Goals
New Year – New You? Or True You?
I admit it. There have been many years in which I vowed to be someone different, starting January 1st. Some
I admit it. There have been many years in which I vowed to be someone different, starting January 1st. Some
I have a love/hate relationship with new year’s traditions. I love the imagery of leaving the old behind and planning
There are some of us who are a bit more restless than most. Who are searching for something new and
I am a big advocate of working forward rather than backward. I’ve transformed my life into one of meaning, fulfillment, and joy by using several methods of envisioning what I wanted to create in my life.
As such, I’ve journaled, created vision boards, set HEART goals, and created accountability systems to ensure that I acted unfailingly on those dreams. And, it’s worked.
Yet, as powerful as those techniques are, none are nearly as amazing as a way of envisioning (and then creating) a better future than one I learned from Joanna Taft, director of the Harrison Center for the Arts and visionary community leader.
Her question is this. Rather than reenact, why not pre-enact?
Learn more about pre-enacting by reading the full post.
There are times in life we get stuck. We dislike where we are. It might be in our career or in a relationship or in a specific geography. We might not like our current employer, boss or customers, yet we don’t see any other options.
I’ve been there – and I have had plenty of conversations with people who are stuck and want help getting unstuck. What I’ve noticed is that there is a consistent pattern that accompanies the “getting stuck” times both with me and with others.
The good news? You can learn how to break this pattern and move forward when you are feeling stuck.
It’s that time of the year. Perhaps not the “most wonderful time of the year”, but the time of the year that businesses and nonprofits alike go through the process of strategic planning and goal alignment. The notion is this: direction gets set at the top, then is cascaded down the organization through a goal alignment and setting process.
Today, I’m not going to quibble with the process. I’m going to attempt to demystify the language, as I observe much head scratching (and some of it’s my own) when asked to participate in the process. What is an objective? How does it differ from a goal? Should I have a mission? A vision? And when someone tells me I should be more strategic, what do they mean?
Common wisdom advises us to “ask a busy person” when you have something that needs done. I’m not sure if this is because busy people have a way to get organized and just get things done or if it is because really busy people have not mastered the art of saying no.
Either way, as a busy person, I find myself asked to take on a variety of roles, tasks, and causes. More often than not, I say yes.
At times the yes serves me well. I do good work, enjoy the work I do, and meet amazing people. And at other times, the yes undermines my focus, well-being, and energy.
So, when the need arose to teach a group how to “say no gracefully” – I said YES! Because like usual, I knew that by teaching, I might learn. And indeed, that is the case.
Let me share some of the highlights of the retreat workshop and a few of the techniques, for I suspect I am not the only one who says yes too often.
Money. Cold hard cash. Moolah. We strive for it, obsess about it, and work hard for it.
We generally make money the primary measuring stick for so many things – value, importance, effort, ease. In my work as a director of Indiana Voice of Women, we’ve begun exploring how to expand beyond using money as a measuring stick. Based on the work of Ethan Roland and Gregory Landau, we are framing our resource discussions around eight forms of currency.
So, I’m curious. What might happen if you measured worth based on these eight forms of currency instead of just one?
Lately I’ve been wondering if SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based) goals only represent a tiny part of what really matters, what really makes a difference, what really makes for a life worth living. For I’ve seen what happens when we create SMART goals, especially when we are going to be measured (and rewarded) for them in a work setting. We think small – remember they must be achievable. We divide our work into small fragments, losing sight of the overarching purpose. We document the doable into a tiny time box.
I wonder what would happen if we also created HEART goals, ones that are: Holistic, Enduring, Aspirational, Really matter, and Timeless.
The reason SMART goals are effective is that they provide a way to break big things into smaller pieces that can be measured. However, you have to know what the BIG thing is. My suggestion: start with a HEART goal and then, and only then, create SMART goals in support of it.
Some examples …
The idea of having less, doing less, and managing less, runs contrary to our consumer-based market economy. Yet as Henry David Thoreau discovered at Walden Pond, it can be a marvelous thing. It can free us up for more important things. To relax. To breathe. To do the things that really matter.
Yet many of us just don’t know what to shed or how to begin. We’ve fine-tuned and socially encouraged our “more” mentality – and spent scant energy on the reverse. So in today’s post I’m providing you some specific thought starters in four categories you might consider shedding. This is not an all-inclusive list, but merely a start. I’m only going to hint at the HOW to do this… but know that you’ll find ample on-line details about purging these items from your life.
I’ve listed four categories you might consider: things, tasks, thoughts, and toxic relationships. For each category, I’ve provided three suggestions. That gives you a starting point of 12 places you might begin to shed. …
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