In retrospect I can say that one of my better habits in the past, was my habit of reviewing my goals on a weekly basis. I’m picking up that habit again, and will be posting the reviews on this blog.
Achievements by public commitment
When I started that habit, I was really into productivity habits and systems and into goal setting theory. Reviewing my goals on a weekly basis seemed like a good habit to get a score on my progress. And it was, especially for the lack of progress … because there were periods with hardly any progress at all. And I put it out there, right in the open, stating that there was – again – no progress.
There were times that I felt bad about posting the progress report, without having something to report besides the lack of progress. But I learned a lot from doing it. And I made a lot of progress. Partly because there was a desire to make that progress, and partly because I made a public commitment to it.
So in retrospect I can say the habit worked for me. So that’s reason enough to pick it up again.
Setting new goals
But before you can review anything, you have to set some goals. Or put your ambitions into words, because you probably already have some goals, but you just haven’t put them in words yet.
Long-time readers know that I start most of my activities from my personal core values. The inner foundation of things I know to be important to me. My five personal core values are Love – Fun – Freedom – Growth – Authenticity. And although I’d love to give every value it’s own audacious goal, I know it’s better to not do that.
In order to set new goals, I’m going to use the same path as I did almost three years ago. But I add the wisdom I have gathered since that time to the process of defining them.
The process of setting new goals
So one of my next posts will be to go back to the roots and investigate my personal core values in detail once more. From that foundation I will look at my personal mission statement again and see if that needs some tweaking. After that I will translate that mission statement into guiding principles for how I want to live my life. And as soon as I have those, I will define new goals.
That may seem like a long route towards setting goals. And it is in a way, but the most powerful goals are the ones that are truly aligned with who we are and what we want. Investing that time into defining my goals will render higher quality goals, and increase the likelihood of motivating me to deeply want to achieve them.
Taking the short-cut to defining goals would probably render goals that are either too easy, unattainable, or unaligned. And that would be a short-cut to failure (and who needs that?).
You know … I’m really looking forward to writing those reviews again. You can expect them on Sundays (after I defined the goals of course). And should I miss one of the weekly reviews, please DO let me know!
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Lodewijk,
sounds like a good approach. Did yu set yourself a time frame for this too?
Viel Erfolg
Françoise
I’m going to work on this over the coming two weeks. Sunday February 7 will be the first real review moment … although I don’t know what goals or habit changes I’m going to review yet
I have a clue, but the real definition will follow from the detailed investigation over the next two weeks.
Most excellent! Thanks for sharing your purposeful journey. I plan to take notes.
I totally agree – accountability and progress checking is the key to successfully meeting your goals. I particularly liked the simplicity of your values and plan to pare mine down – much easier to focus on one word than a phrase.