you like people to say at your funeral? How are you becoming that kind of person today?

Your Response

What else have you found helpful to focus your life? Leave me a comment below or call me using the ‘Send Voicemail’ button. Please also rate and share this podcast on iTunes to help others discover it.