In my time in between my first and second child we got a new business coach to help us evolve the Newmark business who took us down a path we hadn’t been before. which was fabulous.
There were a few key outcomes we took from this training – sales, referral marketing, prospecting, business planning and targets, project planning for small businesses and individuals, and goals.
I saw a post on Facebook today on Flying Solo about goals, and it was really interesting to see the responses. Some said they thought goals were essential and provided clarity and focus to their efforts, others said they liked to use other words to describe their goals, and others said they think goals are a waste of time and that they like to simply ‘think. act. do’.
Until I worked with this business coach, I always found goals difficult. It was the perfectionist in me that hated goals, but also one of the things that kept me from reaching peak performance in many way. You see, for me, many things don’t get off the ground until they’re perfect, which means, many things don’t get off the ground because I’m not happy with them yet. But what I’ve come to be (slightly more!) comfortable with lately is that while perfectionism is wonderful and makes me feel amazing, something is actually far better than than nothing, and often me something is actually 90% pretty good, and perfectionism tries to get it to 110% plus, which is probably unnecessary!
Anyway, I digress! I finally learned how to set goals that worked for me, consistently, and also learned the subconscious programming behind why it worked for me. The model I learned was from Brian Tracy called the 10 Goal Method.
My thinking on goals for mums started with a conversation with a very close friend, and me giving her a goals book. She was in the midst of the indecisiveness, and reconstructing her new life, but without any parameters and a LOT of cycling work being done inside her head by herself.
These goals were across a number of different life areas, and helped me take small incremental steps towards things I actually really did want in my life.
By following the ten goal method, I also only had ten things to achieve for now. This doesn’t mean I don’t have a long list of life goals, but having ten in my sights are the most important for now, and the others often happen along the way because they’re written down (insert Harvard stat about 2% of the Harvard graduates having 98% of the wealth because they wrote it down). This makes me feel a sense of satisfaction that there are ten, which is enough but not to many (as to overwhelm me), and not too few (to make me impatient about achieving just three). It’s a good workload.
In the midst of the reformation of yourself and the new version of you, some would say the real you, it is good to write things down to get them out of your head, and to crystalise what you really do want. You’re not writing something that needs to be perfect the first time. You’re not writing about something that would be good for another mum. You’re writing about something that you want. Something you really want.
Often as part of this reconstruction phase of your life, you’ve realised that you actually have time for anything that is important to you, but that things that actually aren’t really that important start to fall away. Sometimes this can feel like you’re loosing a piece of you, especially if it is something that you have done for a very long time. By being mindful of what you really don’t want, you loose the sense of regret or loss, because while you may have been doing something for a long time, it’s actually not that important now, and you’ve been pushed to make decisions about what you really want because you no longer have the time available to do everything.
You’re probably an over achiever as it is, and you probably get a lot of satisfaction from getting a lot done, and interacting and connecting with a lot of different situations. And this is what makes you a great person, a successful business person, and also an inspiring mum, most importantly to your children, and to others in your community.
As the saying goes, ‘energy goes where energy flows‘.
The ten goal method is a way of being authentic, and defining what it is that you want for now. It need not be what you want forever, so take the pressure off that. But what do you want for right now. One of my very first goals, was that I wanted to have valuable time with my family, so I defined what that looked like for me. You see, when my first bub came along I was amazed at how little time she spent awake. I loved her to bits, and every second that she was awake I wanted to engage with her and enjoy her. While she was a very little baby, this took very little time in the day, and I still had time to get my sleeps in when she did some sleeps, and tidy a few things up and keep in touch with people, and do the groceries online. But as she begun to grow and sleep less during the day, my personal productivity went down hill, and my ability to get anything done became really challenging. I wanted to give her my undivided attention while she was awake. By setting a goal of ‘playing actively with her for at least two hours every day’, it made me ‘present’ in the moment when I was with her and playing and engaging just with her (not on the phone, etc), and happy to get other things done the rest of the time which were also important.
Lyn Worsley once told me that you only need active engagement with kids 30% of the time. This also helped ease my mind.
