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	Goals for Life Ernest H. Rosenbaum, MD and Isadora R. Rosenbaum, MA

1. Most people are goal oriented, whether they are high level or low level.

2. The importance of being oriented toward achieving one's goals.

Accomplishment
Satisfaction with achievements
Success (permanence, prolonging life, enduring achievements

There are several factors that are involved, including trust, faith, family and health, in achieving one's goals in life. One should try to help promote one's goals.

There are four physical and psychosocial areas, which can be assessed:

1. Physical - It is necessary

In life, try to achieve some type of loving relationship - family, friends, animals.
Work on one's body, which is a machine that serves you only with proper care.
One needs to follow bodybuilding and maintaining a prevention program with mind/body/nutrition

2. Social

One has to maintain a good emotional level in order to interact appropriately with one's friends, colleagues, family. Employ ways to improve emotional stability.

3. Family

Maintaining good family relationships is very supportive for one's life, longevity and goals.

4. Mental Attitude- The Role of the Mind

1. We are all growing and changing, and this is the decade phenomenon of how we change with every five- or ten-year period. It is important to record and review periodically.
2. Learning - We are constantly learning new ways of adapting, adjusting, and this is part of the growing process.
3. Contributions to better life.
    a. Spiritual - whether it be a religious or nonreligious type, one needs to have a certain level of spiritual guidance, in helping to maintain better mental health.
    b. One needs to know one's mission in life - (goals and ambitions) - and have secondary (alternative) missions available in order to help orient oneself toward fulfilling one's goals.

There are several questions that one must answer:

1. What is really important in life?
2. If there was one thing you could change in life, what would it be?
3. A mission statement for life.
    a. What are your goals?
    b. What do you wish to achieve?
    c. How do you find your happiness?
4. If I could do one thing today to help promote well-being or help someone, what would it be?
5. What should I think of doing tomorrow to make tomorrow a better day?

Sitting down and writing answers to these questions can be a helpful way to help answer a purpose in life.

Time management:

1. Life - Know your mission statement.
2. Be willing to give to humanity - yourself, time/money, with dedication to causes.
3. Know that people are more important than a schedule, and you have to be very giving, flexible or fluid in setting your schedule and judgments.
4. Schedule family importance versus family duties. This is a matter of setting priorities.
5. You must be willing to make changes in life versus just trusting in fate, where life just goes on as a routine process.

Thus, by knowing life's goals, we can try hard to fill our lives with compassion and direction. It is important to select the important things in life and then fill in all the gaps.

To achieve your life goals, planning and implementation are critical.

This could best be demonstrated with what I recently saw on television, where a very large bottle is filled with large rocks. One could think that the bottle is full, like our lives could be full, but if one pours pebbles in, these will intersperse within the rocks, and one can add an awful lot of pebbles to fill up the bottle. If one would then shake the bottle, you could then add sand, which is much finer, and one could fill in additional gaps. When the jar appears to be full, one could then add water, and a sizable amount of water could be added. Thus, we think our lives are over-burdened and full, and yet, we do have the capacity to make additional time and effort to continue filling up our lives with activities in order to achieve our goals.

The mistake one often makes is by not properly planning and over-filling one's life and having many efforts occurring, which can overload or over-burden one's daily or weekly activities and cause great strain and stress and thus decrease efficiency and make life sometimes impossible.

Thus, it is important to note that in trying to live to the fullest, one must organize one's life.

1. A weekly planner to sort of get the objectives for that week under scrutiny and to improve one's planning efficiency.
2. Keep a personal journal to see the pattern that is developing and how you organize yourself and how you achieve each of your daily goals.
3. It is important to organize tools, such as assistance and help, appropriately in order to achieve one's goals.

Lastly, it is important to live one's life to the fullest by attaining satisfaction from doing what is important to you in life and yet be willing to help others achieve their goals or just helping them to live better or fuller and thus attain additional satisfaction. Most important is living with your family to help them progress and grow.

It is important to appreciate how fortunate those are who have good health and how disease and illness change one's life; not only one's goals that may no longer be attainable because of deficiencies, or the depression and the anguish of going through an illness may change one's attitude. One has to somehow work to achieve hope in order to live to the fullest.

Laughter
Laugher is an essential part of life and can increase the quality of life. We all go to comedies, shows, watch television and also read. Norman Cousins was probably the greatest proponent in his book, Anatomy of an Illness, where he described how looking at comical movies of Groucho Marx, The Three Stooges helped him regain his health. An old admonition from the Scriptures is A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.

Dr. William Fry at Stanford has been using humor therapy as part of his daily way of helping people, and many others at different institutions are doing likewise. Somehow, making people happy helps them endure some of the tragedies they have to go through in life with illness, as well as keeping one's courage in fighting to help regain one's health.

Thus, one tries to find happiness no matter what the problem is in trying to optimize one's quality of life. One can get happiness and joy and triumph through sheer determination and perseverance over a special problem. There is the great story of Nicolo Paganini, who was one of the great violinists of the 19th and 20th centuries and was giving a concert when one of his strings suddenly snapped. Although the audience gasped, he continued playing. A second string broke, and without missing a note, he continued playing. When the third string gave way with a sharp crack, the violinist momentarily stopped playing, but he then continued with persistence and confidence. He raised his Stradivarius violin and with one hand raised he announced, One string...and Paganini. Then with tremendous skill and discipline, the gifted artist finished the selection on a single string with such perfection that he received a standing ovation.

We all face times in our lives, where we have grave moments and we're tempted to give up and not continue, and we often miss what could be a very rewarding achievement in life.

Thus, we need courage, dignity and optimism to meet our challenges in life with hope that we can overcome whatever obstacles are present.

Try every day to do some good and to identify someone who needs help. When you meet people, try to be warm, smile and treat people with kindness. By trying to maintain a happy attitude - you can enhance your chances of being happy. One has to keep in mind that happiness is something you cannot attain without trying, but you can realize once you've been there and achieved it. One has to try to not only enjoy life with friends and family, but also to try to help others.