Heart and Mind Goals

On January 7th, I hosted a workshop for a small group of hand-selected individuals to support them in consciously creating their future in 2023. These individuals made the wise and empowering choice to show up to consciously create their year, instead of letting life, circumstances, and other people determine what will be most important to them this year.

Their first and biggest task was to complete a Year-End Review. And they did it in a very deliberate and conscious way, like I explained in my last newsletter to you. They took the time to get really granular and to look at each month of 2022 separately. This allowed them to notice both the ordinary and the extraordinary events and experiences that transpired in 2022, and to obtain a different perspective on their accomplishments and growth over the past twelve months.

I then had them slow down and create a Wheel of Life and consider the various dimensions of their life and their current level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with each dimension before setting goals for 2023.

Today, I want to say a little more about setting goals. As I’ve shared before, I’m not a big fan of traditional New Year’s resolutions. I believe that when we are setting goals, these goals should come from our highest most authentic self, our Inner Wisdom or Inner Leader. When our goals come from this place, they are aligned with who we want to be in the world and what we feel called to create and bring into the world. When our goals come from our Ego, or from our sense of how we see ourselves falling short when we compare ourselves with others, then our goals are essentially SHOULDS and not WANTS.

A ”should” is something we believe we must do, either to catch up to others, or because we think that what we are expected to do it, or because it’s “the next logical step”. I’ve heard people say that they chose to get married or have babies, because “it was the next logical step”, or “everyone else was already doing it”. These are not good reasons to choose to do something. You are not taking full ownership of your life, if you let societal expectations or others’ opinions or accomplishments dictate what your next steps in life are. The end-result of such decisions is usually resentment, frustration, and disappointment.

It serves you more to slow down and consider whether you really WANT the thing you say you want. Is this choice aligned with your most important values and with who you want to be in the world? Is this choice aligned with what your heart is yearning for most?

The other reason why it serves you to slow down and consider whether something is a want or a should, is that you are more likely to fulfill a goal and create something you truly want, than something you only think you should want. Human beings are naturally resistant to being told what to do. If you have ever interacted with a two-year old, you will appreciate just how early in life we start insisting on our own independence. It’s built into us to want to do things independently, because it’s part of our evolution of humans.

And what this means is that you are by nature resistant to being told what to do, even when you know it would be “good” for you to take that specific action. Just the mere fact that someone else is insisting you do it, might have you find ways to either passively or aggressively resist doing it. We all want to feel empowered to make our own choices in life. We want to feel like it was our choice to make in the first place.

So, when you “should” on yourself, you are letting others decide what matters most to you, and guess what will happen? You will unconsciously find ways to sabotage your own efforts. You will resist and struggle your way through the goal, because deep down, you really don’t want to do it.

Some people have tremendous resilience and will work really hard at accomplishing their parents’ goals, or doing what they think others expect of them, and even though they might reach the goal, they will still end up feeling empty, dissatisfied, and frustrated, because their souls will know it’s not what they truly want. How often do we hear stories of people who became lawyers, doctors, accountants, etc., because their parents had those career dreams for them, and then they are described as “having a mid-life crisis” when they quit cold turkey and take up art or dancing, or something completely different.

The “crisis” they are experiencing in their life, is the realisation that time is finite and that they have not done what they most yearn to do. Their soul awakens them to what’s possible. And when they reach a boiling point inside where their frustration with being stuck in something they don’t want, exceeds their discomfort with other people’s disapproval of their choices, they finally have the courage to make the choice they always wanted to make in the first place, but didn’t have the courage at the time, because of their fear that they might be rejected by those they love most.

Our whole lives, we are working to find the balance between our need for our own independence, and our need for love and belonging. We are both meaning seekers and social animals. We want to be doing things that are meaningful to us, and we want to feel like we belong somewhere and like we are seen, understood, and loved. And for some people the struggle between these two opposing desires is real. They experience tremendous pain and discomfort with their own inner conflict between wanting to do what matters to them and wanting to be loved and to belong. And depending on your personality type and the culture and environment you grew up in, one or the other sometimes seems more important.

So, what is my point? When you are setting goals for the New Year or at any other time of the year, for that matter, ask yourself, “Is this a WANT or a SHOULD?” and be honest with yourself about that. It serves you to get real with yourself about what you truly want to commit yourself to.

The next step once you are clear about what you want, is to consider HOW you will bring that into your life NOW. What can you do TODAY to start taking steps towards that goal? Here are there two things I would like to share with you to support you in making a strong commitment to your goals this year.

Firstly, big bold declarations are NOT goals. They are just that: big bold declarations. A goal is something that is doable and actionable. For example, “write a book” is NOT a goal. There are so many steps involved in writing a book, that the goal can’t be “write a book”. The goal also can’t be “lose weight” or “start a business”, or “make six figures”. These things are big and require multiple steps to get there. When you state your goals in this way, you are setting yourself up to feel overwhelmed.

Rather, you want to break your big aspiration down into smaller, actionable steps. What are the steps involved in writing a book, for example? There is choosing a title and topic. There is creating the outline of the book. There is deciding on the number of chapters based on the outline. And then you must physically sit down and write each chapter of the book. Once the book is written, it needs to be edited. And even after writing the book, publishing it would be whole new goal altogether.

