My Year So Far and Goal Setting

Photo: angietorres

Last year I started a blog to jot down my progress through something. (I’ll write about why I’m not telling you the topic of this blog in a minute.) This blog was supposed to be motivating, hold me accountable, and all that other good stuff. But what happened was that I was making amazing progress with this thing, which is why I wanted to share my progress in the first place. But as soon as I started blogging about it, it all went downhill.

One day, I was reading a magazine about the law of attraction when an article about overcoming situations in your life caught my attention. The writer explained that in order for you to overcome something, you need to stop paying attention to the problem and think about the opposite. For example, if you’re trying to lose weight, focus your thoughts on living a healthy lifestyle through working out and eating healthy. Do not focus on actually losing weight. According to the law of attraction, you attract what you think about most.

The article also stated that if you are trying to eliminate something in your life you must stop blogging about it, writing about it in your journal, making it the topic of discussion etc. I immediately thought about my blog and how as soon as I started to jot down my progress, there was no longer progress, only setbacks to record. So, I immediately deleted the blog and stopped focusing on the situation.

Then I thought, well if I create a blog about things going good in my life, maybe the same situation will occur? And that is how My Inspired Year came to be. And the same effect is happening in my life now! I’m having an amazing year so far, and yes I know it’s only February. My business is growing. I want to design more websites and get away from the club flyers; and I have had several clients inquire about websites. I have a set amount of money that I want to make from my business each month to supplement my income from work, and my employer asked me to put together a web design package to offer my services to our clients. And the number he suggested I charge was the exact amount of money I wanted to earn from designing each month.  I want my day job to offer me more flexibility, and I’ve been given the opportunity to work from home a few days out of the month (it’s a start, but the ultimate goal is to work remote, and eventually have them as a client instead of as my employer.)

So far, career wise (and this is really the main focus of my life at the moment aside from being a great mother which will always be priority) all my goals seem to be lining up. And there is nothing more motivating than meeting your goals. I used to be the worst person at goal setting ever. I would set these huge, unattainable goals and then get frustrated when nothing got accomplished. Nowadays I put my goals in 3 different categories.

1. Easy to accomplish goals. These can be things you want to accomplish on a daily or weekly basis. I’d say set these at no more than 2 weeks. That way you can experience a lot of small victories and feelings of accomplishment.
2. Short term goals. I set these goals at 1 month up to a year out. Usually my easy to accomplish goals are the steps that lead to completing my short term goals.
3. Long term goals. These should take over a year to complete. Usually your short term goals are steps taken toward your long term goals. I usually brainstorm about what it would take to accomplish my long term goals. My short term and easy goals stem from there. Using a semantic map like you used in school would be a good tool to do this.

These categories have really helped me to set more goals and accomplish a whole lot more. It’s the small victories that help me to push forward and reach for that larger victory.