2022 December 6 The next step on making our goals

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. Thanks for joining me tonight to talk more about setting our goals for 2023 and beyond. So let's get started. If you like what you hear tonight, please leave a Like and tell your friends, and if you don't, let me know what other topics you'd like me to cover.

But first, a quick note from my friend. Navine wrote me the following comment. This had to do with last week, we were talking about goal settings and setting initial goals. She said, ‘Making a good goal is easy.  What's difficult is to be persistent.’  First off, thank you very much for leaving the comment. I think it's probably one of those things that a lot of people may share your feelings. So I'd like to take a moment to answer it.

Here at 7EveryMinute, we actually think that making good goals takes a little bit of thought and a little bit of personal honesty. It's not that it's hard, but it does take some quality time to make some quality goals. You can define your life in terms of the questions you ask yourself and the goals that you set for yourself. So those are both pretty important things. So you want both of those to be high quality. 

Once you get that part done, making some quality goals, then there are techniques that we can show you to make working towards those goals something that you'll naturally want to do. Your brain will help you succeed instead of keeping you stuck in a safe past.

People think of goals in terms of resolutions, like, I want to lose weight. But good goals take a little more thought to create, and are just the first step in priming your brain to help you succeed. That's what makes all the difference. We have a course coming up, See Your Future Transformed, and it's a model of transformational coaching that gently guides you through tested methods to train your brain, to actively help you attain your goals by envisionment, not persistence or willpower.

More in that to come. We're having a new session starting in January of 2022, just in time to make our goals for next year. So more on that later.  Thank you Navine for the question. It's a good question. I think a lot of people have it. So thanks for asking it, and thanks for allowing me to explain it to you.

So first, a quick review from last week, where we went through making smart goals. Remember, SMART stands for a Specific Measurable, Achievable. Relevant or Reach (stretch goals), and Time base, something with a deadline.

We can go through this in more detail, and we do in the course, but the most important piece about this is that your goal has to include a very specific thing. That's the problem with something like ‘losing weight.' Okay. What do I mean by losing weight? Do I just want to lose weight, or do I want to lose weight and be more toned? Do I want to be stronger? Am I actually happy with my weight, but I want more muscle less flab?  What do we mean when we say that? So, a very specific goal. It has to be measurable. I want to be able to fit into the pants I wore last year. They're achievable. I wanna weigh four pounds - probably not achievable.

So it has to be a realistic goal. It can be a relevant, or reach, goal. It can be a stretch goal. It doesn't have to be something simple. It doesn't have to be a guaranteed win. As a matter of fact, it's better if it's not, because if you make it a bigger goal, then your mind will be more interested in making it happen. It's like, I bet I can actually reach that goal. 

It has to be time based. It needs a deadline. Because if you say, I want to get a hundred dollars in the bank. Okay, is that before the end of the day? Before the end of the week? Before the end of the year? You know, over the next 10 years? It makes a huge difference.

Smart goals, they have to be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant (or reach goals, stretch goals), and time based, with a deadline. So for the moment, if you didn't catch last week's episode, for the moment just write down everything that comes to your mind in terms of goals, and we'll start to sort things out later. After a few days, deeper thoughts will start to appear, and the real goals will start to become clear. So this is all review from last week. Again, I encourage you to take a look at that. We go into it in more depth. 

That brings us to the first really fun part. Making up goals is fun. The next part that I think is even more fun is looking at our list of goals and thinking about which ones really matter to us and which ones are just fun to dream up. So one way to start to sort your list out is do something like post-it notes, or pick your favorite method. I have them all over my world. I just find them really handy. So I get some posts-its, maybe in lots of colors, if that's what you like to do. Then take a blank sheet of paper or maybe an area on a mirror, a window, or on the wall. Just take your first three post-its and write down three headings, and the headings are Now, Soon, and Later.

So now, as in RIGHT NOW. Soon is before too long, and later, sometime in the future. Now go back and look at that list of goals you have been writing down, starting from last week or starting this week, and write the very first goal on that list onto a post-it, and decide if it's important enough to work on right now.

