Setting Goals Will Change Your Life
And some personal reflections here too.
In the second part of this three-part goal-setting series, I want to share with you how setting goals will absolutely change your life.
In last week’s post, I shared four questions that you can answer to set yourself up for creating meaningful goals. And now let’s dive in to part 2!
If you have ever set goals or thought about doing something new in your life, and then you’ve either forgotten about it, or you’ve not known where to begin, or you’ve just not been able to achieve it, then this is for you.
Sometimes when we’ve tried to set goals and failed, then this can make us feel like a failure, and I want you to know that it’s not you, it may have just been the way that you’ve been taught to think about goals. So, don’t give up on goal setting, and don’t give up on yourself, because you are too important and your one life is too important for that.
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If I think about my own life, every important moment and every beautiful moment happened because I dreamed about doing something, and then I went out and took action. To take just one example, if you know about my own career, I could have absolutely stayed in my previous career as a neuropsychologist. I was great at my job, I helped people, and it was really interesting. But it wasn’t the calling I had in my heart. I could not have got to the end of my career and the end of my life knowing that I hadn’t pursued a life of time management coaching, graphic design, and bringing the two together in designing planners - those were the things that I really felt pulled to pursue, even though my career at the time felt good.
I really only had the courage and the belief that I could change my life because of a process of exploration and goal-setting.
I really actively started my personal development journey at the start of 2019. Up until that point I had dabbled in personal development, but I was a person who was just getting through a todo list. I put things on the list because I felt like I had to do it all, I felt like I had to succeed, to get it all done, and to do anything that anyone asked. This meant that life was like spinning plates in the air - I didn’t have enough downtime, I didn’t sleep enough, and I wasn’t paying attention to how I felt and how I wanted to feel.
The beginning of my personal development journey looked like me putting time aside with a pen and paper, to write down some ideas that felt meaningful to me. I would put the kids to bed and then get into bed myself and have a notebook and write down my thoughts.
I actually looked back on that first notebook and the very first thing in there was a list of things that I wanted in my life - I wrote down 7 things, from lifestyle to career to values.
And then the second thing that I did might come as a bit of a surprise - I wrote down 10 people that I was influenced by, and these were not people I knew personally, these were people whose content I had been reading and who I felt were helping me and supporting me through a difficult time, and teaching me to improve myself and heal. They say you’re the sum of the people who you surround yourself with - I totally agree with this, and by doing this I wanted to highlight the people I thought were most beneficial, so I could remind myself of those people when I was feeling really low.
I also wrote down my values, which were not just qualities I wanted to live by and aspire to, but also good qualities that I wanted to accept about myself, qualities that I already had, because in the past I’d had a hard time thinking that I was worthy. I could then come back to this list when things had been especially hard.
I also wrote down guiding principles - things that I was learning and wanted to hold at the forefront of my mind, and I also wrote what I wanted in my ideal week.
I then created a mind map of how I wanted to feel. Doing it this way meant that I could see what was related to what, and I could move closer to the actual feeling that felt best, and so that meant I could come up with a couple of core feelings that were really important to me. This exercise is really interesting because it helps to guide your choices, and if one action or achievement doesn’t work out, you can work towards something else that also allows you to feel that same feeling. This really helps you to understand why you do what you do, and so helps with self-awareness. And again, with this base, you can then design a life that is meaningful to you.
So this was really the start of a long process where I would regularly journal and answer prompts about what I wanted in my life, so I could really decide what to work towards.
In the middle of 2019, I then came to quite a significant crossroads in my life. I had to decide which lifestyle I wanted, and all the things that came along with that. I was a single parent, living in my dream house that I could no longer afford with working the number of days I was, and I had to decide on either Path A - where I increased my work hours, earn more money, see the kids less, and keep the house. Or Path B - where I sold the house and moved somewhere else, left my job to pursue a new career, work during school hours, and spend more time with the kids. Both paths had benefits, I loved my job, I really loved the house and what the house represented for me and my kids, but I also wanted to be someone who prioritised time with their children, and I had this dream in my heart to change careers. It was only because I had spent that year working out my dreams, my values, and my goals, did I really understand and also accept which path I should take (and so, I sold the house in 2020 and eventually changed careers in 2021).
So goal-setting for me has really been a significant part of my story.
Now, I think that setting and going after goals does three things. I think that it pulls you out of autopilot, I think that it helps you get really really clear on exactly what you want to be doing, and it helps you feel less overwhelmed, and I want to elaborate on these three ideas.
Autopilot
We live a lot of our life on autopilot. Our brains really like to do the same things over and over, because it’s easier and because your brain knows that those activities are safe (and remember, your brain’s number one job is to keep you alive).
So you go around doing the same routines and reacting automatically so that you don’t have to think too hard, and this should be a good thing, your brain is supposed to be making a lot of things automatic because your brain is trying to process millions and millions of pieces of information throughout the day, so it would just implode if you had to consciously think about everything. But what this means is that sometimes you get a bit stuck doing things that don’t really support where you want to go in the future.
