Terri's Tuesday Tip of the Week - March 31st

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible. - Tony Robbins

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