-What will happen if I don’t accomplish this goal?
Last year, my private goal – the one I accomplished – was centered around my relationship with my husband and my relationship with my kids. I needed to strengthen my family relationships.
If I didn’t, my family would suffer. My marriage would crumble, and that was unacceptable to me.
My kids, specificially Z, J, and K are getting older, they aren’t little kids anymore. And I needed to strengthen our relationship as we move into the older tween and teen years. I was unwilling to risk “losing” my children because they had moved on, but our relationship hadn’t.
That was my why. That is why my other three big goals did not get accomplished, because the “why” I had for them was not as large and as important to me as this one goal’s “why”.
So, when you look at your goals for this year, for this month, or even this day, ask your self “Why” and “What will happen if I don’t accomplish this goal?”
Write down in positive terms how your life will be different when you accomplish your goal. Hold it in your mind. Re-read it periodically. Filter your decisions through it.
Whatever you focus on, grows. So focus on the positive, focus on what you can accomplish, and do it.
Now that the hype of New Year’s is over and the kids are back to their activities and schoolwork, let’s take another look at goal setting and more specifically the goal setting process.
Goals are different than new year’s resolutions. Goals are concrete, measureable, realistic, and if done properly come with a plan of action. Goals create visual and mental targets to hit. It’s hard to get somewhere if you don’t have a destination clearly in mind. Goals provide that destination, while your plan of action gives you the map to get there.
One of the first steps in my goal setting process, whether I’m setting personal or professional goals for myself or educational goals for the kids, is to take a look at the previous year.
I’m not one to dwell a lot on what’s happened in the past. It’s not productive towards moving forward. I learn from it, make adjustments, and draw a line in the sand and move on. But once a year, I look back on the previous year with three objectives in mind:
to determine what progress I did make and celebrate it
to identify one thing that needs to change the most going into the next year.
Beating ourselves up over missed goals is not productive. Just because we missed our timeline doesn’t mean we missed our goal, we can take a look at the progress we made and see how very far we’ve come and how much closer we are to the goal than we were a year ago, and we can celebrate that.
For example, last year I publically shared three BIG goals that I had for the year: debt free, fit & healthy, and an income goal for my business. None of those goals were fully reached; they are still in progress.
But when I look back, I see the thousands and thousands of dollars in debt that we paid off, bringing us closer to debt free. While I strugged with new health challenges this year, I made significant progress towards my goal of being a fit & healthy mommy. Health has to come from inside, before it can be reflected outwardly.
Professionally, the income goal wasn’t hit, and yet the foundation was laid. I made major changes in my business last year and crossed off most of my action plan for the year. When I mapped out what my business currently looks like and what assets I have in place through steady progress last year, I find myself in a much stronger position to make that income goal a reality.
Now it would be easy to look at these three big goals and say, “didn’t make it, so I’m not going to.” and give up. But that would be a waste of all that progress. AND… it’s not the full picture.
Because I had one thing, one goal last year that was the most important. I kept it private, but filtered ALL my decisions about how I was going to spend my time and place my focus through it. It was about relationships – specifically my marriage and my relationships with my children.
To me, it doesn’t matter if I hit the other goals if my marriage suffers or my relationship with my kids suffers. Dont’ get me wrong, I have put work and income before them before and the price was WAYYYY too high. This last year I wanted to continue to repair and strengthen my relationship with my husband and invest into that relationship, and I wanted the kids to know that they were just as, or even more important than the other things going on in my life.
And in that area, I totally succeeded. Goal was reached. And that is the best success of all.
By taking a look at progress made during the year, I can now set forth goals for the coming year, and identify the one thing that I need to focus on to balance out my energy and focus for the coming year.
If you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to take a look at all you accomplished last year. Yeah, stuff happened, but you made progress. Identify it, Celebrate it, …. and let go of what didn’t happen. Let’s focus on what did, and what’s coming in the next year
I believe in you!
…Shannon
P.S. this works wonderfully for setting educational goals for the kids too.
A new year. A fresh start. And all over the globe people are making new year’s resolutions. Full of hope and promise, millions will spouting about what they want to do in the coming year: quit smoking, lose weight, write a book, start a business. Whatever it might be, new year’s resolutions are set with the best of intentions, and I commend that. But I won’t be joining in.
Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely things that I want to accomplish in the coming year. And last year, I set forth the year with my own list of things to accomplish. But they aren’t New Year’s Resolutions. They are part of a bigger plan – my personal vision for success – and part of a specific strategy and set of goals I’d like to accomplish.
You see, New Years Resolutions are all well and good, and are usually set with the utmost intention to meet them. But yet, in 6 weeks most people will give up and say they tried and that’s it, maybe next year. And in 4 months, the vast majority of people have abandoned their resolution.
I don’t know about you, but that’s not what I want, for me, for my family, and for my friends, clients, and readers. Each year I want to make progress towards becoming better, towards becoming the person that God has laid on my heart to become. And I wish that for you too.