We want to become wiser and learn new things and have new experiences and get healthier, so doing the same old things does not support that. By consciously setting goals, you then have an endpoint that you want to work towards, so that you can help steer your brain into doing new actions and with repetition these new actions will then become unconscious habits.
So it’s a process, you have to move from dream or idea, to conscious choices and new actions, to new automatic habits and routines that will replace the old routines. This is how setting goals pulls you out of autopilot and changes your life. In this way, you are living with intention, and being awake to not only what you are doing and why you are doing it, but the consequences of your actions.
Clarity
The next idea is about clarity. Have you ever felt stressed because you have something on your mind, and your brain keeps going over and over the same stuff?
This is because we can only hold a few things in our mind at once. This storage system at the forefront of your mind is called your working memory, and it’s very limited, and when things circle around and around in working memory, it might feel like we can’t get out of it. Taking a pen and paper, or a digital document, you can start to write down those thoughts and ideas and dreams, and what will happen is that you will start to empty out those first few thoughts in your working memory.
And then something special will happen - you’re brain will follow the thread and start to think of the next logical thing or the next thing that flows on, and so you’ll be able to explore your ideas much more effectively, and you’ll be better able to solve your problem, problems like, “what do I want to do with my life” or “should I do this thing” etc.
You’ll write your first few thoughts down, and then there will be space for your brain to think more clearly about the next idea. So as you flesh out all these thoughts on paper, which is of course a much bigger space than your tiny working memory, you’ll be able to see the path ahead, see the gaps, see what doesn’t make sense, and see how you’re feeling as well, if that is something that is a little difficult for you.
From all this information, you’ll then be able to generate some goals, and you’ll be able to see them in the big picture, so - why you want to pursue them, why they are important to you, and how you’re going to execute them.
Doing this process of goal-setting really gives you clarity about what you want from your life.
Overwhelm
The final idea is that I believe goal-setting reduces your overwhelm. I think that sometimes we have a lot going on in our lives already, but we also have that mental to-do list of all the other things that should be done, like “oh I have to take those bags of clothes to charity” and all those things that we want to be doing, like that photography course or printing out family photos.
And it feels absolutely overwhelming because you just can’t see how you’re going to do another thing, and you believe that you’ll just never get to them. But when we set goals with a timeline and action steps, what you’ll have is a roadmap laid out in front of you so that you can actually see when those things could be done. And when you see that, you can rest assured that things that you want to happen will happen all in good time. This takes those things off your mind, which will reduce your overwhelm.
So for me, I’ve set goals for this year, and there is something that has been on my mind for a while, which is to paint a canvas for above the TV. I had been wanting to do this for a while, but with my wedding and “familymoon” and Christmas, I knew that I couldn’t do it in 2024. So I allocated it to a weekend in the middle of February. I know that January is a busy time with the kids being on school holidays, family outings, and we also want to move the kids bedrooms around, so that’s our project for January, which means I knew that I’d have time for the painting in mid February. Allocating it here meant that I didn’t feel like I’d never get around to it because when that time came, I just did it because I was committed to doing it.
Now of course we can do this in the short term too, you might be planning to batch cook some food, and it’s weighing on your mind all week and you’re thinking you’ll never get around to it, but when you put it on your calendar for Saturday afternoon, you won’t feel that uncomfortable time pressure any more. When things sit in a timeline like this, whether it’s a short timeframe or a long timeframe, then they are out of your mind and not bothering you.
There’s also a matter of sustainability - when you are living an overwhelming lifestyle where you are being pulled in multiple directions, it’s not one that is sustainable, and it will lead to burnout. Burnout is when you are trying really really hard to effect change and it’s not happening, and so you develop fatigue, exhaustion, and a sense of futility. And so if you’re living a life where you’re just running around doing whatever feels urgent that day, then trying to live a life that is more meaningful to you will feel frustrating and futile. Setting goals is how you get around this. You can start with goals around your health, so that you can improve the foundation upon which everything else is built, and then go from there.
Now, I have an important note on control - some people think that having goals, having a plan, trying to predict the future, is all futile, and you might prefer to just sit back and see where life takes you, but I totally disagree.
Hopefully I have expressed that without intentionality, you won’t be doing the things that are most important to you. It’s true that you absolutely can’t control the outcome, you can’t plan 100% of your life, you can’t control other people, and you can’t control circumstance, but you can absolutely sway the odds in your favour, and you can step forward and go after what you want.
And the science supports this, there is a range of research that shows that having a goal and planning leads to greater success than not having a goal or a plan at all. Going back to my example about selling the house and changing careers, there were heaps of things I couldn’t control - like how much money the house sold for, when and if it sold, where we would live after that, how successful my new career was going to be, if and when I would meet a new partner, and plenty of other little things along the way.
But that’s ok, we still need to be the driving force behind our actions regardless of what else happens.
One final thought. Everything that now exists was once someone else’s dream. Every development, every experience, every product, every service, was once someone’s idea, and they took that idea from dream to goal to action. And I want this for you because you are so important. All those things that happen on purpose, happen because you set goals.
Remember, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” (Mary Oliver). See you next time for part 3 on setting goals.