This blog is broken into the following parts: the background story || habit tip || 4 simple steps to prioritize with confidence that are time-tested in my own life || further support, including a meditation. Click on the previous links to jump right to that content.

I asked chatGPT to write about how a wolf could teach us how to prioritize… and to be honest, it knocked it out of the park. As I read through it to edit, I couldn’t have done any better. So here goes…

In the vast wilderness of nature, the gray wolf roams as a majestic and powerful predator. Known for their exceptional ability to hunt in packs, gray wolves have long fascinated scientists and wildlife enthusiasts alike. However, beyond their remarkable hunting prowess, these magnificent creatures can teach us a valuable lesson about prioritization. By observing their social dynamics and coordinated efforts, we can gain insights into a new way of approaching our own tasks and responsibilities. Let’s explore how the gray wolf inspires us to reconsider our approach to prioritization.

1. Pack Mentality: Embracing Collaboration

Gray wolves thrive as highly efficient pack hunters due to their exceptional collaborative skills. Each wolf in the pack has a specific role and contributes to the success of the group. Whether it’s tracking prey, cornering it, or delivering the final blow, they understand the importance of working together towards a common goal. Applying this principle to our lives, we can foster effective teamwork and collaboration, recognizing that shared efforts often yield superior results. By leveraging the diverse strengths and skills of those around us, we can accomplish more and prioritize tasks more effectively.

2. Adapting to Changing Conditions

The gray wolf has demonstrated remarkable adaptability over centuries. Their survival depends on their ability to adapt to shifting environmental conditions, changing prey availability, and other factors. Similarly, in our fast-paced and ever-evolving world, we must remain flexible and open to adapting our priorities. Recognizing that circumstances can change unexpectedly, we need to be agile and responsive in our approach. By regularly reassessing our priorities and adjusting them accordingly, we can ensure that we remain on track towards our goals despite the challenges and uncertainties we may encounter.

3. Instinctual Decision-Making

Gray wolves rely heavily on their instincts when making decisions. They possess a finely tuned sense of timing and judgment, allowing them to determine the best course of action quickly. While human decision-making involves a more complex cognitive process, we can learn from the wolf’s ability to trust their instincts. Sometimes, overanalyzing and overthinking can hinder our ability to prioritize effectively. By tapping into our intuition and combining it with logical reasoning, we can make swifter decisions and prioritize tasks based on our gut feelings, ensuring a more balanced and efficient approach.

4. Strategic Patience

Patience is a virtue often associated with wolves. When hunting, they exhibit remarkable patience, carefully observing their prey, and selecting the right moment to strike. In our fast-paced world, we tend to rush through tasks, sacrificing quality and focus for speed. However, the gray wolf’s approach teaches us the value of strategic patience. Taking the time to assess and evaluate our priorities allows us to allocate resources effectively, ensuring that we invest our time and energy where it matters most. By embracing this patience, we can enhance our prioritization skills and achieve more meaningful outcomes.

Conclusion:

The gray wolf’s fascinating attributes and behaviors offer valuable insights into our own approach to prioritization. Embracing collaboration, adapting to change, relying on our instincts, and practicing strategic patience are all essential aspects of effective prioritization. By learning from the gray wolf’s remarkable abilities, we can adopt a more balanced and holistic approach to managing our tasks and responsibilities. So, let us take inspiration from these incredible creatures and unleash our own potential to prioritize with purpose and achieve our goals more efficiently.

Habit tip

Gray wolves don’t need planners to help them prioritize, but I do. The way the Full Focus Planner is laid out enables me to quickly see what top tasks I need to do to move most efficiently towards my goals but also allows room for life to be, well, life. Writing things down literally keeps me accountable to me. 

The habit tip I utilize monthly, weekly, and daily is to identify my top 3 tasks that will move me forward the most. Some of these are driven by actual deadlines, some of these deadlines are of my own making, and some of them are based on weekly assessment of my business + life and where I have opportunity to grow. Productivity experts agree and would also add that you should include work and life together. 

Here is an example of how this has worked for me. A goal for me later this year is to sell Good Intentions Tomato Juice, my side passion project. It was lovingly brought to my attention that I wasn’t doing much to support this goal I say is so important to me. So I looked at my priorities and my top 3 tasks and decided I needed to add a new habit. Now in my weekly top 3 is to spend an hour researching and acting on what I need to do to legally be able to sell Tomato Juice. This hour doesn’t take away from my other key priorities (mainly content creation, client meetings, nurturing my network, + all the other entrepreneurial hats I wear), and yet it aligns my words with my actions, letting the universe know I mean what I say. 

