LONG POST ALERT!!!
It’s that time of year where many people bring up New Year’s Resolutions and diet plans.
At the beginning of 2018, I informally put together a mental catalogue of things I wanted to accomplish by the end of the year. It was a loose projection that worked at times and didn’t at others. By the end of 2018 I had accomplished a lot but it always seems like it’s not enough, or that I’m not where I want, or need, to be.
In the beginning of 2019 my friend and I met for a goals meeting with a few other women to brainstorm new goals and how to go about achieving them. It was such an amazing experience and I really do recommend it to anyone who has ever considered putting together a New Year’s Resolution. A meeting about your goals between peers and business associates is such a fulfilling experience. It opens up the dialogue to include challenges faced by others as well as the all-important advice they sprinkle throughout the examination of their learning experiences.
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We met twice and then were not able to meet again after that, because we were all busy trying to get them goals! Anyways, here are a few of my take-aways from this experience.
1) By creating a group event/meeting, it is easier for most people to dedicate the time necessary to tackle the concept. A discussion about goals can also be innovative and inspiring. For me, having a more formal meeting planned forced me to focus on the task, and taught me that official or formal set plans help me more than last-minute coffee plans or trying to do everything in the “spur of the moment” and then forgetting important details later. It was also inspiring to hear what kinds of goals others had and how influential certain aspects of their planning can be.
2) My friend came prepared to the meeting with some materials she recently got her hands on at a leadership conference she attended. In her take-away from the event, she found an activity that requires one to break down how time is utilized weekly and then daily. This was a huge eye-opener for me, who had very little time to myself and acknowledged how unhealthy that was. It later prompted me to realign my work hours at a part-time job through a formal process. It also helped me realize how necessary it was for me to take a step back once I did get to a point where my lack of free time was physically causing me harm.
3) Another member of the group specialized in reading personality types and how they affect your work ethic and ability to learn, among other important facets. She explained to us that certain people work best under specific conditions that others would struggle in. She also informed me of the learning pattern associated with my personality type. This helped me understand my past struggles, but gave me the wisdom to recognize what I needed in the future as well. For example, my learning process is typically referred to as a “plateau” learning curve. This essentially means that I can pick up on learning new concepts rather quickly, but once I meet a specific mark this changes and the learning is slow until I progress to another point of rapid learning. There are many different reasons why this may occur (interest and focus among them) but once the plateau period passes, rapid learning is the norm again. I basically learned that if I still maintain interest in a topic it benefits me to keep studying it until another rapid learning period occurs.
4) Overall, it’s almost cathartic to put together goals and track the progress of completing them throughout the year. 10/10 highly recommend.
Below are the goals I’ve created fro myself from 2018 through 2021. Notice how some goals in recent years were building blocks to support future goals. Having this multi-dimensional approach to goals is a very good way to executing them.
The key to this success is the mindset you create for yourself. Find out what you want, then work backwards.
For example, in the summer of 2016 I moved out of my parents’ house and found my own apartment. This was a goal I was working toward since the beginning of 2015. It took a year and a half but a lot had to happen before I could make it possible: I needed to have a dependable car first, but before that I needed to save money, but before that I needed to find a full-time job that could allow me to save money. While I was hustling to meet those support goals, I was also accomplishing other small goals within the same time frame. As I was looking for jobs, I was also going through my things in my childhood bedroom. Deep cleaning the whole place so I could get rid of useless junk and organize the things i needed and wanted in my future home. That helped immensely later on, because everything was ready to be packed in a truck to go to the new apartment. When I finally found a full-time job I started saving a lot of money for a car. When I had enough saved for a down payment I got a car right away so I could finally have a dependable vehicle. Then, once a week I would go to Bed Bath & Beyond or Target and started picking up small household items I would need in my own place. I slowly filled a storage container with these items until I moved. This made the financial burden of moving more tolerable since I spread it out over six months instead of six days. There’s plenty more I could say about this process, but I think that will be reserved for a later post.