I talked about Periscope yesterday, and one of my favorite “scopers” to watch is Bethany Boring. She has such an inspirational story, and her injection of positivity is a great way to end my day. Last night she talked about goals, and it really got me to thinking.
I have tons of goals, both personal and professional. I am a planner, and very goal driven, so I like to know where I am going and how I am going to get there. But more often than not, I become overwhelmed, and my goals crawl off somewhere to die, while I remain in the land of just trying to get through the day.
We know that writing goals down is important. A 1979 Harvard study showed that those who write down their goals are as much as 97% more likely to achieve them! But for me, writing them down wasn’t the problem.
I have lots of goals. And that is the problem. I have so many goals, in so many different areas of my life, I am overwhelmed and just stop trying to achieve any of them. By narrowing it down to one or two major goals, I will be able to work towards them with laser focus. And often, those bigger goals encapsulate a lot of other areas of my life I would like to work on.
Why do I want to achieve these goals? As Bethany reminded me, your why is what motivates you to action to achieve those goals. The big goal that I immediately thought of is buying a house. Within the next few years we not only want to buy our first house, but hopefully the one we are currently living in.
As most of you know, we lost almost everything in a fire in January. After a month of living in a hotel, we moved back into our apartment only to discover they had taken the insurance money and ran, and not properly repaired the damage. After another month of fighting with the management company, and total uncertainty about where we were going to go, God provided us with the house we are in now. It has been a huge blessing to us, and is far more than we could have imagined ourselves.
That is a pretty big why! After a season of loss and uncertainty, we want security, permanency, and we want our home to be a tool that the Lord can use, not a burden that saps spiritually and emotionally.
This big goal also covers smaller goals, like getting our finances in order, becoming less wasteful, and living more minimally. My husband and I both agreed on a few steps we are going to take together to start working towards this goal.
- Track our progress visually
We already discussed the importance of writing goals down, but my husband and I are taking it a step farther and making a visual chart. Whether your goal is to pay down debt, lose weight, or buy a house, being able to see your progress is not only motivating, it will keep both of us in the loop and on the same page. We will hang the chart somewhere we both see daily.
2. Unity
Either we are both for this, or we are against it. This can’t be me wanting to buy a house and nagging him to save money, we have to both want it. Not only will this strengthen our marriage, it will help us reach our goal faster and give us built in accountability.
3. No Excuses
We have set goals in the past and failed miserably because, well, we found excuses to fail. I’ll just spend extra money this ONE time turns into a lot of times, and moves us farther away from our goal. I have started asking myself, would I rather have this purse/pen/book, or would I rather own a house?
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