As a teenager growing up I had one priority. Unfortunately (while being important to me) it was not my grades in school. Like most in High School, my priority was girls and finding a girlfriend. The amount of effort, emotion and time that I spent on the phone, thinking, wishing and hoping that she would be mine was enormous. I would spend the whole afternoon on the phone sitting there not saying anything, but just knowing she was on the other end - and that was a better option than doing just about anything else.
Now this didn't mean that I didn't think about or do anything else. My grades were always pretty good, and I always got my work done. I enjoyed hanging out with friends, playing basketball, listening to music, swimming in our pool, but if a girl wanted something - things normally got pushed to second.
How many times have we heard..."if you spent that much time on your homework as you do on those video games (or memorizing those lyrics) then you would have straight A's". We see that right now in the school that I work in. Many students who might not test well, or might not get good grades can excel in other things because....they care enough to put in the work to be good at it. It is always very difficult (as an adult now) to figure out why a student can be out all night with his girl, which then effects him in school the next day. If they just made the right choices, they would not be in the situation that they are in now. If we could only look at each other through THEIR eyes, and not our own....
What effects someone's priorities, and how does someone change their priorities? I guess if there were easy answers to those questions life would be a lot easier. Too many times we know what we need to be doing, but we tend to do just about anything else. While we call it procrastination, I tend to believe that it means that our priorities are just not aligned with what we think or other think they need to be. I feel that we devote enough energy to succeed if it is that important to us - unless internal factors such as low self-esteem hinders us.
It is easy to find people in my field of work getting burned out because of all of the emotion and energy that they devote to their profession. Since those working with kids normally do not make too much money, to stay in the field one must be passionate about what they do - making it easy to prioritize their work over other aspects of their life which could help balance them out.
As I have gotten older my priorities, and motivations have changed, and I look forward to them changing again and again as I grow older. When I was single finding love was a priority. When I down, finding something to focus on and "accomplish" was a priority, and yes, when I have children, he/they will be my priority. So what happens during the "in between times"? The times that we need to focus on something, but we want to do anything but - and we procrastinate? How do we change our priorities?
I believe that if we are struggling at accomplishing tasks or goals, we need to evaluate our goals (as well as our needs and wants). It is very easy to decide that we are going to start a new project, but how do we actually make that happen? Without proper goals and objectives we won't get too far. So as I try to figure out how to get past the idea phase..lets remember that we should not judge someone's priorities through our own eyes, because we do not know all of the motivation behind them reaching their goals.
