By the point that you are reading this, ringing in the New Year is just a memory. You have since gotten back to the daily grind and sunk back into the mundaneness of everyday life. It’s been a whole month since then! Any new year’s resolutions you have set have likely faded in effectiveness, if not disappeared completely. Maybe you’ve given up on setting resolutions altogether. Maybe you avoid setting goals because you’re sick of failing to meet them. Maybe you want 2020 to be a better year, even if you don’t exactly know how to do that.
Friend, I know a lot about failure. I have wrestled against an attention deficit disorder for most of my life, and I have felt like I was failing in one way or another for much of that time. And with failure often comes shame and a desire to hide. I have “hidden” my imperfections more than I like to admit and maybe you have too. It’s not our nature to put them on full display. So announcing a New Year’s resolution on Insta, only to ditch it two weeks later seems like a surefire way to be found out. If you don’t make goals, or quickly forget them, it’s easier not to come face to face with the fact that you didn’t meet them. But what if things were different? What if you could set goals that you knew you could meet? What would it feel like to ring in 2021 having exceeded even your own expectations for all you could accomplish?
I recently heard someone say, “If you think you’ve made it – then dream bigger, trust God for greater things, desire to be someone so much better than you had imagined. When we stop growing, we start dying inside.”
Sometimes I ask myself if I want a mediocre life, or if I want a great life. It might seem like a silly question, but a great life does require sacrifice. So I have to choose if I truly want that. If it’s worth it to me, then I will choose sacrifice and risk every time. The mediocre life requires that you only do what you know, what you’re used to, and you stay in your comfort zone. It doesn’t require dependence on God, it doesn’t require risk, and it doesn’t require a vision. But in the end, a mediocre life is only mediocre. I don’t want that. I want greatness. I want to make a difference. I want to leave a legacy. I want to change lives and I want my life to mean something. What about you?
What do you want?
This is the first question you need to ask yourself when setting goals. I’m serious. Don’t just skim through this article and do nothing. Grab a piece of paper and a pen and write down what you want. This might be a harder question than you expect.
First, think big. What do you want your life to be? Who do you want to become? What do you want to do before you die? Who do you want to impact? If there was nothing in your way, what would your life look like 50 years from now? What about 20 years? What about 10?
If you’re struggling with this question, you’re not alone. Sometimes it’s really hard to know what we want, especially if we don’t regularly ask ourselves that question. I’ve found that this question is especially hard for women to answer. They’re not used to thinking about what they want. They’re often much more focused on the wants and needs of those around them. Either that or they’ve faced huge disappointments before. When you’ve been deeply disappointed, sometimes it’s scary to want things again. If you want to be married, but you’re facing a long season of singleness, it can be terrifying to even acknowledge what you want for fear of never having that desire fulfilled. The same goes for children, careers, life stages, or anything else. For some reason, there’s a shame and embarrassment in acknowledging unfulfilled longings.
But here’s the truth of the matter: you were made to want. Your job is to identify the things you want and go to God honestly with them. It is God’s job to fulfill or not fulfill those things. So there should be no embarrassment if those desires are not met because you’re not the one who’s supposed to meet them anyways. So….WANT things! Want them earnestly. God has placed those desires within you for a reason and he wants you to earnestly seek them. As you trust him with them, the ones that aren’t of him will fade away. Yes, there might even be a few that go unfulfilled for the majority or all of your life, but if you let the fear of that happening keep you from wanting things and pursuing the things you want, you will live a timid and mediocre life. And that’s not where God wants you.
So, what do you want? Write is down. Think big. Think huge. What does greatness look like in your life? Even if you don’t think you can achieve it, write it down. We’ll get to the practicality in a moment, but for now, what’s the vision you have for your life?
Before you move on from this step, there’s a few more things you should write down. What things make you you? What are your passions? What are your talents? What are your strengths? What are the experiences in your life that have shaped you the most? All of these things are part of the equation.
Now, break it down in year increments.
There’s a lot of big things I want, but many of them are not feasible now. Many of them are things that are 10 or even 30 years into the future. So what do I do now?
This is where a lot of people get stuck. Sometimes our goals seem so big that we end up doing nothing because we don’t know how to achieve such big things, or we’re just not able to achieve them in this season of our lives.
