{Hello friends. A few days ago my husband, Travis, and I were talking. I was sharing my frustration with myself and my failure to follow through on some goals. The result of this conversation was this post. He wanted me to write it, but he said it so well that I told him to instead. I think you will be truly challenged, encouraged, and blessed by it.}
It’s the end of Feburary. Many of us have quit our new year resolutions, while others of us have drastically cut back on our ambitious goals. What is it that keeps us from fultfilling our well-intentioned plans?
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I’ve heard many good reasons in the past:
We don’t write them down…
We don’t create action steps…
We don’t have accountability…
We don’t set time to review…
And the list goes on.
But is there one thing we can do differently that would drastically increase our success rate? I believe there is.
Recently, Alesha and I were talking about the goals we set earlier in the year. Some of them are so far successful, while others are not. As we talked, Alesha said something very interesting:
“I know what I have to do. I need to stop going on social media in the morning before I do my morning routine. If I did that then most of my goals would be going great.”
When she said that, it made me think of a post I’d written last October on waking up earlier. In the post I talked about how I think that if you want to wake up earlier, the discipline you need isn’t so much in waking up at a specific time, but in choosing to go to bed earlier.
I think the same is true for goal-setting.
When we set goals, we tend to focus on what we need to do to fulfill them. I think…
We should spend just as much time choosing what not to do as we do choosing what to do.
Think about it this way:
You have 24 hours in a day. Currently, you are spending those 24 hours whichever way you want. Then comes a goal you want to achieve. You focus on adding a new habit, or rhythm into your life, but you never once think about the fact that you day is already full of 24 hours worth of activity.
In order for us to do anything new, we have to remove something else. It is literally impossible for us to add any new habit or goal into our lives without subtracting something else first.
Today is already filled with 24 hours of activity. For many of us, these activities will include things such as:
Sleep
Meal prep
Eating
Meal clean-up
Work
Driving
Parenting
TV
Social Media
Hobbies
Reading a blog (at least this one)
And much much more!
But not all these things are worthwhile. Some of them add value. But maybe even the ones that ”add value” don’t drive us in the direction we want our lives to go. We can’t fix that by simply setting new goals.
We need to choose what we will remove from our busy lives just as much as we need to choose what habits and goals we wish to add.
Otherwise, we’ll continue to fail.
We’ll continue to have unmet goals and ambitions.
So what goals have you set recently? Have you thought about what habits and things in your life have to be removed in order to add these new things in?
What will you quit doing, in order to start doing something else better?
And as the saying goes:
“Say NO to good things, so you can say YES to great things.”
May we all learn how to say “no”, so that we can begin to say “yes” more frequently.
{be blessed}
