How you can have both your apples and chocolate: on balancing discipline and flexibility…
I absolutely love goal-setting! More than actually achieving the goals, even. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I joined Knowmads. Nonetheless, I decided to focus on my strength of being a good dreamer and have been developing a three part workshop on developing and dreaming goals for your life and how to plan for the future in the most practical way possible. Luckily, I have the help of Fran, a master of strategy, working on this endeavor with me. A lot of people are fairly avert to the whole goal-setting thing. Here’s what I suggest: call it ‘creative visualization’ if it makes you feel better. It’s simply a matter of words, but often that can make all the difference. Like I said, one of the reasons I came to be at Knowmads was to better understand how I can actually bring my dreams into the world. I absolute hate structure, however, but once I decided to look at the structure as ‘form’, changing the word made all the difference.
When it comes to goal-setting, or ‘creative visualization’, I developed the following four “rules.”
a)they do not rule your life, they create purpose for it
b)they are dreams with a deadline, but deadlines are not bad because…
c)the race to the deadline is only with yourself, so think realistically and intelligently when developing a plan to achieve these goals.
d)yes, develop a plan… goals are of no value if treated like an entry on a to-do list
believe everything is possible, and it is. write down each step it would take to become the president of Uzbekistan and begin to do them, one at a time, until you have won the election.
To prepare yourself for creating an ambitious yet specific plan on planning for your year (one year is a good start, then breaking it down into three month chunks is recommended) I recommend you make a list of the top ten or twenty things you’ve done. You can look at mine here.
I also recommend you make a list of lifetime goals that you think seem almost impossible to achieve. It’s important to get out of your comfort zone, and this is a great way to do it. You can see mine here.
Unsure of what you’d like to get out of your year, out of your life? Join the crowd! To get some more insight, however, I’d recommend taking inventory of your talent and skills by looking at past jobs and experiences you’ve had, past praise you’ve received, and looking at what makes you passionate by making a list of three or four things that make you incredibly happy. Seeing all these ingredients on paper are necessary and useful to make the best recipe for your own apples and chocolate. As a wise woman once told me, “there’s a story in the telling,” so make an effort to write about yourself as much as possible. This is you time to be selfish, so savor it!
At the end of my first workshop, after having split up in groups of two to write a speech to the group thanking everyone for what they had accomplished, I asked them to be as specific as possible describing what they had accomplished, who they needed to thank, and for what. I also recommend doing this as a sort of tool in exploring what you want to get out of the year as well as exploring who can help you get there. I left the Knowmads with the assignment of creating a creative visualization board for themselves to visually represent their accomplishments they hoped to achieve. Stay tuned until the next workshop for more details on how you can make your dreams come true and to take a peek at a few creative collages we are creating here at headquarters!
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