Goal Setting 101

Happy New Year!
It’s that time of year, when we take stock of our life and evaluate all the parts where we want to be better, do better, and eat better.

On any given personality test, I am an achiever. Therefore goal setting is my JAM. I love to set goals and I love to CRUSH goals. (You can tell I’m passionate about this by my use of the all-caps key). But this year, as I am learning to navigate this post-cancer season, I am finding it surprisingly difficult to set goals and New Year’s resolutions like I once did.

This was perplexing to me, because 38 years of life would tell you that come January 1, I am ready and motivated to tackle every single goal on my well thought-out, probably alphabetized, crisp new list. But as an achiever, meeting these goals was never optional. I set goals with the full expectation that they would be met and exceeded, and I always followed through. There was never even a thought that I might not reach a goal I set. And it’s not because I didn’t set high goals… I’ll confess here that just prior to being diagnosed with cancer, I was legit researching what sporting event I could join that could take me to the Olympics. I’m not even joking. (I mean, I wasn’t looking at gymnastics or anything, but surely I can learn Olympic Power Walking?)

But now, even small goals come with the disclaimer that I might not meet it. And the reason is that in this post-cancer stage, life is still quite uncertain and quite unpredictable. I’m not just talking about the constant fear of cancer returning. I’ve learned that while I’m no longer in the “treatment” phase (thank goodness!), I will always be fighting cancer. And that means constantly verifying that I am indeed still cancer free, constantly changing and adjusting treatment options to meet my current needs and the most up-to-date medical advancements, and as a result constant changes in side effects and how to manage them. And that creates a real uncertainty about the future. Making commitments seems to always have an asterisk that says “yes I’ll be there two months from now, unless something changes…”

It’s hard to think about the future when the future seems uncertain.

But the truth is, my future isn’t any more uncertain than it was before. No one’s tomorrow is guaranteed. But my life it is less predictable now. I used to be able to say that today I woke up, felt great, went to my job, did the laundry, exercised, and enjoyed some quality time (or chaos) with my family. And three months from today, life will probably look exactly the same.

And that’s what makes goal setting easy – I know what my life looks like, I can envision how I want to improve it, and I can see what action steps I can take to make small changes over time to get to where I want to be. But in this post-cancer season when the future seems uncertain, the achiever in me struggles to make goal-setting commitments because I don’t know if it’s possible to actually meet them.

I realized I have the wrong mindset. Dallas Willard says “The most important thing about you is not the things you achieve but the person you become.” A goal isn’t a failure if you don’t reach it, but you did do everything you could to get there. And that’s the purpose of goal setting – not whether or not we achieve it, but who we become in the process.

So I’m changing my mindset to meet my circumstances. I suppose you could call it New Year’s Resolution #1 – see goals as a success if you did everything you could to get there, even if you didn’t accomplish the task itself.

A better way to say it – don’t call them goals anymore, call them dreams. “Dreams” hold so much more promise than “goals” or “resolutions”. What’s your dream for the future? What your dream for your family? For your health? For your job? I can live in that space so much easier than in the space where I feel the pressure to meet all the goals.

So here’s the rest of my dreams for this year, as I pray Isaiah 42:9 that it may be a year of the Lord’s favor;

1. I dream to run a Spartan race again (June 2020!)
2. I dream to do a better job of keeping my house clean and tidy (this may classify as more of delusion than a dream…)
3. Write a book and find more opportunities to share my story to help others (sure…nbd)

What are your dreams/goals/resolutions/words for 2020?