Goals, resolutions, objectives !!! What do they mean to me ? And from when these mattered to me ? Let me share my story.
I recently started thinking about when I actually started setting goals for myself. Well, not actually written down goals, but knowing that there is some target and I am working towards that…. And that, for me goes way back……to millions of days back, when I was in primary school. You see, I was very clear on what I wanted to be when I grew up - you call it ambition, whatever.
I was very clear that I wanted to be a doctor. All the class tests, exams everything for me led to that destination…. With the result that from the time I was in say 8th or so, my mom never had to ask me to study!! My elder sister always took up my share of the chores as well. And then, she looked at what enabled her classmates to flourish in their exams and made sure she got those things arranged for me!! During the crucial plus two years, I demanded lot of help from everyone in the house. You could see my mom writing down tons of notes from all the text books I took from the library. We were a gang doing combine study at our friends' houses. I would around the town for these sessions and my family did not raise any questions. You see, I was in this single minded pursuit of my goal…to get admission into a medical college…
But then, I never got that admission. In fact, I got it almost a year later and that is a story for another day…
I did engineering and then my goal changed to score good marks so that I could get a job..
And once I got into the job, I didn’t have to set any goals. Or, that's what I thought! Why ? The organisation set it for me!! They called it objectives and I went by that! In the initial years, I went by what my project manager wanted me to do. I focused on completing the work to the satisfaction of me and yes, you guessed it right, my boss.
Meanwhile, life happened. I got married, had kids. Frankly, I have no idea now on how I survived each day then!! The day to day survival phase saw my immediate goal reduced to getting a proper sleep every night:)
When my younger one was out of the toddler phase, I started leaning in more into my work. When my kids were out of the toddler phase, I came out of the survival mode. By then , I had taken up more senior roles at work and that is when I started looking at the objectives more closely. I felt I could use "objectives" to structure what I wanted out of my role. I got into the habit of examining my progress against the objectives on a quarterly basis. On the family front, my goal was to spend more and more time with my children.
After leaving the corporate job, I decided to use the learning from the process of setting objectives across all areas of my life, i.e. work, family, finance, self and home. I started setting quarterly goals and this enabled me to a) get involved in various projects and b) keep my eyes and ears open for opportunities. It doesn’t matter whether you successfully complete whatever goals you set. The simple fact that you have a goal and you are working towards that makes you learn more, makes you feel more fulfilled.
The process of setting goals made me more aware of how I can shape my time, how I can pursue different opportunities( and that too at the same time) and enrich my life.
This interest led me to research more about the goal setting process and how to translate these goals into day to day actions in a more structured way.
Even here in this blog, I seem to have written more about goals than anything else. Yes, it is a favourite topic of mine. In one of the first set of posts, I wrote about us having so much potential and how we could start identifying those. Then there was this article about Habits vs Goals. I did share my Big Goal for the year 2019 and how the universe helped me in that. For a more structured look at why goal setting is important, what to set as goals and how, listen to Episode 10 on Goal setting at New Indian Woman podcast here :
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What kind of goals would you want to set ?? I would love to hear the same - Comment below or write to me at krishna@thenewindianwoman.com
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