Goal Setting: New Year Madness

How does it make you feel? What goes through your mind?

Do you enjoy setting goals? Do you dread setting goals?

Do you do anything to keep from having to think about, talk about or write down your goals?

Depending on the type of person you are, goals can be helpful or hurtful. They can help direct your energy toward an accomplishment you’d like to experience or they can make you feel all tied up in knots.

For me, it’s the latter. I’ve never understood them. I’ve never enjoyed doing them. I’ve never found them useful and I certainly don’t judge my success as a living, breathing, human being by them. But many people do.

Now don’t get me wrong, I DO actually sit down fairly regularly and think about what I’d like for myself, my business, etc. I write these thing down and even look back over them on a fairly regular basis. After all, if Stanford University says that it takes writing goals down on a regular basis in order for them to come true, well, by all means, let’s write them down! 🙂

The thing is, for me, they don’t drive me. For other people that I know, they are indeed the driver. These goal-oriented people strive each day to reach closer to their goals. It seems to give them a sense of purpose each day. But for people who don’t ‘get’ the whole goal thing, there is another way.

First, you have to understand that if you’re not a goal-oriented, goal-centered person, you’re probably what I call a process-oriented, process-centered person. You love the process of life, you enjoy learning and doing and creating and noticing and smelling and, well, you get the idea. And you know which kind of person you are just by reading these words.

Regardless of which type of person you are relative to goals and goal setting, I’m going to invite you to try a different process this year.

All Important Life Question

Instead of setting goals this year, ask yourself one simple question:

Do you want to DO the following year like you’ve done this year
or would you like to do the coming year differently?

If you DO want the next year to be like the last, then proceed to do things like you did them last year. And if this is your choice, great work knowing that you like what, and how, you’re doing life and all that it entails.

If you DO NOT want to do next year like the last one, well, you have a few steps to take. And the first step is another question:

What DO you want to be doing next year?

For many people, this simple question can bring up a myriad of emotions:

• Fear
• Anxiety
• Stress (which Eckert Tolle says is simply not wanting to be where you are)
• Dread
• Overwhelm
• Or any number of other emotions.

Why the emotions? Because we don’t LIKE goals. We don’t UNDERSTAND goals. In high school and college, when my teachers came in and said we were going to learn how to set short and long-term goals, I just rolled my eyes and said, under my breath, “Oh, goody. Here we go again with the goals.”

I’d do the activity but I’d never really DO the activity. Even back then my gut told me that setting goals weren’t important FOR ME. But they are for others.

Answering the first question:

For me, I have answered the main question above, “No, I want to do life differently next year.”

Answer the second questions:

I want more movement. I want to be outside more. I want to swim in the ocean (a warm ocean). I want to write more and create more. I want to do more of what makes people happy (make gluten-free cookies and muffins, believe it or not:-).

OK, that’s all for now.

How will YOU answer the question? Just something else to think about this holiday season. I wish you all of the happiness you can be aware of between the spaces of everything going on.