The Secret to Actually Achieving Your Goals
Welcome back to the Give Life in 2020 Planning Series! If you’re just now joining us, you can checkout Day 1: How to Get Started With Your Goals in 2020 here.
You might be thinking. Why are we talking about goal planning now? It’s not January!
Well, first …
There is absolutely, positively nothing magical about January 1. You can start goal planning any hour of any day at any time of year.
We’re starting our goal planning for 2020 now because we want you to have plenty of time to work through your 2020 Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planner before the new year, so you’re ready to breathe life back into your home, your church, and your community starting right now.
Now maybe you’re one those people who thinks, “Goals… Schmoals…”
Goals really are all the rave right now, aren’t they?
Women all over the world are waking up to the fact that they are made for more than what they’ve been believing about themselves, and they are ready to start doing something about those desires buried deep in their hearts.
Maybe you’ve been drinking the “goals kool-aid”, and you’ve pulled out a blank piece of paper and started writing out your 5-year goals, 1-year goals, and maybe even breaking them down into monthly goals.
Maybe…
Maybe you have…
But do you feel like you’re ready to actually achieve your goals?
I can tell you that I spent many years writing out my goals only to arrive at the end of the year floundering for purpose and direction.
I’m telling you, it wasn’t pretty.
I had all these dreams, all these really awesome convictions of what God had made me for, but I wasn’t moving the ball forward on any of it because I simply could not stay focused.
Life would happen and I would get distracted, or I would go months without remembering that random piece of paper tucked away on my desk.
I mean, honestly, have you seen my desk? It’s not pretty…
Ever.
Ask my husband…
But there it sat – full of possibility and purpose.
Yet I lacked clarity on how to move forward on any of of my goals.
Let alone know how to execute those plans!
Writing your goals down is a really important first step.
There is real power in writing down your goals.
But unless you have a process in place for regularly evaluating how to make good on those goals?
It’s pretty much a waste of pretty paper. I don’t care how cute the printable was you printed off to write your goals down on.
Goals provide direction.
Goals give you something to work toward.
When your days are overrun with mundane tasks (and sometimes boring moments) that don’t seem to make a difference, goals help motivate you.
Goals help you focus on things that matter.
But goals mean nothing if you don’t know how to break them down and put them into actionable steps on a regular Tuesday afternoon.
Over the years, I’ve learned some lessons when it comes to setting goals and actually working toward achieving them.
To be honest, setting goals is the easy part. It’s the follow-through part that I always stumbled over.
That is until I learned the secret.
Want to know the secret to accomplishing your goals?
Evaluation.
Yep. Evaluation.
Putting regular times of evaluation on the calendar is essential to following through on your goals.
Because life happens, I have found that putting systems in place to keep me from growing distracted, burned out, or even hopeless was the key to making sure I actually took action on my goals.
The thing is that goal setting is nothing unless you have the tools, or even the skills needed to self-evaluate.
Evaluation is the difference between good intentions and actually doing what God has made you to do.
If you look at the Creation story in Genesis 1 & 2, after each day, God looked at what He had created and declared it good.
God evaluated the work of His hands.
Later, after Adam and Eve had eaten the forbidden fruit, God came to the garden looking for them.
Do you think God didn’t know where Adam was when He called out, “Where are you, [Adam]?” (Genesis 3:9).
Of course He knew where Adam was!
God asked Adam where he was because He wanted Adam to self-evaluate.
As image-bearers of God, I think it’s a pretty good bet that we can follow God’s way in bringing life and image our lives after His example. Right?
And this is why I created the 2020 Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planner.
I needed a fool-proof way to make sure that I wasn’t just setting goals, but that I was also evaluating my work and making sure I was staying the course, making good on those God-given goals He set before me.
What do I mean by evaluation?
Well, I don’t mean naval gazing, and I certainly don’t mean thinking about all the ways you don’t measure up.
I just mean asking yourself the right questions to see if where you are now is where you want to be.
Then determining what steps you need to take to get from where you are now to where you need to be.
Here are some evaluation questions I’ve found helpful:
- What’s working for you right now?
- What’s not working for you right now?
- How is your relationship with the Lord right now?