It may seem small, but by the end of the year I’ll have moved light years ahead of where I was had I continued to do nothing. 

4 steps to gain confidence in your ability to prioritize

Step 1: Dare to Dream

What & why: Daring to dream asks you to know the answer to the following questions. This can change and is meant to as life evolves. So don’t stress too much, just answer as best you can from where you are right now. 

• What are you building towards?
• Where do you ideally want to see yourself 6 months from now? 5 years from now? 20 years from now? 

It’s easier to prioritize every aspect of your life when you know where you’re going, when you’d like to get there, and who you’d like to be + be with along the way. We can’t always control the when, as sometimes the trail curves a bit or the weather gets dicey, but we can control what we say yes and no to along the way.

How to: For this exercise, pick two of the pillars below that are most important to you. Write down the answers to the above questions. 

• Key Pillars of Life:
  • Health
  • Community
  • Career
  • Adventure
  • Money
  • Creative Outlets
  • Home
  • Relationships
  • Mission in the World

Another question I like to ask is, when 80-something year old me is looking back on life with friends and my husband while sitting on my porch what are we talking about? What am I proud of? What makes me smile?

Step 2: Honestly Assess

What & why: Assessing asks you to look honestly at where you are now in comparison to where you’re going from a big picture lens down to the detail of each of the key pillars of your life. 

This is an important step as you’re walking the path to your dreams. Sometimes that means being brutally honest. Maybe you no longer want to go where you’re going or maybe you do but you’re doing all the wrong things to get there. 

How to: Think of the key pillars of your life you listed in step 1. Get out that piece of paper. Write down the answers to these questions next to each one. 

• Where are your actions supporting those dreams? Where are they not?
• Could you do something differently now to shift your progress?
• Seeing this list this way, would you prioritize anything differently this week?

Step 3: Practice Awareness

What & why: Awareness, knowledge or perception of a situation, is where the magic happens in prioritization. In the example of the wolves, they are so tuned into their instinct that they don’t overthink or overanalyze, they just do. 

Heightened self-awareness, situational awareness, & instinctual awareness allow you to get unstuck and act with faith and trust.

How to: Look at the list you created and added to last week. Take a deep breath as you see where you want to go vs. where you are. What’s one thing you’re doing that’s keeping you from your dreams? 

As you go throughout your days and you find yourself wanting to do that thing, practice the pause. Examples of this could be:

• Notice yourself mindlessly reaching for a third portion of a snack. Pause and ask yourself, why? Are you really hungry? Will it help you reach your health dream?
• Not doing anything about your biggest dream. Pause and ask yourself, why are you practicing avoidance? What are you most scared of?

A quick bit of info on the subconscious I referred to in step 3’s email…

Taking this a step further, many of us prioritize based on the past, our patterns and traumas are our subconscious navigator. And yes, studies are finding that our subconscious, of or concerning the part of the mind of which one is not fully aware but which influences one’s actions and feelings, drives 90% of the decisions we make everyday. 

But if you want to move your life forward, you have to prioritize based on where and who you are now + where you desire to go. This is why practicing a couple second pause, as mentioned above, before acting can shift you.

Step 4: Play the Long Game

What & why: There are many quotes on entrepreneurship that go something like, “the only ones that fail are the ones that quit.” This can be applicable to every aspect of life. If your day to day habits are generally aligned with your dreams, you can trust that eventually those dreams will click into place. No matter how frustrating and annoyingly long it takes.

How to: Take another look at that list you made and have been updating since since step 1. Could your day-to-day actions or even weekly actions eventually add up to that outcome? 

No. Ok, that’s pretty normal. What’s one thing you could start doing a few minutes every day or 30 minutes once a week that will eventually get you there? This ties directly to my example I provided in the kickoff newsletter and described on the blog here. 

If you answered yes, celebrate you! And remember to regularly ask yourself if you’re closer to your dreams today than you were this time last year?

Additional tools to support your ability to prioritize:

A great book. Living Forward challenges you to write your obituary first and plan your life based on the legacy you’d love to leave.

Meditation is a critical way I tune into me and hear what I should prioritize for my highest and best, my business, and the world. Below is similar to something I do for myself daily.