So, you want to slow down and consider what the smaller steps are that would lead to the dream/aspiration/thing you hope to create, and you want to ask yourself, “What’s the smallest unit of action I can take TODAY to get started?”

 

Think about any significant accomplishment you’ve had. Did you do it overnight? Did you even know the exact steps you were going to take before you got started? Or did you commit yourself to it and then start taking small steps towards it? As we start taking action, the next steps are revealed to us. We figure it out as we go along. You don’t need to have it all figured out already. You just need to be clear about your commitment to creating this thing in your life.

As Steve Chandler would say, you don’t need to know how to do something. You simply need to be clear in your heart and mind that you are committed to making it happen – in other words, that you want to do it. Once your commitment is clear, you will figure out the rest. We live in a world where there is no shortage of information. You can learn how to do anything. And yet, if you are not committed to your own process, you will not create or learn anything. You will either find ways to sabotage yourself, or you will create a situation where you are spinning your wheels and getting nowhere.

So, often I speak to people, and they tell me they want to write a book, start a business, have a baby… And they are talking about it with others. They are reading about it. They are doing research on it. So, they are very “busy in the aboutness of it”. And yet, they are making no progress. Why? Because they are not taking ACTION. Life does not reward our dreams, our desires, our yearnings, our aspirations, our wishes. Life rewards ACTION. When we take action, life meets us half-way to bring us the opportunities we are seeking. I wrote about this in a provocative piece called Dreams are for losers.  

One of my clients wanted to have a baby. She had done a lot of work on the intimacy in her marriage and one day in a conversation, she was sharing how she and her husband was talking about having a baby. I simply observed that talking doesn’t make babies. She was taken aback. A few weeks later she came back and said, I was right and that she is pregnant. She realised in that moment that talking about it, wouldn’t help her create it. Taking action on what she wanted, would. And so, they made a baby instead of talking about having one.

Secondly, don’t overlook the most important leadership tool you have in your toolbox, that you might not even realise is an important leadership tool. Your calendar. Committing to reaching your goal requires actually committing time, energy, and money to it. And usually is starts with allocating time in your day, your week, your month, your year to spend working on it. If we know that small actionable steps get us there, then we need to make the time in our lives to take those small actionable steps. And here is where your calendar is your greatest partner, because you can use your calendar to block out the time you want to commit to each of your goals, to ensure that you will be spending time on it, instead of hoping that you will “find the time” to do it. We don’t find time. We make it. If something is important enough, I will commit time to creating it.

For example, one of my goals this year is to run a half-marathon. The last time I ran a half-marathon, was when I was nine weeks pregnant with my first child. It took me a whole year to get fit enough to run my first half-marathon. So, once I was clear that I want to do this again, I booked a race that I would like to run in October 2023, and I worked backwards to figure out how many weeks I have to train for the race. I have 40 weeks to train for the race.

I know I will need to start small, because I’m not fit enough yet to run long distances. So, I will spend the next 20 weeks building my fitness gradually following the formula I learnt back home in South Africa, when I was still part of the Run/Walk for Life Running Club. I will then spend another 16 weeks specifically training to get fit for a half-marathon through regular runs and through increasing the time and distance of my runs to build endurance.

To ensure that I stay committed to my plan, I need to schedule my runs in my calendar and plan my runs around the other important things I’m committed to in my life. This requires a weekly commitment from my side. So, I consciously set time aside once a week to schedule my training sessions, so I know when I’m running. It takes all the thinking out of it and prevents me from falling into negotiation with myself. It’s in the calendar with the time and distance and so I simply commit to doing the run and the distance on the day as I had scheduled it in my calendar.

This way, I use my calendar to support me in creating what I want. And you could do this with anything; whether it’s writing a book, building a business, finding a new home. Schedule time to spend on the activity and commit yourself fully to taking small action steps in the time scheduled for the activity. If you block out half an hour for working on your business, you want to ask yourself, who can I connect with today? Who can I send an email to? Who needs my support that I could send a resource to? Who could I invite to a conversation? What important work needs to be completed in my business? Schedule time and get it done.

A business is not built overnight. It’s built through small actionable steps taken every single day. A book is not written overnight, it’s written by committing time to writing a little bit of it every single day. Consistency trumps intensity every time.

My calendar helps me stay accountable. Once a week, on a Sunday (before the start of the week), I spend time thinking about the most important activities coming up in this week, and I schedule my big rocks – conversations with clients, time with my loved ones, self-care and fitness – so I know when these things will happen for me during the course of the week. The rest of the week, I simply show up and do the thing I had committed to do. It takes the pain out of wondering what to spend my time on. And it allows me to know whether I have space in my calendar for other commitments or not.

So, dear reader, how will you invite first your heart, and then your mind, into serving you in creating goals for yourself this year?

References:

1. Breytenbach, C. (2020). Partnering with you Calendar: Schedule your Big Rocks first. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/partnering_with_your_calendar/
2. Breytenbach, C. (2021). Why it serves you to do a year-end review. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/why_it_serves_you_to_do_a_year_end_review/
3. Breytenbach, C. (2022). When you are serious about real transformation, the time of year is of no consequence. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/time_of_year_is_of_no_consequence/
4. Breytenbach, C. (2022). Dreams are for loses. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/dreams_are_for_losers/
5. Breytenbach, C. (2022). Slow down and turn around: Honouring Completions. Available online at: https://chantalbreytenbach.com/honouring_completions/