Feeling underwhelmed in regard to forward thinking? You have plenty of company in 2020! The year is filled with unknown at every turn, and yet beneath the surface of a lack of clarity is the opportunity to invent anew. A new outlook on setting goals provides insight on achieving them.
Picture this…
If the world were a snow globe that suddenly fell off the shelf in a pandemic moment and shattered on the floor into a million small pieces, what would you do?
Some people would try to repair it as it was, to rebuild it piece by piece as a replica. Others would scrap the entire thing, tossing the pieces into the trash and beginning all over. Still others would pull from the mess the significant aspects, the most needed and important pieces and with that they would curate and create something successful from nothing. Curiously, all of these scenarios are different goal setting styles.
Are you stuck in the habit mode of setting year long and 5-year long range goals?
Do you feel like quitting on your 2020 personal goals and business plans? Ready to walk away?
Or…
Do you realize your successes and feel energized to recalibrate from a place of expertise, taking the best of what you know and navigating what you do not in smaller more innovative ways?
No matter your goal-setting style, most experts agree that breaking down goals into smaller, more tangible and actionable parts is an ideal way to proceed during a chaotic and unprecedented time. While it may be super difficult to forward think into 2021, perhaps a mindset reset in regard to your window of planning is the essential ingredient to infuse what is next. When you feel stalled to think long range, don’t! Instead, adapt a smaller reach. It is not enough to simply break your action steps down into smaller pieces, it is also essential to re-assign new accountability to the completion time frame you are associating to reach each of your goals.
Adopt a season-of-goals mindset.
Instead of making a wish on your birthday cake, activating an entire new year filled with resolutions, or writing a 5-year business plan, edit the chunk of time you are dedicating to execute on your dreams. The year has four seasons, and businesses operate on quarterly productivity, so adapt your goals to follow suit. By breaking down your business and professional objectives into smaller 3-4-month windows of completion, you can also better align smaller, more manageable micro-action-steps that take you from goal setting to goal getting much more realistically. This approach of goal flexing eliminates the overwhelm that comes with long range planning during a crisis and supports you in staying in the moment and more motivated.
Don’t underestimate the power of pulling back on your goals and goal flexing. Way too often goals are set so far ahead of time, perhaps years in advance, that they no longer align with or resonate with the business, the moment, or the person who set them. Adopting a season-of-goals mindset will support a more accurate way to set goals and more manageable and inspiring way to execute on them. It will also allow for a bit of whimsy and creativity to be built into the process. Flexibility is one of the essential elements of goal setting 2020-style, permitting you to factor in the moment into each day and each week, and along with it your ability to adapt to changes as they occur. Rather than abandoning your goals, you can ease into, and pivot along with them.
The truth is in the tweak, and goal flexing allows you to recalibrate as needed and to stay true to your business, your life, and your expertise. Change the way you approach goal setting and you transform your success and build upon the opportunities at hand, logically and in sync with the world at large.