This year, instead of making a new year’s resolution, map out who, in your heart, you want to be in the key areas of your life. And then pick one thing to work on – just one – that is your most important focus for the year. Then figure out what you need to do to improve in that one area, map it out.
And don’t give up. Success isn’t about perfection, arriving, or getting it right all the time, it’s about moving forward and growing into who you are meant to be, in whatever way that means for you.
Just remember, you matter – and you matter to more people than you realize. This can be your best year ever. Cast your vision of success and work towards it. Believe in yourself, the dream in your heart, and have faith. You can accomplish amazing things with God’s help and the willingness to keep moving forward.
Now, I have to confess, most of the time I’m not doing some big ole process here. This is usually done in my journal or in my planner. This year I’m using an organizer, and I’ve found that I have the need to add new sections for goals that I’ve set that I keep coming back to, to refine the action plan. But last year, this was just done in my journal book.
I don’t do this on the computer usually. Mostly because I think differently on the computer than I do in writing. I’m not a linear thinker and I really just like to map things out visually and write in the margins. And I like being able to tweak and plan anywhere I happen to be.
Basically what I do is focus on one goal at a time (and remember, I limit the number of goals I have at any one time so I can really get them done), and map out what it takes to achieve the goal.
Sometimes it’s really simple. For example, during a rough patch in my marriage I was dealing with a lot of negative self-talk about my husband. Not productive. And definitely not helping me reach my vision as a wife.
With prayer and reminders that I need to work on myself instead of being critical of my husband, I set a goal to make sure I came up with at least one positive thing that my hubby did each day and thank him for it.
As an action plan, all I needed was to make a conscious effort to every day 1) recognize one positive thing that he did or said and 2) make a conscious effort to thank him for it (either via email or in person), and 3) when something negative comes into my head, to make a conscious decision to replace it with a positive.
That’s it. that’s all I needed to do to meet my goal. It was actionable, measureable, and it worked.
Sometimes my action plans are bigger. For example, we have a really big goal to pay off all of our debt by the end of 2010. To get to this goal, I’ve had to map out a much, much larger action plan.
I need small, measureable action steps, with points for victory. It’s just too overwhelming to look at that debt number. But when I mapped out the action plan, and saw how once certain small points were met things would move so much faster, it was much easier to wrap my mind around the fact that we could really achieve the goal.
It’s easier for me to claim victory at the small points, knowing that each small step achieved is helping achieve the larger, greater goal, and ultimately moving me closer to that vision.
So, the point of casting a vision for me is to understand where I want to be, for if I know where I want to be, I can work with God’s help to get there. But if I don’t know where I’m going, then I can’t complain that I’m not where I want to be.
Hope this series resonates with you in some way. If you are up to the task, I encourage you to cast your own vision, on paper (that’s key), for the different roles you have in your life. You don’t have to share them with anyone (this is the first time I’ve ever shared mine).
By the very nature of thinking through, praying about, and writing down who you want to be in these different roles you have, setting goals, creating actions plans, and working those plans, you have much better chance of growing into that person.
In this series, I’ve been sharing this concept of casting a vision. This isn’t a new concept, in fact you may have already done this for aspects of your life, I know I had, especially in the professional areas. Even the bible specially gives instruction to write down a vision (Habakkuk 2:2).
But the difference here is to cast your vision for all the different roles you have in your life, not just one aspect. If you haven’t already read how I’ve done this, here are the previous articles in the series:
Previously, I shared, as an example, my vision for myself. In some of the roles, I’m further along than in others. My house is still cluttered and often messy. But it’s improved over four years ago. As a professional, I’ve been blessed to be continually working, and my clients keep coming back.As a person I’m still working on being healthy, but I’m making progress. As a wife, I’m doing a much better job now than I was four years ago.
I’m still growing and I still need to look at this vision every year and pray asking for guidance. I pick out areas that I need to work on and make them my focus.
For me, I have to choose small, manageable, measureable goals. I can’t just say I want to be healthy or I want a clean, presentable house. I have to create measurable, achievable goals, and work toward them.
For example, last year, my health goals were to move every day and to eat breakfast every day.Did I do that? Not every day, but those goals were constantly in my mind. I measured myself against them.
What I’ve learned is that I need to break things up into small pieces, to allow for celebration of small victories, at achievable milestones. If I don’t, it’s too easy to let the goal slip away, to give up, or have to spend more energy filtering self-talk junk. None of which is productive.
I’ve also learned that I’m not super-human, super-mom, or super-anything. I just can’t do all things. I have to say “no” to things that I might really want to do, but don’t fall into the scope of my reality at this time. I also have to only choose one or two areas where I am going to focus my attention, and set goals there. Too many goals in too many areas is, for me, a recipe for failure.
Tomorrow I’ll share how I take the vision and goals and turn them into action plans.
Until then, if you haven’t already done so, cast your vision. Then I encourage you to take a look at your existing goals and see how they map against your vision. If you haven’t set goals for the new year yet, I encourage you to do so. Keep them simple, specific, and measurable. And write them down!! You’ll improve your chances of achieving your goals and your vision if you do so.
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