So you have a me map with goals. Let’s put it to use.
You’ve actually already done the hard part. Now comes the easy part. You know who you are, now let’s try to figure out how you are living your life.
Achieving something in your life doesn’t happen overnight. There is never some big decision that magically makes you achieve your goal. Instead, it starts with a small decision you made at one point that lead to another small decision and so on until you end up reaching that goal. For instance, if you want to be fit yet you have a terrible diet and don’t workout, you will never get there. If you are not aware of the small decisions you are making that are either moving you toward or pushing you away from your goals, you will never achieve your goals. It’s that simple.
As you live your life, you need to take frequent breaks to think about what you are doing and what you want to do. I recommend doing this once a week on a weekend morning. You need to identify four things: what you are doing that you want to do more, what you are doing that you don’t want to be doing anymore, how you can be doing what you want to do and what is holding you back.
During this weekly break, take a look at your me map. Create realistic short-term goals that you can accomplish that week based on your long-term goals and tell a friend about them. Create as many as you can handle, but understand that you must actually be able to meet all these goals at the end of the week so I suggest fewer to start. Don’t create goals just to create goals.
They must be achievable and just as important, they must be measurable. You have to be able to track your progress (ex: “lift 10 more pounds” vs “get stronger” or “learn French greetings” vs “learn French”). If they aren’t, how do you know if you are getting better, staying the same, or getting worse? A long list of unmeasurable goals can be very demotivating.
It is important that your week’s goals be realistic. When I started my fitness program, I made a goal to work out 7 days in a row because I was having trouble sticking to my regimen due to my schedule. At the end of the week, I was able to meet that goal and move on to a new one next week. If my goal was to bench 100 more pounds, I would not have been able to meet it because it is too big of a goal to complete in a week.
We want to pick short-term goals that we can achieve, but that also gradually get us to accomplish our long-term goals. Nothing is more demotivating than having a goal you can’t achieve or one that seems too far away. This way, you get a sense of accomplishment in addition to a sense of progress, which is even more motivating to continue.
You remember how we organized our passions into categories? Well what that allows us to do now is pick common goals that aid us in a number of passions. For example, a short-term goal that improves my fitness also improves my soccer game and my musical performance stamina because the three are all physical activities. Try to find more goals like this and do them first.
