Changing Our Goals Everyday: An Exercise in Daily Personal Evolution

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.
-Alfred North Whitehead

Good goals are living breathing statements of who we are becoming, they should not be static and rigid representations of what we once longed for. Still, many of us have had the experience of writing down goals, only to feel alienated from them weeks later, as if they were a historical document from the past.

Goals do not have a life apart from us, and when are separated from them for too long, they no longer apply because we have grown and they have not.

On the flip side, many of us have obsessed over our goals, looking over them constantly until we’ve habituated and they cease to inspire us; like a moving song listened to over and over again, goals reread incessantly lose their impact.

Our authentic desires, and thus our authentic goals, are like children waiting to grow up; they require contact, maintenance, and constant feeding to thrive. It is not enough to read our goals frequently and be reminded of them, we must breathe new life into our goals every time we touch them, they must constantly be brought out of the past and into the present, or they will slowly die.

The solution is to examine our goals every day and modify at least one goal with each read.

Whether adding a detail here or removing a comma there, the daily maintenance of goals helps insure that they remain fluid, dynamic, adaptable and relevant to our hopes, dreams, and aspirations. If done correctly, changing your goals every day doesn’t result in wishy-washiness — it results in daily evolution of the visions we hold for the future.

The benefits of changing/growing our goals each day:

• Every time we change or modify our goals we are taking ownership of them again.
• By changing our goals every day we stay connected to them.
• The creative energy that gets behind us when we slightly re-invent our goals is beautiful, lifting us up each day and helping us to re-envision our lives.
• We are slowly, imperceptibly, growing each day, developing into wiser, more authentic beings. Growing our goals each day helps ensure that our goals stay consistent with this growth.
• Growing our goals each day forces us to continually reexamine our wants.

Tips for Daily Goal Growth

• If you feel a goal no longer speaks to you, then remove it
• Do not ever change a goal purely for the sake of change, strive to make the goals truly better. If you have nothing to change, then change the order of your goals to reflect prioritization.
• Consider rewording a goal, or rephrasing it with a different emphasis.
• Add a detail. For example, if you know you want to work for yourself, you might expand your goal to include self-employment from home. If you want to save for a child’s education, you might elaborate by stating exactly how much you would like to save. If you want more time alone, you might elaborate by stating that you want time alone for meditation. You get the picture.

One good way to do ensure that you constantly update your goals is to make goal maintenance part of your morning routine. You might want to consider growing your goals each morning after getting up and eating breakfast.

Good luck to you!

~Clay

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