- What three words describe your heart right now?
- What is one thing you could do to help grow your relationship with the Lord? Your spouse? Your children? Your friends?
- What are you turning to for comfort? What changes do you need to make?
- What is draining you right now? Is there anything you can take off your plate? Delegate?
- What lies are you believing right now? About God? Yourself? Others?
A lot of us probably ask these questions at the end of a year, right before a new year. Or when we’re really overwhelmed…
Here’s a whole list of great questions to ask at the end of a year.
But I don’t think it’s enough to evaluate our lives once a year.
Because God didn’t look back at ALL He created and declare it good.
He stopped and evaluated His work each day.
Each day was declared good.
There’s a lot of talk in the Christian world about the spiritual disciplines, and we especially like to talk about our need for prayer and quiet times.
These are good things. Essential even.
But I don’t think we talk enough about our need to journal and evaluate our lifestyles and choices.
I think that’s why we are all so burned out and frustrated.
We don’t realize how far the Lord has actually brought us.
We just see the sour circumstances in front of us, or the failure at work this week, or even the incessant blow up in our home with our children, and we don’t remember that we’ve actually come a really long way.
That even if the progress is small, there is still progress.
And it’s simply because we don’t stop and think and consider our days.
So…
Evaluation is the secret sauce to setting and achieving your God-given goals.
And that’s why I created the Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planner.
With the 2020 Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planner, you can trust that when life gets crazy, you won’t forget your goals, the things God has given you to do, the big rocks so to speak.
Because the Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planner, isn’t just a planner, It’s a way of life, you can practice the spiritual discipline of journaling on a regular basis.
And because you’ve built in regular times of evaluation you can be sure that your goals won’t be forgotten the minute you write them down.
The 2020 Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planner is designed to help you get crystal clear on where you are now so you can get to where you want to be.
Then, your 2020 Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planner will help you make good on those goals all year long with regular check-ins and evaluations to stay on track and reset more than just once a year.
Yesterday, we started with the 2020 Brainstorm page.
Now it’s time to start answering the questions needed to uncover your sticking points, determine what lies you’ve been believing, and figuring out where exactly you could use some extra focus in 2020.
So, flip on over to the Get Your Bearings section of your Seasonal Goal Planner.
Slowly, prayerfully start answering the questions written there in your 2020 Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planner.
Keep working your way through the Getting Real with Yourself, Spiritual Life Evaluations, and whichever life stage pages that apply to you.
Then, stop when you get to the Gaining Clarity for the Year Ahead. We’ll pick back up there tomorrow.
One of my favorite quotes is from Lydia Brownback’s commentary on the book of Psalms. In describing Psalm 12, she says, “Discouragement blinds us to reality. It makes everything look worse than it actually is.”
If we don’t take time to get all the thoughts running through our brains down on paper, they will just keep turning over and over in our minds and we’ll never experience peace. We’ll stay stress paralyzed and not be able to do anything with our goals.
In the last few months, I’ve sat down with a several people who were experiencing incredible amounts of stress and overwhelm and said, “Alright. Let’s talk this out. Tell me, what IS working for you right now? What is the BIGGEST source of stress?”
And we just keep working through questions until we have dumped everything out of their brain and onto some paper.
When they see everything on paper, the look of relief on their faces is always immediately apparent. You can literally, visibly see someone’s stress levels drop.
Getting things out of your head and written down is powerful. So, get out your 2020 Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planer and work through the evaluation pages.
Then, come back here tomorrow, and I’ll help you sort out everything you’ve journaled. Once it’s all out of the brain, we can start doing something with it.
You can checkout all the posts in the Give Life in 2020 Planning Series below:
- Day 1: How to Get Started With Your Goals in 2020 here.
- Day 3: Growing Roots in 2020
- Day 4: Choosing Goals to Focus on in 2020
- Day 5: How to Make a Goal Action Plan in 2020
Don’t have your 2020 Made to Give Life Seasonal Goal Planner yet? Now is a perfect time to change that! Click here to get your Seasonal Goal Planner, and then come back here and finish the series with your planner in hand. Not sure if you the Seasonal Goal Planner is for you? Not worries, click here to get all the details.