How you use your weekends determines how your week ahead will go. In other words, you cannot have a great week if you don’t prepare for it.

So, how do you prepare for your week?

You do it over the weekend. Your weekends’ experience should be refreshing and re-energizing. Don’t let your weekends be energy drawing, as it happens to a lot of people.

You make your weekend’s experience refreshing and re-energizing by following the 3 steps I’m describing below.  

Make Rest Your Priority

After a long and busy week, we all want to rest. But, instead of rejuvenating ourselves over the weekend, we get sometimes even more tired.

Rest here has to primarily do with sleep. The Harvard Medical School argues that sleep is beneficial for your health. Lack of it creates health problems such as weight gain, high blood pressure, and a decrease in the immune system’s power.

According to research, sleep helps with learning and memory, metabolism and weight, safety, mood, cardiovascular health (heart) and disease. 

Making rest through sleep as your priority is therefore proven to be very beneficial for anyone. You are therefore able to experience the following:

• You are emotionally stable. You are aware of your own feelings as well as those of others around you.
• You are able to proactively handle any situation throughout the week.
• You are eventually more productive in what you do. 

Re-Center Yourself

To recenter is to bring and pull yourself back to the core of who you are.

In order to recenter, you need to have a personal mission statement. This is what defines your everyday values and what you stand for in life. It’s your anchor. Every one needs a personal mission statement.

My personal mission statement is “to help people find clarity and balance so that they can succeed at everything they do at work or in life.”

I fulfill it through serving as a Pastor, blogging and soon coaching people.

A personal mission statement is a translation of your calling in life into what you do now in your current living context. In other words, a mission statement evolves over time in terms of how it translates in the specific stages of your life. 

Everything you do throughout the week is done through the lens of your personal mission statement. 

In case you don’t have a personal mission statement, you could start reading “How to Develop Your Personal Mission Statement” by Stephen R. Covey. This resource is in Kindle format.

You can also read How “To Write A Personal Mission Statement In 8 Steps“ by Barrie Davenport. She offers 5 personal mission statement samples that can be helpful to you. 

Remember though that a personal mission statement is grounded in relationships. Who you are and what you do should be around people and how you can make them better.

A place to start from is your family, then your friends and community where you live. To re-center is therefore about reconnecting with people who are dear to you. 

Make Time To Re-focus

A personal mission statement is the only thing that can help you effectively re-focus.

The reality of life is that you had great moments this week. You also had frustrations because of what had happened to you. Your experience, in brief, about this week wasn’t 100% awesome.

At some point, you might have even wondered why you’re here on earth. You questioned your work, career or anything you did this week.

Your mission statement is what will help you re-focus. A better time to do it is over the weekend. This is the only time you can refresh and re-energize yourself.

Here are 3 things that can help you do just that:

1. Be clear about your priorities for the following week. Decide on what you should do and how what you do will affect people that are most dear to you.

My personal order of priority goes as follows: God, family, church (people), work (ministry), community, etc. My days throughout the week have therefore to follow that order.

These are based on the key relationships every human being should have. I discuss more about this in this post, “3 Steps To Help You Be Your Best.“ 

2. Out of the priorities you have written down, develop tasks that will help you meet them during the week.

On a piece of paper or using your device (computer, smart phone or tablet), write your priorities and how you will accomplish tasks under each one of them.

In case you have not been journaling, you can easily start one today. 

3. Keep what you have written down in front of you throughout the week. Have your journal always with you. Review it as often as you can.  

If you’re doing this for your first time, the whole thing may be a challenge. But, when you do it once, twice or more, you will get better at it and grow.

Rest, re-focus and re-center are the three primary things to do over the weekend in order to be refreshed and re-energized for the week ahead! 

How do you make your weekends’ experience great for you and your family? How do you prepare for the week? Leave your comment in the box below.