Or just pretty soon, or maybe just someday. Put it in that appropriate column. So you have three columns. Let's just say you're doing it on a section of the wall, or you have a whiteboard or on a window, and you put up the three headings that say, Now, Woon and Later. You take that first goal and you put it into one of those three columns.

If you look at it and say, This says take a vacation, but it's not that important to me right now. Maybe at the end of the year, you put it in Later. But you look at the next thing and you say, Ah,I really want to get started on this. That goes into Now. Keep working through all your goal ideas and sorting them into the three columns.

But every so often, look at the Now and Woon columns, and if Now has more than three or four different goals in it, pick the top three that are most important to you and move the rest to Soon. If Soon has more than four or five items, pick the top three or four, and move the rest to Later.

If you do this over a few days, and keep looking at your list of goals and envisioning starting to work on only one or two of them from the now column, do those ones really make you excited? Is it something that you really want to spend time on right now? If it's not, move that goal to some other priority. Maybe once you think about it, it's like, Eh, I thought that was really important to me, but now I see it really doesn't matter that much. What you'll usually find is that, pretty quickly, most of your goals will either become simple tasks (clean the kitchen counters), or turn out not to be all that important to you after all. Learn how to make fruitcakes. It always seems important when Christmas comes around, but never seems important the day after Christmas. 

But there's still a lot to be learnt out of this whole process. Maybe all those cleaning tasks on your list are really a hint that the real goal is to declutter my house before the holidays.  Now that's an actionable goal. All those other little tasks become the steps to help you reach your goal. So once you make a couple of breakthroughs like that, suddenly things that seem overwhelmingly large and impossible to do have suddenly become attainable and sources of personal energy and satisfaction.

So how cool is that? In just a few days, you've not only taken just a mindfull of random ideas and sorted them out, but by giving your subconscious a little time to think about it, you've prioritized the ones that really matter to you. We just went from that scary blank piece of paper syndrome to having a plan with priorities, a path forward, and we've already started making little steps towards completing a goal. That seems like a whole lot of progress already, and we've barely even begun yet. 

So what comes next? Well, now that we've started, we'll naturally want to keep trying to make more goals, but there's probably another step. Next, what we really want to do is to go back to our goals and make sure they're big enough. Are they really life transforming? We can almost always do far more than we think we can.  We can go back and look at our list in terms of how we want our life to be, and not just as this high quality to-do list. Are these goals really moving us towards what we really envision our life to be?

But that, dear friends, is for next week. Remember, we're going to take this in little steps so that by the time New Year's comes around, we have a pretty nice set of goals put together in a way that we're going to help our mind help us make those goals a reality.

So if you haven't done so already for this week, I would encourage you to go back to listen to last week's Live about setting smart goals and how to write them down. Then on the cover of your notebook, or on the first page, boldly write your description statement to yourself. John's Life Roadmap for 2023. Or Mary's New Life for my 67th Year. 

Because you're asking your inner self what you really want to do for the next year, and that's a pretty important decision. So make a great big deal out of it. Then listen again to this week's broadcast and start sorting out your goals. You know that whole jumble of ideas that you wrote down in the three categories. Now, Soon and Later. Then start envisioning if those goals are really life-transforming or not. If not, keep asking yourself what you want to retain, until the really important goals and ideas start to become obvious. We'll be talking more about this in our See Your Future Transform course coming up in January, which covers the whole process in a lot more detail, more in that coming.

That's it for the evening. Please remember the war in Ukraine is still going on. Winter is there. Things are really bad. Think how uncomfortable it is if you happen to live in any of the northern parts of the US or in Canada. It's starting to get cold. Well, they're in the same sort of latitude, the same things are happening there. If you don't feel comfortable being more proactive in your support, there's a lot of humanitarian links on the page UKR7.com,  including the link to World Central Kitchen, which we talked about a few weeks back. That's WCK.org. Real good people doing real good things, helping people in humanitarian ways. Please keep that in mind, especially for the holidays. Remember, one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. So if you can and you're able, please check it out. 

So thank you for stopping by. If you found something interesting or useful, please pass it along and please hit that like button. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week and remember to live the life you dreamed of, because that's the path to true  contentment. Love and encouragement to everyone. See you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you so much.