Much of the time, we set ourselves up for failure. We set goals in order to please someone else. We plan for things that we aren’t ready to tackle. We try to do too much. These are recipes for failure. If you are going to set goals, make sure that they are achievable. Spend some time figuring out what you need to do. Determine what success looks like and make plans.
Every year in January a horde of people line up at the gym for that magical workout that will change their lives forever. They make grandiose promises of losing 50 pounds, giving up sugar, or quitting smoking. Of course by the 2nd week of January the gym is a ghost town, candy bar sales are through the roof and that pack of cigarettes became two. Why is it so hard to do what we know needs to be done?
When it came time to review how things went in 2015, I had a hard time. I had nothing to work with because I did not set any goals and plans at the beginning of the year. The only valuable thing I was able to do was list out the areas where I did not do so well. This year will be different. I have set a number of goals and plans for myself.
Year in Review summary In an effort to improve my life, I am publishing a year in review for 2015. Since I didn’t set any goals last year, it is a bit hard to grade my progress. So, before the year is over, I intend to set a few goals on what I want to improve next year. But first, I think it would help to summarize how i think things went in 2015.
When I was seventeen my father confessed, “Hey, I’ve never done this before. We are practicing on you.”. I think every parent on earth feels that way. We really have no idea what we are doing. Most of us are dealing with issues as they come by the seat of our pants. Even worse, the rules keep changing. And it doesn’t really matter how much experience or how many kids you have.
As I fly over DFW airport, I can see downtown Fort Worth in the distance. I have 13 years worth of memories there that are surprisingly happy considering how eager I was to leave. I guess it is hard to fully appreciate something while you are experiencing it. The tendency, at least for me, is to move forward. I have been in pursuit of some ambitious goal ever since I was a boy.
Kids naturally learn. It’s what they do. In the dictionary it should describe children as “Small humans who obtain knowledge at dizzying speeds with the express intent of driving their parents insane”. As parents, our concern is what they are learning from whom. Our hope is that they are being influenced by parents, teachers, and coaches etc. The truth is that they are primarily influenced by video games, YouTube videos and their friends, mostly their friends.
Lists are how we track what we need to do but this alone is not enough. Despite an abundance of technology available to help us keep track of tasks, many of us still keep these lists in our heads. We do this for a variety of reasons. They all have a common root. We don’t trust our system. We don’t actually believe that the list is the full list. We know that things have either been forgotten to be put on the list or were not important enough to track.