The first step is to break your “Wants” down into different categories. Some are things that are very dependent on our season of life. If you want to be married and have kids, but you’re single right now, then that category of “wants” goes in a separate category for a different season of life. If you want to be a missionary one day, but God has called you into a season of preparation right now, then that desire is a “seasonal” one. Those things can be put off to the side until God brings them up again.
Now, look at what’s left. The things that are left should be things that you can be working towards in any season of life, even if you can’t fully achieve them in every season. In the things that are left, your next step is to break them down into year increments. Which ones can you work towards in the next five years? Which ones will be more like 10 or 20 years down the road from where you are now? This exercise helps you gain perspective and breaks the big goals into “now” and “not now” categories.
Make a list of your goals.
Now that you’ve identified a vision for what you want and what that looks like in this season of life, you can write out a list of goals. These goals are more than just repeating where you want to be in 10 years. This is what I like to call thinking backwards. Now that you know where you want to be in 5, 10, or 20 years, you need to think through what it will take to get there. So you have to break it down into manageable goals to get you where you want to go.
Say you want to be a homeowner 5 years from now. That’s not something that’s just gonna happen because you want it. There will be steps you must take to do it. So underneath that big goal, write down the smaller steps. Maybe you need to start saving up money to pay for a house. Maybe you want to get debt free first. Maybe you need to start getting rid of extra clutter so you won’t need to bring it when you move. Start breaking it down into small steps. Does getting debt free sound like too large of a goal? Break it down. What would that require? Maybe you change your budget so you have an extra $20 a week to put towards paying the debt off. Maybe you cancel one of your four subscription services. Maybe you stop using your credit card and only pay in cash. Just keep breaking it down until the list you have in front of you includes a myriad of small, manageable steps that you feel like you could start working on tomorrow.
Even the biggest goals can be broken down. Take my career goal, for example. I want to be a published author and speaker one day. That’s not just something I can apply for and get the job. It’s something I need to work towards and there’s a lot of steps to get there. So I think backwards. Maybe I can’t step into that role right now, but what can I do in this season of life? I can consistently make time in my life to work on my writing. I can make goals of when to post each next blog post. I can work on content curation, platform building, website management, and meaningful engagement. Those are all smaller facets of my big goal that I CAN work on in this season. And even more than that, each one of those smaller facets includes a bunch of tiny manageable steps that I can work on.
Every goal is manageable if you break it down enough.
The thing that often gets us stuck is thinking that a goal of ours is unattainable or too big. When we get too overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, we often just don’t start. Fast forward five years and we haven’t gotten any closer to where we want to go. So break down your goals. And if they still feel overwhelming, break them down more. If part of your goal is unattainable in this season of life, then figure out what you can do now. Maybe you aren’t working your dream job yet. Are there ways you can work on projects in your current job that will build the skillset you will need for your dream job? Are there disciplines you can master now (like self-discipline, dependability, punctuality, innovation, creativity, or teamwork) that will help you in your dream job? Maybe there’s a way you can work your way up the ladder in your current company to build your resume for your dream job. Or maybe you’re working at Starbucks and your job has nothing to do with your eventual goal. Maybe you feel stuck. (Here’s a little secret, though: sometimes those “meaningless” jobs are the best ones. You don’t have to expend a whole lot of mental energy to make someone a cup of coffee, so you can use that same energy to work towards your dream. Make time for your art, your hobbies, your resume building, or your additional training/education when you get home from Starbucks. Making coffee is just your day job.)
But what about…
The biggest thing that gets in the way of reaching our goals is a lack of foresight. This is why we find it really easy to go to the gym for the first two weeks of January, and then stop going altogether after that. We forget to schedule in the obstacles.
So that’s what you gotta do: schedule in the obstacles.
Take a look at each goal you have on your list and every step it takes to get there. What is going to stop you from reaching those goals?
Last year, I decided that one of my goals was to make Christmas cookies for all my neighbors. Making a big goal in the month of December is a dangerous endeavor no matter the goal because December is like the finals week of normal adult life. I knew there would be a million other things vowing for my attention. So I sat down to write down all the things I could foresee getting in the way of me reaching my goal.
