Reach For The Moon

Happy New Year! It’s happening, 2016 has begun and if you haven’t already then it’s time to set some goals and make them happen. I only had one goal for 2015. To survive. I am happy to say that I achieved that goal and although I have some mental and physical scars from the adventure, I am alive and well and ready to take on some new challenges.

I have never been all that great at goal setting. I have however always had the desire to be good at it. Oh sure I have stuff in my head that I would like to accomplish and dreams that I would like to see come true. It’s the getting it out on paper and creating the steps to make it happen part that is hard for me. There is a quote by Zig Ziglar that says.

If you aim at nothing, you will hit it every time. 

I think it runs through my head about a zillion times a day. What happens when you don’t write your goals down and create a plan to achieve them you get overwhelmed and then feel like you have no goals at all because it feels like nothing is really being accomplished. I walked into the kitchen the other night bemoaning my lack of vision and goals to Mr. Wonderful. This is when my 10 year old son pipes in, “Goals? Mom you have lots of goals! You have your 1/2 marathon goal, you have your blog, you want to go visit your family in June, you have lots of things that you want to do!” Mr. Wonderful and I just looked at each other and smiled as he gestured wildly and kept ticking off one by one all of the things that he has heard me mention as things I’m dreaming about.

Mr. Wonderful and I went through the book, Conquering the Entrepreneurs Kryptonite, by James Woosley a year and a half ago when we were beginning to shift the direction of our business. Fortunately for us the author of the book and his mentor, Chuck were coaching us through it at the time. We dreamed, we planned and we broke the plan down into actionable steps. Through the process lots of great things have happened and lots of hard things have happened. Overall we are in a much better place than we were and are continuing to forge ahead with our dream of making the complicated issues of investing and tax planning, simple, both for our clients and their families.

Things are both different and the same now. I still have those same desires for the business but I now have dreams for my life personally. What was cool about all that we did in planning for the business is that the steps that we took have freed me up to do other things that I never would have been able to do otherwise. Had the planning not been in place there is no way that I could have helped out from home while I was in treatment last year. So conceptually I know first hand that all of this goal setting and planning work, I just find it harder when I am trying to apply this same plan to my personal life and there is no one holding my hand through the process.

Have you ever taken the time to sit down and really dream about your life? It’s harder than it sounds. It’s hard because most people are so busy living that even the notion  of dreaming about something different is impossible to imagine. When Mr. Wonderful and I began to dream it wasn’t easy at first and we wrestled with the notion that life doesn’t have to be the way it is. We began the process however and wrote some stuff down and began to take action on making some of those dreams come true.

Fortunately I love to read and I love to learn. So I am forging ahead in my goal setting education. I have lots of stuff written down now and I am working on weeding it out and creating some clear steps so that at some point all of that stuff becomes reality. I will keep you updated as I progress forward in this process and hope that you too will sit down and begin to dream and create a plan for your life.

At the end of his podcast Michael Hyatt has a quote that I love.

Your life, your one and only life, is a gift. Now go make it count.

Have a great day, All!