Today is the end of the first quarter of 2015 and I am so
excited! This has been an amazing year
already and I can’t wait to see what happens for the rest of it….
Last week Terri’s Tuesday Tip was about vision and this week
is about GOALS! Over the last week, I had
two different discussions about goals and it challenged me to rethink what are
goals, why do we have them, how to create them and to have a personal “status
update” since it is the end of the first quarter.
According to dictionary.com, a goal is:
- something that you are trying to do or achieve
- the end toward which effort is directed: aim
When I thought back to how I started writing goals and how I
now create my yearly goals, I thought back to the first time I remember
creating a goal. I was in my early 20s
and I decided to read a certain number of pages in a year. My goal was 10,000 and I read over 15,000 pages
that year. At that time in my life, I
worked at a bank and would spend my evenings reading. That goal propelled me to increase my
vocabulary, improve my reading comprehension and prepared me to return to
college to finish my degree.
Today, I create goals based on the vision I have for my life
and that vision has grown over the years.
The first true vision (career dream) I had for my life I discovered at
19 as I was running and it is now coming true. With the vision that is every growing for my
life and as I continue to dream bigger dreams, I begin each year (or start at
the end of the previous year) to develop my goals to help me obtain the overall
vision for my life.
When creating goals, I recommend developing S.M.A.R.T.
goals, which are Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and provide a
Timetable for accomplishing. I create my
goals in the areas of the 6 Fs: faith, family, friends, finance, future and
fitness.
With it being the end of the first quarter, I did a “status
update” on how I was doing for 2015.
Here are some of the questions I asked myself:
- How am I doing on this goal?
- Why do I have this goal?
- Do I still need this goal with the new dreams and inspirations that are developing in 2015?
- How will this goal help me accomplish my long term goal?
- How will this goal help me accomplish the vision I have for my life?
- How will this goal help me fulfill the purpose statement that I created for my life?
When I reviewed my goals, I was surprised by something. I wrote a goal and did not follow my own
recommendation of being specific. The
goal was to create an awesome presentation for Toastmasters, which when I wrote
the goal I had been asked to speak at a Toastmaster conference in May. In early January, I had decided not to speak
because some other major things came up.
However, I recently competed in the Regional Toastmaster Speech Contest and
it was an awesome speech and I know I affected people’s lives with the speech
as it also affected my life. When I
reviewed my goals, I first thought I was not going to accomplish the goal, but
now I see that the goal was for a different outcome that I did not see
yet.
I want to encourage each and every one of you to create
goals, dream big and have a BIG vision for your life. There is no one right way to write goals, dream big or
develop a vision for your life. The best part of this whole process is
summarized in this quote:
What
you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by
achieving your goals. - Henry
David Thoreau
