Personal Development: Your Goals
It’s the very beginning of the year, and during this time, people usually think about their new year’s resolutions or set some kind of goals for themselves so they have the entire year to achieve them. Dive into the new year with great challenges and goals but don’t overdo your list. When you have set too many resolutions and goals, it makes it seem nearly impossible, and you will tend to find yourself feeling overwhelmed with what you have to do, instead of feeling invigorated and excited about working on these goals.
I have some advice. Choose no more than 3 goals. I think 3 goals is a good number but choosing one, ginormous goal would be great as well. For example, I have a ginormous goal that will, no doubt, take more than one year but it’s a goal that with little steps, will help me achieve the big goal. I’ll be able to look back at the end of the year and see what I’ve done to achieve my huge goal. What is it? Well. I want to be able to live a sustainable life; but more importantly: My larger-than-life goal is to be completely self-sufficient. Providing my own food, living off the land, so to speak, but also, live a “green” life. That is huge, right? I know!
However big my goal is, it doesn’t overwhelm me, thankfully, in fact I am very happy to work on it constantly. I’m sure it’ll be a while before I’m “off-grid,” meaning being completely independent of energy companies (electricity, natural gas heating, water) but it’s a goal I really want to achieve at some point soon.
The little goals are important too, so for some of you, you will want to stick to smaller ones like getting in better shape, losing some weight, working on your own personal development (staying calm instead of exploding, sharing more, being kind as much as possible (instead of never! ;-)), helping your community, showing more compassion toward others, etc.) Those are excellent goals, so don’t forget those either, but when you have an enormous goal set for the year, you know that you will think of that daily, then work on it whenever possible. It can only happen when it’s on your mind, so a good way to remember is to have a message that you’ll always see every day. A chalkboard or post-it note on the frig works! Even if you don’t do a thing about it that day, that’s ok, at least you will be reminded of your goal.
If huge goals like that aren’t your style, that’s fine. For instance, if I break down my goal into little ones and make a priority list, then I can go from there and I’ll have actual specifics to work with. Mini-goals could be: harvest the rain water, then set up a water filtering system; or learn more about vegetable gardening, or get (or build) a greenhouse, start composting to be able to use that in the garden later. Stuff like that.
The most important thing is to make your goals clear, so there’s no room for murkiness. Saying, “I want to lose weight for the new year” is not that clear unless you want to be vague like that. If you lose one pound by the end of the year and are happy with that, you go. However, a better goal would be, “I want to lose 15 pounds by the end of the year.” That’s very precise and do-able, see?
Make clear goals for yourself and be excited about achieving them.
February 5th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Two other ways to remind yourself: write a future dated journal entry for each goal–how good will it feel to achieve it, how will your life be better? And make a collage of your goals to gaze upon to remind yourself of them. (I teach journaling classes, and manifestation is a very popular topic)