When I moved to Richmond four years ago, I was in the market for a new gym. My new gym had all kinds of fancy equipment and classes.  When you join, they set you up with a meeting with a trainer under the guise of getting to know the gym better and helping you to design a plan for your personal fitness.  Of course, this is not the truth.  It is a pitch with a trainer designed to get you to sign up with them for private training.

After taking me through a round of exercises, my wanna-be trainer asked me a round of questions.  What were my fitness goals? How quickly did I want to achieve them? Of course, I said that I wanted to become stronger. I wanted to lose weight and I wanted to become all around healthier.  It was not just about a number on a scale but of getting back to a place of eating healthier and exercising regularly.  Because the weight thing was something he could hone in on with a fixed number, he asked how much I wanted to lose.  I gave him the figure that nags in the back of my mind but rarely has ever been a number I’ve seen when I stepped on a scale.

Then he asked me a question that has stuck with me, “On a scale of one to ten, how important is it for you to achieve your fitness goals?”  Whoa…It is one thing to say “it is important to me” but another thing to rate its importance in my life.  I suddenly felt a lot of pressure because if I had to be honest, I’d probably have to say that it gets a lot of lip service but meanwhile my actions do not reflect that it is a “ten” on the importance scale in my life.

Of course, he had an end game, he was trying to pressure me to sign up for personal training.  He said that he would suggest me working out with him twice a week, an hour at a time, at one hundred dollars a time.  Ok..seriously, who just has an extra eight hundred bucks a month laying around?  I couldn’t help but think, “I bet that’s what you’d recommend.”  I know he needs to make a living too and so I’m not going to begrudge him or his efforts when he acted like it was crazy for me not to sign up with him right in that moment.

But that question keeps sticking in my mind.  “On a scale of one to ten, how important is this for you?”  I think about it when I want to skip going to the gym, when I want to eat something unhealthy, when I want to procrastinate doing work for school, when I want to spend money frivolously and so on. There are always things we cannot change, cannot control in our lives but most of what keeps us from living the lives we really want is within our power to change.

What is the most important to you? What do you really value? Who do you really value? What work matters the most? What gives you energy?

Does your budget reflect that? Does your calendar reflect these things? On a scale of 1 to 10 how important are these things?

As spring moves into summer, this is a great season to reevaluate. Spend some time with these questions in the coming weeks. Grab a coffee, get up a little early, stay up a little later, take a few hours off work or get a baby sitter but spend some time focusing on what you really want out of life. What can you do in the next twenty-fours to put a priority on the things that really matter? What can you do in the next week to put a priority on the things that really matter? How about in the next six months? Where do you want to be in another one year/five years?

Stop allowing others, a busy schedule, mindless work and mindless time spent on things that do not matter rob you from living the life that you really want.

No more excuses.  What is a ten for you?  How do you adjust your life to reflect it?