Rework your priorities

Chances are, receiving the news of a serious threat to your health will prioritise what’s important to you in your life. Be active in this process – as I discovered, if you suddenly realise you’ve been entertaining meaningless crap, you now have permission to drop it.

It’s amazing how priorities shift when your life’s timeline is drastically shortened. Receiving a terminal illness diagnosis didn’t suddenly remove all the choices from my life, in fact there were mostly the same range of things I could keep doing for at least a while. What changed though was the importance of those things. It’s as if there was a new system for prioritising what was important.

To explore this, here’s a simple process:

• List everything you have going on in your life.
• Go through the list and mark each item with one of the following:
  • Let go of – For things you can simply stop doing.
  • Close-off – Stuff that needs to be tidied up, (perhaps you can delegate some of this?).
  • Keep doing – Stuff that’s good for you to do.
  • Start doing – These things won’t be on your list, so add them. These will be things that you know will be good for you, and so are an essential part of your game plan.
• Finally, be strong and take action to bring your reprioritised list alive.

There may of course be some mundane stuff you need to keep doing, (that you can’t delegate) in which case celebrate you’re still breathing and take a Zen approach to doing those things.