When it comes to setting goals, people tend to be one of the following, which one are you?
A GOAL RESISTOR – You don’t like being penned into the commitment of goals. It may be that your work life is super organised and planned but to balance that out you don’t like having too many plans in your personal life.
It may be that you just prefer ‘being spontaneous’ or ‘going with the flow.’ You may feel setting your own personal goals is selfish, or even ungodly. Whichever it is, you may set some goals but resist the process in some way.
A GOAL LOVER – You LOVE having goals and regularly whether weekly or yearly sit down and think of what goals you want to reach and you make decisions and set them. Whether you follow through and do them could be either way, maybe a topic for another blog, but setting goals is something you do.
A GOAL REJECTOR – You just don’t set goals for whatever reason. You don’t believe setting goals is something you need to do. Either you have an opinion on it spiritually, maybe you see it as moving in your will, instead of God’s, or you simply have no desire or motivation to set goals. Your life is full, and you don’t even think of setting goals or see the need for it.
The focus of this blog is probably to the first two on the list above, to the goal lovers and the goal resisters. If you are a goal rejector, check out Biblical Wisdom on Goal Setting
So let’s say you love setting goals for yourself. You’re a planner, a list maker, someone who loves getting things done. You love reaching goals you set.
Setting goals is easy. Pursuing them may be easy. The only thing is when the goals are not achieved, you feel disappointed. Maybe you feel like a failure. You get discouraged. Consequently, you may give up on those goals. You may go through a season of not pursuing them. Or you become a procrastinator.
Maybe as a goal resistor you reluctantly set and follow goals. And maybe you easily get discouraged when the journey is tough, when obstacles keep getting in your way.
All this is quite usual. In this blog I’m giving you some goal setting tips that will help you set and pursue goals in a way that feels empowering and takes away those feelings of being penned in or overwhelmed.
These tips will help you connect with yourself and God in the process and feel a sense of satisfaction and peace even, if you don’t meet your goals. These tips will help you feel like you are a master of your own destiny and who doesn’t want that!
Christian Coaching
Tip 1
Realistic Goals vs Unrealistic Goals
Many of us will remember the SMART goal rule. (Setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time scaled.)
Well, my experience is that goal setting lovers can tend to over commit. Feeling enthusiastic to pursue something exciting, you can tend to set goals which if you really examined the commitment involved in achieving it, and within the time you are saying you will, you aren’t being realistic.
Maybe the goal parameters would be realistic if you were to dump a bunch of other commitments or give up your current work and work full time on the goal. In real life we can’t always make these types of decisions for radical change, or we don’t want to. You normally must achieve new goals alongside other commitments.
This should be a big consideration, so that you set the goal in a way that it is possible and not overwhelming and not totally unrealistic. You can break the goal down into smaller bite sized chunks, so it’s achievable alongside other commitments.
Another tip is to move the timeline of completing your goal out further to give yourself longer to complete it. Either way you will feel better, less overwhelmed and you will have set your own expectations of what is achievable. This will result in you feeling right on track with where you expect to be.
If you are someone who finds being realistic about what can be achieved by when difficult, get yourself a coach! A coach will help you immensely with this. I work with many clients who need help in their planning process, sometimes in being able to construct bite size chunks, achievable goals, and sometimes in finding a sustainable pace in going about completing these goals. Other issues such as motivation, priorities and values and a lot more come up along the way. A coach can help you navigate all of these which may have become
roadblocks but are all solvable.
You only need to be coached for a time on it and you through this will learn how to think differently and be able to manage the process yourself before you know it!
Christian Coaching
Tip 2
Evaluating Progress
When you set goals, regularly evaluating how you are doing against what you have planned is vital. The idea is to look at the good, the bad and the ugly. How am I doing? Am I on schedule? What am I feeling? Why do I feel like I am failing? What have my circumstances been? What has happened that may have slowed me down? What is the cause of me doing this slower than I expected? What is helping me? What is slowing me down? How am I honoring my values in this process?
This is being kind to yourself. This is empowering you, because awareness of circumstances helps you understand how you are showing up, how you may have made good decisions to adapt and focus on areas that may not have been expecting but were important. You will begin to understand what your personal obstacles have been. You will be able to evaluate how you could have cleared these. Be kind to yourself and don’t judge yourself but rather seek to understand why things may not have gone as planned. Understanding is empowering. You can’t fix a problem if you don’t even know what it is.
The reason why you got distracted and did other things could be for good or bad reasons. Either way, good reasons are cause for celebration as you stayed true to who you are and followed your values and made good decisions. Bad reasons are an ideal opportunity to learn and grow, to recognise where you may need help, or where you must change. Change may be needed in your internal world of limiting beliefs or your skill set, or something else. You will never learn and grow if you don’t take the time to evaluate yourself honestly and without judgement.
Again, a coach is an ideal person to unpack this with you and help you with any blind spots you have. They can identify a pattern or a belief that may have held you back. We have to work on our beliefs and fears as they are most commonly the only thing holding us back from progress.
Christian Coaching
Tip 3
Moving Goal Posts
This tip is something I have personally found extremely helpful, especially coming to a year end but also at any time. Once you’ve evaluated the reason why goals have not been achieved, hope is restored, and you can see that all is not lost. Many people make the mistake of automatically trashing the goal and forgetting it forever, without evaluating. If it hasn’t happened this does not mean, we automatically give up.
What have I learned? Where am I at now? Is this still a relevant goal for my life or work? Is this coming season, this next year the right time for me to go for it? Is it a goal that belongs in my short, medium, or long-term categories?
Answering these questions, helps you see clearly. It helps you make the decision to simply move a goal forward or stop it being a goal. You may think, ‘yes I see that this is the right goal for me to achieve in the next 6 months’, or ‘actually given the season I am in, I think this goal is one for some years down the line, not now’. Without judging yourself for a delay, you can become empowered from your learning of what happened and feel more confident that with the necessary adjustments, it will happen, in the right time.
Christian Coaching
For me personally this year as I write, I have had to allow some 2023 goals to now go into 2024. I feel OK and excited about this. The reason is because even though these goals were not met in 2023, some internal work I have done on me during 2023 combined with understanding what season I am in, gives me confidence of these goals being achieved during 2024. I don’t feel I have failed but instead having answered a bunch of deep questions I can see that God and I have laid some really strong groundwork down which will bring success.
17 years ago when I decided to switch up my whole career and change direct into full time personal and leadership development, to become an Executive Coach, a wise person said to me, ‘most people do really well at this when they get out of their own way.’ I feel like I understand this statement today better than ever. When we stop judging ourselves, beating ourselves up, feeling we have failed or will fail, when we give ourselves permission to progress and flourish in the way that suits us and the way we were designed, we are truly free and empowered to be all that we are created to be.
Christian Coaching
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Christian Coaching