Reflecting on Goals
This year, I wrote my goals as I often do. I started with my bold business goal, to grow the company by 20%. Followed it with a leadership goal that I use to keep my eye on the team’s professional development and staying organized so that company communications and objectives are clear and remain front and center, along with marketing and visibility goal that include key metrics for what success looks like.
Personally, I like to have a clean, organized, functioning home and family life, so I set a goal that I defined with specific strategies that I want to follow throughout the year. Things like weekly budgeting, family meetings, home organizing, and trip planning.
Lastly, I addressed my personal foundation, which is made up of mindfulness practices, nourishment, creativity, play, contribution, and rest.
Aligning Goals with Excitement
We always begin our program with our planning call, but then you have a week to sit with things, and as I was in my “in-between” week, I felt oddly out of resonance with my goals. You see, I’d sort of cheated and plugged all the things I wanted to do this year into ChatGPT and had it spit out my goals. I told it what edits to make and where to get more specific. At the time it felt like an efficient way to prepare for my planning call.
The problem was that my goals contained what I wanted to do, but they didn’t excite me. You want your goals to excite you, like you are working on the MOST IMPORTANT things. They are meaningful. For instance, these goals are the same, but reading them feels really different:
- Pay down 20k in debt.
- Financial freedom: Pay down 20k in debt.
Reordering and Realigning Goals
So I sat with my goals and realized that all the metrics and details were there, but what I was calling them was all wrong. For instance, my “Marketing and Visibility” goal isn’t my language or what I get excited about. So I changed that goal to “Learning and Teaching.” Though the underlying metrics are the same, learning and teaching are my jam. Now I felt excited to do the commitments under this newly named goal in a way that I didn’t before.
I also decided to flip-flop the order of my goals. I put my personal foundation first. After 13 years in business and a lot of healing work on my body, I know this: If I’m not in top shape mentally, emotionally, and physically, I can’t execute on my BHAGs (big, hairy, audacious goals) without risking burnout.
Lessons from Goal-Setting with AI
What I learned from this experience is that AI is super helpful in so many things. It made my holiday prep to-do list; it’s great for dinner ideas, and I’ve found it helpful in a number of areas of business, but when it comes to something as personal as goal-setting, we don’t just need to be organized; nothing can replace tuning in and listening to our own knowing, and nothing can replace doing that work yourself.
After updating my goals and reordering them, I feel great when I open our app to see what I want to work on for the week.
What about you? Do your goals resonate and reflect what you really, really want?
