Goals

It’s almost mid-January and many of us have already written goals for the year. It’s also very possible that most of us have already abandoned or forgotten about the goals we wrote a few weeks ago when the new year was dawning and we were full of hope. I am still writing my goals and will finish them this week. Today I wanted to share about how Lance and I write our goals. We both need the vision of where we are going written down and writing out our goals helps us to live with intention. And the best thing is, you can start at any time. The calendar doesn’t have to say January 1st before you can start working on your goals.

I think it’s interesting how many of us write goals in January with the best of intentions to follow through and achieve them. However, having the self-discipline and organization to work on them for more than a week or two can be very difficult. I used to always write down whatever it was I wanted to achieve over the next year. It would be a very broad statement such as exercising or eating healthier or growing my business but I never really achieved anything and usually forgot about them soon after writing them down.

It wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I started breaking my goals down into specific steps needed to achieve success, which is ironic because I used to work as a speech-language pathologist. As an SLP we wrote goals for IEPs all the time and they had to be broken down into specific increments and measurable. You would think I would have just carried that over into my personal development goals but I didn’t. It wasn’t until I started working with a business coach and we were only able to set goals for 12 weeks at a time that it dawned on me I should be doing this in all of my goal writing. And when I started applying it to my personal goals as well, I finally started to see more success.

Since Lance and I are married, we work on our goals together. We take at least 2-3 date nights to discuss them and get them written. A lot of time during these dates is spent talking about the last year, what are our hopes and dreams for the future as a couple, family, and individuals. Let me be clear, these dates DO NOT have to be at a restaurant or overnight somewhere. That’s wonderful if you can, but it is not necessary. We usually go out for one and the rest of them are at home during a time we intentionally set aside for this.

As part of the process, you must work on coming up with a shared vision for your future. If you both have different ideas of where you want your family or marriage to go, it will be difficult to achieve anything. It took us years to finally come up with a vision that is something that we both want to achieve. It’s okay if it changes over the years too, ours has. This was the first year that we didn’t really have any changes to make to our long-term goals and vision.

So how do we write goals? When we are goal planning, we start with the long-term goals and work our way down to the short-term goals. What do we ultimately want to achieve in 1, 3, 5, or more years? Once we have those, then break them down into smaller chunks. I break my goals for the year down into 12-week goals so that each quarter I am working on something that will move me toward my year-end goal. My 12-week goals are broken down into the weekly goals that I will work on specifically. Lance & I try to have a quick meeting on Sundays to go through our goals and schedule for the week so that we are on the same page with what we will accomplish together and separately. Then we hang it somewhere we will see it frequently. We are also implenting weekly family meetings this year so that the kids know the scheudle and expectations for the week as well. We hand our long-term goal sheet up so that we don’t forget what we are working towards.

Write your goals down! There has been research proving that people who write out their goals are more likely to achieve them than those who don’t. Lance and I developed a Goal Planning Guide to help people with writing goals and developing a vision for the future. This is not just for couples, individuals can use everything in the guide as well. There are also questions to guide you through the process of developing your vision. We have included forms that help you organize your goals from weekly to long-term.

As our gift to you, we are including a link to our FREE Homestead Goals pages. This is not included in the Goal Planning Guide but does work well with it. We use these to help us stay focused on the projects we determine are important to complete on our farm. Fill them out and keep them somewhere you will see them! It is satifying to mark projects/goals off as we complete them!

Let us know what you think of our Goal Planning Guide and Homestead Goal sheets. Here is the link again for our FREE HOMESTEAD GOALS pages.

I want to leave you with a quote I love on the front cover of my planner: “The future starts today, not tomorrow.” Saint John Paul the Great.

Pictured below are our Homestead Goals and the Goal Planning Guide. After our last goal planning date, we celebrated with DQ blizzards.