Throughout this past year and a half of _______?, I have realized one thing. This one short life we are given could be lost at any time. Time is so short! How does one even clarify how to make the best use of the time we have left? Illuminating this forced me to narrow my search. What was I looking for, was it time management, happiness, or self-actualization? Did I need to be Awestruck to be a fulfilled person? Developing a sense of wonder seemed to tick all the boxes. But it didn’t feel quite what I was looking for. I searched around the subject fields, and voila! Goal setting! It fulfilled a sense of what will matter for the next minutiae of time.
Looking through the list I gathered, Goal Setting by Susan B. Wilson seemed the obvious choice, as it had a workbook format. From the introduction, I liked the quote from Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning – about how people in concentration camps who visualized their goals for living were thus able to withstand the tortures of their circumstances. Moving on to explaining what effective goals are I thought I was on the right track! But, by looking through the digital book appeared it was more work oriented. That is just one area of life.
Visualizing goals seemed like a good method, and lo and behold, there was a book about that. Drawing Solutions How Visual Goal Setting Will Change your Life by Patti Dobrowski. One problem though, seemed that I couldn’t even come up with a goal to draw. Moving on to Kaizen by Sarah Harvey seemed personable, and had some ways to sift through what to change in your life by analyzing your relationship to your body, what were your areas for improvement. Or through areas of your working life, you can search by several means what new challenges you may want to work toward. But this wasn’t the way I wanted to search for what my goals might even be! I felt a more in depth approach on how to set goals is what was needed.
In Big Dreams Daily Joys Set Goals. Get Things Done. Make Time for What Matters, Elise Cripe describes the difference between goals and to-do lists, divides daily life into 3 layers, and describes what makes a good goal. She describes categories of goals, and how to divide projects into smaller steps. This seemed like Kaizen in having to sift through your life somehow to stumble on goals. Another miss. How to find the worthiest goals, and how to decide what exactly is most important to me in what few years one might have left?
Perhaps the book, The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals With Soul by Danielle LaPorte is the book I am looking for. But, this earlier work seemed much like Cripe’s book, in that it doesn’t seem to provide a framework for how to decide what will become my most important goals.
The nearest book to what I was looking for was Find Your Balance Point by Brain Tracy. This has in-depth explanations of terms and is geared for a person to figure out how setting goals fits into who you are, and helps “to create a plan that drives a life of passion, purpose and self-direction.” It seems to help you define what values and virtues lie at the core of your character and personality. Okay, that’s the one for me! If you were actually looking more for work-related goal-setting sources, there were plenty more of these on this list that I created.
~ Posted by Kris B.
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