The first half of the year is almost done. Can you believe it? I know for me, this is a time when I reflect on my goals and kind of gauge on how they are going. It feels measurable to think “am I half-way there?” There might be goals on your list that you haven’t even thought about past February. I want to help!!
Today I’m sharing some tips to help accelerate your goals over the next six months!
1. Visualize achieving your goals
In Essentialism, Greg McKeown talked about how Michael Phelps visualizes his swims going perfectly. This analogy stuck with me and I started thinking about my goals. What if I took each one and visualized what it would look like to achieve it? I don’t just mean one line about what success would look like but paint a detailed picture. This can help in two ways:
- If we are afraid of our goals. I think sometimes we make goals and are so afraid of them. We feel like they are impossible and can’t even picture actually reaching them so we don’t even try to take the first step.
- If our goals are unclear. When we are forced to visualize what it looks like, we can see the components of what it would take to get there that may have otherwise felt foggy.
Here’s an example from my 2017 goals.
GOAL 3: TO LIVE IN THE PRESENCE OF THE LORD.
Each day, I greet God in the morning before I open my eyes. I’m smiling and excited to see what He has planned and I have already mentally chosen to obey whatever He asks me to do. I am overflowing with joy and peace and it affects the whole energy in the house. After I throw on clothes, wash my face and brush my teeth, I go sit on my couch with my Bible and journals. I’m excited for this quiet time with the Lord and I feel Him speak to me in such a real way. When I close my Bible, I feel ready for the day, even the tough things to come. Throughout my day, I meditate on a verse and wrestle with what the passage is saying WITH God. He reveals so much to me as I ask Him His thoughts. I have opportunities to pray with the girls, with Tyler, while making sandwiches. It feels like I’ve got a constant friend with me. His presence brings such peace even when I start to worry. I hear Him clearly lead me to people throughout my day who simply need to feel loved by Jesus through me. I’m grateful that it no longer feels like my brain in ping-ponging but that I’m steady and centered with Jesus.
This exercise reveals a few things to me:
- How I greet God each morning. I want to start doing this! I remember seasons of this but haven’t done this in a while. It’s an amazing way to point my day in a positive direction.
- I don’t want to do a quiet time for the sake of checking it off my list. I want it to prepare me for my day. This makes me ask how I can be intentional with the time.
- If I want to experience this, I am going to have to resist the noise of the world. It won’t just happen on it’s on.
- I want this joy and peace every day!!
Visualize your goals and discover setbacks you maybe didn’t see before and see what things you can start incorporating into your life now. Also, get such a clear picture that you are no longer muffled on whether you really want it! And let that all propel you forward!
2. Create habits that compound your goal
The big lesson I learned from Darren Hardy’s book The Compound Effect is that it’s the little things every day that will “compound” to have a big “effect”. I know that’s incredibly basic and we know we should be doing things every day but unless we put some things on autopilot, we are essentially having to think of possibly 10 times a day of something we should do to move each of our goals forward (assuming you have 10 goals).
Figure out one habit that you can put into practice for each goal and spend time on the front end establishing it as a habit that you can do automatically each day.
I know how frustrating it can be to finally sit down at the end of the day and feel like all those things you were gung ho to do that day didn’t happen. That instead, the day was filled with the urgent and putting out fires. Habits can help you make small progress in those areas you said in January were important to you.
If you need help, check out our habits worksheets in the library. Sign up here for access. We actually have 3 different ones in the shop and if you own a copy of The Finishing School, we have a chapter on Habits there with another worksheet! 😃
3. Know which lens to use
Sometimes it can be overwhelming because we don’t know what to actually look at with these big goals. Here are my suggestions:
- For the to-do list – zoom in. Create monthly goals to help you reach your yearly goals.
- For the prayer list – zoom out. Pray for the yearly goals so God can propel you in the overall right direction.
I recently decided to include my yearly goals instead of my monthly goals in my personal section of my prayer journal and it has made such a difference!! I am almost daily being reminded of my overall goal and it’s helping to keep me focused. Before I was praying for monthly goals and it was easy for my actual purpose to get lost and to be so focused on tasks. That’s fine when I’m actually working through a to-do list but when I pray, it’s about what God can do and I want to make sure I’m trusting Him with the big plan. God wants it all of course but when I pray the big prayers, I feel like I don’t get lost in the weeds of details. Instead, I’m hovering above seeing the whole thing and doing it with the God who holds it all together! For my to-do list though, if I didn’t break it down, I would quickly get overwhelmed!
If you don’t have a prayer journal, now is the perfect time to test drive our format with our 6-month journal and then start 2018 with our yearly journal! Shop here!
4. Find a golden nugget
I feel like the standard advice is to forget the past (and what could feel like a failure of the first six months) and look forward. Not so fast. We aren’t going to wallow in it but we have to analyze things a bit. Why didn’t your goals materialize like you thought? What were the unexpected setbacks? Do you even care about this goal? Or was it too unrealistic? Dig deeper and make sure the last 6 months were good for something because we ultimately know God had a purpose for it even if you feel like nothing happened. Make sure you aren’t missing it. Sometimes we can face the same trial over and over and over again if we simply don’t look to see why something is happening.
That’s it! Now it’s your turn friends! Work through these steps and I hope you will feel refreshed to tackle those goals!!
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