Goals – love or hate them, here is a new way to look at them

Do you love setting goals or have a goal setting allergy? This time of year newsfeeds and email inboxes are flooded with messages and offers to help you set goals to achieve over the year.

Now, I typically see people divert into two camps – one camp LOVES goal setting and the other LOATHES it. And I want to you know that if you shriek at the term “goal setting” I understand, because that is the camp I used to live in as well.
Until I made a couple of mindset shifts I am going to share with you today.

So stick around, stay with me because what I want to share could help you expand your perspective just enough to get you feeling more courageous and empowered to dip your toe back into setting powerful “goals”.

Now if you DO happen to love goal setting, but are not happy with the degree to which you are showing up to meet those goals and you want a fresh approach, you want to ditch any habits standing in your way, then I do have something for you too at the end of this broadcast. So be sure to stay and find out what that is.

But please do me a favour, leave me a comment and let me know how you honestly feel about setting goals this time of year. What is your experience and tell me where you struggle the most.

Goal setting can feel intimidating and pressure filled am I right? Especially if in our experience we have a lot of self-disappointment in the past or stories of limitation that we are really used to telling ourselves.

I remember a few years back, I was absolutely defiant in the face of all the goal setting marketing I was seeing. To me, it just felt like an incredible pressure to achieve and measure myself by.

Have you ever felt that way? Well, what I discovered is that the word ‘goal’ can take on a very adopted meaning and it often comes along with a mindset that has us view achieving a goal as:
a measurement of our self worth and
as evidence “to love ourselves more” or “love ourselves less”

To you find that to be true?

This is where I found myself and I decided at that point, if the word ‘Goal” held so much of a negative association for me, then what I needed to do was to reframe it for awhile. Put it into my terms.

And you know what I reframed it as?

Enrichment Milestone

I decided I wasn’t going to set goals anymore, I was going to set enrichment milestones and with that reframe, adopt a new meaning and mindset with it.

The mindset I chose was not “Achieved” or “Didn’t achieve” but how much was my life enriched by working on the milestone?

And you know what happened with that brand new meaning and mindset I chose to create for myself?

I started to appreciate and honour my process of working on that milestone. Of being process-focused instead of outcome focused.

And you know what the crazy thing is? When I took the pressure off the outcome focus, and focused on enjoying and finding meaning in my process, those outcomes started happening regardless.

It all came down to adopting a practice and progress mindset, and that was a fundamental shift that allowed me finally come around to loving goal setting.

Now adopting that kind of mindset has a bit of work to it and I don’t have time to fully dive into that today, but what I do want to leave you with is a tool that you can use right now, which you can grab from my website called “The Affirm Yourself” cheatsheet and this will help get you started on the habit of reframing so that as you go to create some intentions (or enrichment milestones) this year, you have the positive inner self talk, the inner reframing to match. You can grab that cheatsheet here.