Another thing that I learnt, while in the process of learning about de-cluttering, was that for something to come in, something needs to go out. If you want to make space for something new to come into your life, you need to subtract before you can add — there is only an infinite amount of space in your head and time in your day, no matter what kind of super woman you think you are. And this also links back to self care. If you don’t take care of yourself, nobody else can or will. If you don’t care for yourself, you’re pretty well useless to anyone else really.
This especially applies to sleep, and burning the candle at both ends. While you could find time pre-children to recover, it is much harder to do with less and/or broken sleep. You’re decisions can become ill founded (and often require re-work, which creates further frustration), and you can start on a real downward spiral, and often start to draw into your mummy cave, perhaps hibernating a little!
The other part of goal setting, and planning in general, is that it allows you to focus your attention, and not get distracted by bright shining objects or away from your hedgehog – what you’re really good at. And what you really want to do. It is easy to become distracted by new things coming along, and sometimes you will shift your goals, but at least you will consider the opportunity against your previous goals and your framework before acting on something not worth your attention, or not something you REALLY want to spend your valuable time on.
In motherhood, I have found that I have really challenged a lot of pre conceived ideas I’ve had, especially in defining what Mum means in my life, what type of Mum I want to be, what type of wife I want to be, and what sort of example I want to show to my children. And in addition to it defining my thoughts, one of the hardest things is that while in the past I would have been happy to agree to disagree, but parenting to a large extent is about what WE decide is wright. While the children are incredibly intelligent, we need to essentially align and come to one view, if we’re to keep the child sane, and ourselves . This involves lots of discussion, and agreeing on an approach.
For me, responsibility also came in here too. I wanted to share the responsibility of parenting, and the children to be influenced by both of us, not just one of us. I couldn’t handle that much responsibility, especially early on while I was learning at an absolutely astronomical approach (and mostly by observation and racking up countless hours of observing bub). Eventually reality did kick in, and it wasn’t possible for us to both be around as much as I would like AND have food on the table, but we were able to discuss our roles and find a solution that worked for us.
Children are incredibly impressionable, and the influence you have on their values should never be underestimated. (Tweet – Never underestimate your children… Jane Shields) The older they get, the more you’ll start to see yourself looking in the mirror (for better and worse – e.g. do we really say ‘what’ all the time instead of pardon, do I REALLY talk like that on the phone, do I really stand like that!!!)
My husband has tried this also, to great success. And it was incredibly useful for me to see how he framed his ten most important goals, and to confirm we were aligned on the most important elements. This was a mechanism of communication for us, and also allowed us to work as a team to achieve each other’s goals.
By the two of us both doing this method, we’re also able to share our priorities, and it helps to make things realistic, and have a calm discussion about how things might come together. While we do them separately, I’ve found that alignment is useful in actually achieving them. In our case, I tend to make his a little more ambitious, and he tends to help me make mine a little more realistic (or financially viable for the time!).
Today I started on a well overdue goal, and it felt amazing. I started a course on meditation. You see I’ve listened to a lot about meditation, and I wanted to learn it last year, but all the eggs didn’t line up and I didn’t get to it (because other more important things took over). But it reminded me that I had set that goal in place, and now I was about to tick it off, and replace it with a new goal on my list of ten. This doesn’t mean I wasn’t working on my goal all the while, as I came across pod casts and conversations about meditation (and learnt that the purpose of meditation isn’t to have no thoughts coming into your mind!), and I even enrolled in a course that didn’t go ahead. I also learnt through this time when I couldn’t go whole hog, that there were some little shortcut meditations that were right for me for the time, for example, I learnt about mindfulness, active meditation (like yoga, walking, exercise), the power of the deep breath or the yawn to reset the parasympathetic nervous system, and a tiny introduction to the art of breathing.
While I hadn’t done my ten goals for a while, I had engrained my energy towards those ten things.
This led me to check out my last ten goals, and see how many of them I had achieved, and to write a new ten to cement down for the next month, and then work towards those and write them down as often as I could.
So yes, I think Mums should have goals. I think they should be written down, and should have timeframes. I also think they should evolve, but evolve as you wish them to, against your values and what you really want, not evolve by distraction and unsatisfying behaviours.
Rx
