“Setting Goals, Finding Purpose, and Making Time”
Fear, insecurity, and self-doubt. Television, internet, and social media. No matter how hard we try to avoid them, there are forces in the world that distract us from accomplishing the things we choose to purse. Internal, external, and all places in between, the white noises of life will come at us from every direction. They can consume our thoughts and our actions; preventing us from reaching the things we so desperately want to achieve. Whenever I reflect on the goals of my life, certain questions enter my mind. Where are things at? How am I doing? Is this still a priority? These are honest questions, and ones that I’ve been asking myself for as far back as I can remember. Will I find all of my answers? Better yet, am I even intended to? When I consider things from this last perspective, something interesting happens. I feel a weight lift off my chest. I still appreciate the significance of my personal goals, but the timeline for reaching them seems less consequential. We talk about life being a journey, rather than a destination. For me, this suggests the possibility that accomplishing each and every one of my goals isn’t nearly as essential as this: that I do my best to continue to establish them.
Some important considerations on the matter of goal setting: if I’m going to put my time into something, are the sacrifices, process, and eventual results worthwhile?
There are so many decisions people make when it comes to the causes they get behind. We all have different life experiences that influence the ways we think and act, and we can’t always explain why one particular goal will resonate with us more than another. Our interests vary, and that helps keep the world interesting. How we prioritize our time is a personal choice. We shouldn’t have to justify it to anyone. Even so, there are some beneficial considerations we can, and probably should make when evaluating not only our goals, but the methods we apply in our effort to reach them. Can our actions be viewed as selfish? Is our behavior destructive? Are the emotions we elicit hurtful to others? If we find that questions like these are difficult to ask ourselves, then perhaps that should be telling us something, as the insight they provide can go a long way toward determining whether the time we’re sacrificing is being well spent.
Personal responsibility: the gatekeeper between what we want, and what we need to do.
Completing our objectives can require an all-out commitment. We’re engrained with the mindset that nothing good comes easy, and so we dedicate ourselves in mind, body, and spirit, pooling every conceivable resource we have to try to bring our goals to fruition. Ambition alone is rarely enough. What many of us need is more time. One of the frustrating things about time is how easy it can be to fixate on what we don’t have, as opposed to what we do. We look at another person and think, “If only I had their time and life, imagine how much I could accomplish.” The truth about this perspective is that it’s rarely accurate. None of us knows exactly what’s going on in another person’s life, let alone all of the responsibilities they have, the people they may be helping to take care of, or even how difficult it might be just for them to take care of themselves. “The grass is always greener,” they say, and they’ve been saying it forever. Whenever I find myself dwelling on the busyness of my life and how thinly spread my energy can feel, I find it helpful to focus on what is within my control, and the choices I make with the time I have. “Quality over quantity,” I tell myself, sometimes for days, weeks, and even months at a time. What’s ironic about many of my personal responsibilities though, is how far they go toward defining who I am. They influence the work I do on both large and small scales alike, benefitting me in ways that if I don’t always appreciate in the moment, I trust I will understand later.
Connecting forces: what my kids and their favorite video game have taught me about the link between my personal responsibilities and my ambitions.
The idea about how our personal responsibilities can influence the work we do in other areas of our lives reminds me of a word I recently learned from my kids. Parkouring. The kids used the word to describe what they were doing one day while I was watching them play Minecraft together on X-Box. My first thought was that the definition had something to do with completing an obstacle course. When I asked my son if that’s what the word meant, he responded by shrugging, and telling me, “kind of.” Curious, I looked it up on Google and discovered there’s actually a lot more to the definition. According to the World Freerunning Parkour Federation (https://wfpf.com/parkour), the word parkouring has its origins in a training program for French Special Forces, and is defined as “the act of moving from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ using the obstacles in your path to increase your efficiency.” Basically, it involves analyzing one’s environment and then using an array of body movements (running, jumping, flipping, spinning, etc.) to navigate the terrain. After reading and then rereading the definition several times, I came to the conclusion that this was my new favorite word. Parkouring. How could I never have heard of this before? Most of us are familiar with the saying that life is a balancing act, but when I say those words aloud they sound lifeless to me, like dusty pieces of a tired cliché. When I hear the word parkouring I think movement, critical analysis, adaptability and, most importantly, action. In other words, using every piece of what you have within yourself and from your surroundings to accomplish your goals.
Achievement fundamentals: writing down your goals, breaking them into steps, and building them into your schedule.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. Writing down goals on paper brings a whole new level of realness to the commitment of completing them. Placing written goals somewhere that they can be seen each day is also helpful, as is scheduling a specific day and time to begin working on them. If I can take a big goal and break it into smaller steps, I find the project a lot easier to begin. From there, it becomes a matter of checking off each small step one by one once they’ve been completed. If I can see that I’m making progress, I feel a sense of momentum, which helps to keep me going. As specific parts of the project get checked off, I’ll feel like I’m passing mile markers in a race that indicate how far I’ve gone toward completing my goal. This allows me to appreciate progress and trust that my eventual endpoint is not only possible, but defined. Getting started is the key. The amount of time that gets dedicated in the beginning of a project isn’t nearly as important as the commitment to keep giving it.
“But each of us is an artist…with every choice, every day, you are creating a unique work of art. Something that only you can do…The reason you were born was to leave your own indelible mark on the world.” (Ban Breathnach Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy)
Take care, everyone. Whatever your goals may be, keep believing, planning, working, and parkouring your way through them!
As always, thanks for reading.
- Todd
Work cited disclosure:
Ban Breathnach, Sarah. Simple Abundance: A Daybook of Comfort and Joy. New York: Warner Books. 1995. Hardcover.
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