Goals, Not Resolutions

Welcome to 2007! I've personally entitled 2007 as "The Year Of Abundance," but you're welcome to give it whatever title you like. When I played football in highschool, we often liked to give our season a title or mission statement. Whether it was "Finish Strong" or "Commitment," it was something simple we could put on a t-shirt and wear under our game gear. There is something about being in a locker room putting your pads on and seeing every other guy in there with a t-shirt on that says "No Quit!" I get fired up just thinking back on it and it played a major part in me deciding to give a mission statement/title to my year. I know my fellow blogger, Steve Pavlina has written some wonderful things about goal setting, as have others, so I thought I should at least chime in.

Why do most people fail to maintain their resolutions? There are a number of reasons, but the most prominent is that the resolutions people make are generally too drastic or absolute. "I'm quitting smoking on January 1st" or "I'm going to never eat sweets again as of New Years 2007." I'm not saying these resolutions can't be achieved or maintained, but to make a surface decision without attempting to change the underlying programming causes most people to miss the boat. If you've eaten cupcakes on a weekly basis for the last 10 years, but "in 2007 it's gonna be different!" you might be fooling yourself. The problem isn't necessarily the cupcake eating, but what incites you to want to eat the cupcakes in the first place. If it's your stress or comfort food, you need to set goals to lessen the things that cause you stress, or to find positive alternatives to dealing with your stress. Shad Helmstetter covers this tremendously in his book, "What To Say When You Talk To Yourself." He says to imagine all the furniture in your house being your previous negative thoughts. You move it all out, but the only way to keep from having to go get that comfortable sofa, is to replace it with healthier programming.

The way I've broken my goals down may be a little different than others, but it's a way that I see as being effective for me, which is definitely important if I expect to actually feel like I can accomplish them. When I was heavy into bodybuilding (and that time will come again, once free from a day job,) I routinely built my workout around four major muscle movements: squats, bench press, deadlifts, and military press. Those heavy, multijoint movements had a greater effect on multiple areas of my body than any other exercise and so I used those as the baseline and everything else fit in appropriately around them. My goal setting for 2007 is the same way. My four areas for 2007 include: spiritual, family/relationships, health, and financial. These are four pillars that when I strengthen, will help everything else fall into place. Overtraining one over the others will likely cause atrophy in the neglected area.

Understand, the goal is not necessarily to live my life in balance when it comes to my time. I believe that to become successful, you have to live an unbalanced life to an extent in terms of where you spend your time. My goal is to use the time I spend in each area more efficiently and in ways that create a greater result. I'll give you a couple general examples in a moment, but to kick things off, I even wrote a basic mission statement:

"To maintain a pure and single focus on putting into practice methods and ideologies that will improve not only my spiritual, family, health and financial life, but also the lives around me. "

Here are a couple basic examples of the goals that I set:

Spiritual: Develop education in the word as a backdrop of teaching opportunities.

Family: Create more consistency in staying in contact with my parents.

Finance: Look for better and simpler ways to track finances.

Health: Keep a better record of your daily food intake.

Now, I understand that these can be misconstrued as general goals. They were simply an outline of areas that I wanted to become more detailed with. However, just writing that I wanted to be more consistent in staying in touch with my parents has upped the number of times we've spoken since the New Year. I often times get so caught up with helping people that are part of my business, that I can look past maintaining that basic contact just to say hello.

When it comes to health. I do get more specific with weight goals and how I plan to achieve them. I've dropped 7lb. in the first week of January and I couldn't be more excited about being in better shape. For the most part, my weight has a tendency to yo-yo when I don't focus on what and when I'm eating. We always think slipping a sweet in here and there doesn't hurt. But if "here" is Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday and "there" is Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday, we're not really "slipping" anything. It's part of our diet.

For finances, I happen to be a person that dreads using tools like Quicken. I'm the first guy to extoll the virtues of it. I just hate to take the time to do it. The thing is, when I use it, I'm so much more on top of our finances. The issue isn't using the tool. The issue is setting aside the time. The greater detail of my financial goals covers setting aside time (where, when and how much) to analyze and plan our finances.

As far as my spirituality is concerned, I've become more and more a student of the teachings of the Bible and before the secularists go running away, here me out. The goal is to learn more on how to treat the book as a success manual. John Maxwell has a book called the Leadership Bible. I've heard two of my mentors talk about it and I'm reading it this year. Regardless of your faith (or lack of faith,) there are pliable, time-tested teachings on success in the Bible. I just want to learn how to use them better.

So there you have it. An inside look at some of my goals, not resolutions for 2007. What have you decided to turn around or improve on this year?