- Lack of counter space in the kitchen
- Limited time
- Needing to buy lots of ingredients
The next step was to proactively think of solutions. If I thought of solutions before the problems arose, I could make sure nothing blindsided me and kept me from reaching my goal. So I got creative:
- Buy parchment paper to lay over my dining room table so I can roll out cookies and put cooling racks there
- Chose a date to mark on my calendar that is specifically set aside for cookie baking, and limit my cookies to only 2-3 recipes
- Only choose recipes that are simple to make, have very few ingredients, and won’t overwhelm me
By listing these problems and solutions I was able to limit the scope of my project to only what I knew I could reasonably achieve in the time I had. I avoided being overwhelmed by choosing simple recipes with few ingredients, and I avoided life getting in the way by having a specific time set aside to bake the cookies. Therefore, in one long Saturday afternoon I made over 100 cookies and passed them out to my neighbors.
This type of planning works with all kinds of goals. Make it simple for yourself: plan for the obstacles. This method of planning keeps you in control. Some flexibility may still be required, but the likelihood of an obstacle blindsiding you and completely bulldozing your goal is greatly minimized.
So what is standing in your way? What solutions will you set in place now to overcome those obstacles? Make it practical for yourself.
Track your progress.
This next step becomes extremely simple if you’ve done the prior steps well. If you know what you want, you know when you want to achieve those things, you’ve broken those goals down into a series of tiny manageable steps, and you’ve scheduled in the obstacles, then all that’s left to do is to track your progress.
If tracking your progress makes you feel defeated, then you need to rethink one of the prior steps. Either you need to rethink your timeline or you need to break down your steps more. If you cannot accomplish a step in one sitting, then it might not be small enough. If your steps aren’t small, they may feel too overwhelming. You need small steps so that they are practical, manageable, and trackable.
As you move forward through the next days or weeks, you can ask yourself, “what’s my next tiny step?” And as you accomplish step after step you can track yourself moving closer to achieving your goal.
I once heard a seminar by a woman talking on this very subject. She shared that every person should have a dream. What’s your dream? She then asked us to breakdown our dream into tiny steps that we could do in ten minute increments. No matter how busy we were, it was entirely doable to work on our goal for ten minutes a day. And even though those ten minutes will seem small, by the end of the year we will be 3,640 minutes (or 60 hours) closer to our dream.
Ten minutes. Or fifteen. Or sixty. Whatever the number is, it is practical and trackable. If your goals aren’t trackable, they aren’t specific enough. If your goal is just, “Get healthy,” it’s too abstract to track. How will you know when you’ve achieved it? Instead, maybe your goal could be: “eat a vegetable with every meal” or “be able to do 30 pushups in a row by next January.” Those goals are both practical and trackable.
How do you track your goals? Sometimes I will just print out a free calendar template and check off each day that I accomplish that thing. Other times, I might make a checklist with all my tiny steps and cross them off as I do them. Sometimes I will set aside some time each month to reevaluate how I’m doing and brainstorm for the coming month. Get creative!
Celebrate!
The last phase of making and keeping goals is to celebrate. I don’t just mean celebrate when you’ve reached your big goals. You should also celebrate the little victories. If you have a goal to exercise every day, reward yourself after thirty days of consistency. If you have a goal to read twelve books this year, then celebrate every book you complete! Sometimes celebration just means acknowledging your progress. Other times you can reward yourself with a treat or an incentive. Maybe you go out and buy that dope workout gear after working out for 60 days in a row. Maybe you go get drinks with friends when you pay off one of your loans. Make it fun to achieve steps and goals. Let yourself want the reward more than you dread the struggle.
Thrive.
There you have it. Those are all my tips and tricks to set goals and actually achieve them. I hope this article will help you step out of a cloud of defeat and into a road to truly thriving and accomplishing the things you’ve always wanted to. It’s going to be hard. It will take work. You will need to be intentional with your time and talent. It will require planning and consistency. But I promise it will be worth it. That moment when you complete all of the steps you’ve made and accomplish one of you goals, you will feel on top of the world. Nothing will bring you down because you did it. You wanted it, you pursued it, and you achieved it! You are amazing and strong and your goals are worth investing in so that you can thrive. So get up off your butt, put your phone down, and dream on! You are capable of achieving your goals and God is glorified when you use your time to intentionally pursue the things He has created you for (rather than scrolling through social media).
SO….what’s your next step? Go do it!
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