Let’s be honest – how many times have you said to yourself, “I know I need to do this, but I really can’t be bothered”? Your energy is telling you something! You may think you need to do that activity because you set yourself a goal to complete it, but if you’re addressing the wrong goal, not only does the strategy you develop to achieve it not feel right, you’re wasting precious energy.

Mindful goal-setting helps you discover your true goals. When you know your true goals, the strategy comes together easily and you just work the plan without having to remind yourself, “Why am I doing this again?”.

First, let’s agree that setting goals is important. After all, if you don’t know where you’re going, you won’t know how you’re going to get there (and there’s no guarantee you’ll get there). Doesn’t it make sense then to make sure the goals you set are the right goals? It’s easy to automatically carry goals over year-on-year in the same way that you carry old tasks over onto a new to-do list. Nor do we regularly question whether we still want the same things out of life. But we change as we grow, derailing events can come out of left-field, and therefore our priorities change as well. So you owe it to yourself to make sure those goals are still relevant, that they are still your “true north”.

January is a great time of year to do this.

This is a simplified version of an exercise I do with my clients:

1. Begin by reviewing your values – these could relate to how you interact with people, what you give priority to, what’s important to you.
2. Next, choose a major long-term goal – this could be in relation to your business, your family, or your personal development. Work with only one major goal at a time.
3. Now the fun part – you get to imagine what you will have done to achieve that goal and then create a plan around that imagining. Think in terms of steps – intermediate steps and short-term steps.
   
4. Having done that, be objectively critical as you review the plan for relevance. Do the intermediate and short-term steps logically flow from the long-term goal? Do they actively contribute to achieving the long-term goal? If they don’t, ditch them.

If you do this exercise, I’d love to hear your experience – was it easy? Difficult? Eye-opening?

More organizing and productivity tips at https://www.MindfulOrganizing.NET/blog

Be great!

Ellia