how to re-examine our intentions and strategies to reach our goals?
These posts are evergreen, but as I am writing this the year is ending and the new year is starting, it has become time to re-examine the way we are approaching our life in a business manner. This post will help you set the goals that you can approach with the new beginnings methods and the now method.
I know our life isn’t a business and we sometimes shouldn’t take life to seriously, but when talking about getting the most out of life and reaching our goals, it can help to look at our goals in a bit of a strategic manner.
Even when looking at the way we enjoy our life and how our relationships work, there are ways we behave, patterns we follow and decisions that we are used to making. The dynamics are usually set unless you are a very spontaneous person. If you look at it that way, even spontaneity is a dynamic that yields a certain type of results.
To get different, we have to do differently.
We might be happy about the way our life is going, but to leap into the new year, into the goals that we want and into the life that we want, we need to use a strategy of expansion.
Meaning that we have to look at the things that we do that are feeling limiting.
Sometimes the strategy is to slow down, to pause, and to observe. Some of us are always running and always trying to get to the new thing that we don’t create space for our goals to be born.
For example, a way that I am re-examining my strategy is by looking at the way I am feeling lately. That feeling is pressure and overwhelm.
I am going to be using this example to show you some tricks to re-examine your year and see where to adjust. Each of these will include a few prompts you can ask yourself to go deeper into each of these.
1. Emotional Analysis
This comprises understanding how we feel about the results we were getting with our current habits during the entire year. Also, understanding how these habits are making us feel. Getting results provokes feelings as well. This helps us understand how the body is reacting to this and it helps us to distinguish what is adaptation and change and what is truly not working for us.
3 questions you can ask yourself to start the process.
Think of habits that you feel impact your goals.
- When thinking about one of these habits, what emotions come up?
- What do you believe these emotions are trying to tell you about this habit?
- How can the habit shift so the emotions alight with how your goal makes you feel?
2. Success analysis
The point of this step is to deeply analyze the goal we want to achieve. To fully understand where we want to be helps in planning a strategy, the energetics and the steps that we might need to follow to get where we want to be. This also helps to inspire and open up to creating by re-examining our processes.
- Make a list of three goals that you were trying to accomplish last year but didn’t quite get to
- Describe each goal in depth and write about what would it bring to you energetically
3. Long run thinking
This part of the process guides us to understand and to be conscious of where will we be if we don’t re-adjust. Bringing to light these things serves not only as inspiration but also as a reflection in retrospective. This is also where we recognize what we are doing well to keep implementing it.
The decisions we make now will surely impact our future, not to scare you over here or to be create an existential crisis but that is kinda how it works. So here we think in the long run, will we get there with the decisions we are making?
- How do you wish to feel in the long run? What are the top three feelings that you see yourself experiencing?
- What do you believe that will cause those feelings in the future?
4. Radical re-imagination
If we changed our approach according to the steps that we are taking and the emotions that we are feeling, where would we be in 3 months, 6 months and a year? How far can we get by changing the story that we tell ourselves, our habits and strategy?
5. Differential path
This is the part of the process in which we decide and organize what is the radical path that will take us to where we want to be. Even if the change is tiny and we shift slowly, in the long run, that change will be very noticeable. It’s like two lines that aren’t exactly parallel. They will eventually cross even if the difference between them and perfectly parallel lines is unnoticeable at first.
Start building that path and creating the small moments that will take you where you want to be. A year seems like a lot of time, but once we look back, we realize how fast it actually goes by.
Even if we don’t like it, how we choose to spend every second impacts us heavily. I am not saying this to induce perfection in you or anything like it, but to make you realize the opposite. Even the small moments of rest and stupidity are important.
The moments in which we make mistakes and start re-imagining. That might not look like a lot of action, but it is. The rest and the slowness are part of the process as well.
Great things can take time and they can happen fast as well. As you look inwards for the truth, you will find what is needed.
