Goals…oops!

Goals…yep…I have ‘em! A lot of ’em! One was to have this post done 2 weeks ago…see how that works? The truth is, that no matter what goals we set for ourselves or our families, they’re all pipe dreams unless we do the work. 

I can rattle off a bunch of excuses why I didn’t get this done…we were on vacation…we got a new office…my son is in Poland helping refugees…I have a sick goldfish. 

See? But it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I didn’t do what I needed to do to meet my goal. Does this make me a failure? Only if I don’t do what I set out to do. If I was to stop what I’m writing right now and say “Well, it doesn’t matter…it’s late…I’ll never make it as a blogger.” then I would be a total failure. Instead, I am sitting at my computer at 4:40pm wanting nothing more than to pack up and go home, writing about missing a goal that I had set for myself.

Does it hurt? Only my pride. See, I COULD just pretend that this topic was for this week and tell you all how awesome and amazing I am at meeting my goals. I could do that, but what would that do for you? My secondary goal here is to show you that integrity matters just as much as grit. If you set a goal for yourself and don’t meet it, it’s the perfect time to reflect on why you missed it. Is it because you are trying to put too much into your schedule to satisfy everyone? Is it because you don’t have a written schedule, so it slipped your mind? Figure out why you missed your goal…maybe it was totally out of your control, and that’s perfectly OK…it happens sometimes. I’m sure that the millions of people trying to get out of Ukraine missed a couple of goals they had.

The point I’m trying to make is, it’s OK to miss a goal. It’s not OK to not take what responsibility is yours for missing it. Make the necessary adjustments to meet it next time.

I compare a lot of things in life to shooting firearms. Achieving goals is one of them…in fact every time you shoot at a target, you are trying to achieve a goal…hitting the bullseye. Even expert marksmen miss their mark occasionally. When they do, they take an assessment of what happened. 

Did they blink? Were they breathing when they squeezed the trigger? Did they squeeze or jerk the trigger? Did the wind speed increase just before? All of these questions seem innocent, but any one of those things can cause a miss. After the assessment, the marksman then makes any adjustments needed and fires again…and reassesses, until he/she hits the target as many times in a row as they are trying for.

The simple way to explain shooting and meeting goals is this…look at the target (goal)…sight along the barrel using scope or sights (steps needed to achieve the goal)…deep breath in, let it out, squeeze the trigger on the natural pause between breaths (actions needed to take). Now, did you achieve your goal? Make an adjustment, and try again!

Speaking of goals…my NEXT one is to be walking out the door in two minutes so I have to wrap this up and get it posted! See you next time!