How big are your goals?
When it comes to goal setting,
bigger goals immediately take most of our attention. Do you know this feeling? You have an idea. It’s for further down the line, you need to work for it.
It’s a process. It needs time, and you need patience. Your best choice would be to slow down.
Sit down, breathe and break it down into smaller objectives on the way. But you can’t wait, you’re
so excited, you have to tell everyone, right now. So the ball starts rolling; your mind is
a blur of vague ideas that may lead you there, but you need to tend to them. Of course, it would help if you had
a team, the right people.
You need so much initially, and there’s so much that has to happen it almost
seems impossible to reach. Do you know that feeling?
Too much is never enough, but what is enough?
Decroux said it:
“Too much is never enough.” He was right, of course. But how much is enough? How do you create
that process to reach your big goals so you don’t burn out on the way there? It’s obvious, isn’t it? The faster you go – the greater the friction and
the risk of burnout. If you go slow, there is less friction, and consequently less risk of burnout. But it’s not only that.
When you slow down, you can take the time you gain to put your mind to the process; be mindful of it. Since the road is long, you need to make your strides at a reasonable pace to be able to
sustain in the long run.
When it comes to long-term goals, it is easier to break the process down to smaller, more straightforward goals you can achieve weekly. This level of resolution lets you see the progress you make from week to week.
Planning your process
One of my favorite things with clients is creating a working process based on their resources. What I love about this are two contradictory things:
1. The constraints – You know what you have in your resources, which you can work with. It’s simple. There is no way to work with what you don’t have. “We work with what there is” – still echoes in my mind after so many years of saying it to my teams.
2. The unknowns – I love the unknowns in a creative process. You don’t know what you don’t know, so you are in a constantly thrilling process of discovery, which is another good reason to slow down so as not to miss anything on the way while exploring.
Think of the way towards a far-reaching goal as exploring uncharted territory. Everything is new, and you need to pay attention. Now that’s exciting. Forget the big goal for a while, get into the groove of the journey.
“If you are concentrating on the work that is in front of you, you will be better off. This attitude, what I have come to call a process mindset, helps prevent you from trying to rush toward an outcome when taking your time is a better strategy.” Says Brad Stulberg in The Practice of Groundedness.
The groove of the journey
The groove of the journey is the joy of the open road. When you slowed down in the beginning, you looked at your end destination and from that point backward into what has to happen so you can achieve your big goal.
Using your imagination, you threaded out the landmarks on your way. The little goals you are working towards. You got to the three, two, and one-month goals. Dialing down into weekly goals, you could then imagine daily to-do lists, that serve your greater weekly, monthly, and long-term goal.
The only thing now is to set out and do your thing, slowly but surely, putting one step in front of the other, just like me with my 5K Objective. Slowly but surely towards your goal.
Enjoy the journey, pay attention to what you discover, and log your
steady progress, to make sure you are on track.
