Planning your Becoming

It's that time of year where the internet abounds with ideas for setting your resolutions, suggestions on keeping your resolutions and consolation to those that break them.  You can find tools and articles to help you set your goals, ways to make them SMART, and systems to help you break them down into manageable bites and schedule them.

Instead, I want to suggest that you add a dimension into your goal-setting this year.  All too often we focus on what we want to do or have.  Our focus is on what we want to 'get' out of and from our goal setting, but we spend little time reflecting on what that achievement will make of us.  We are all shaped by our experiences in some way.  What we live through, the way we approach and experience it, will shape the person we become.  It therefore makes sense to devote some time to considering, and planning, our Becoming.

“The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get.”  Jim Rohn

We can all set goals that are achievable, allowing us to check them off the list and feel good about ourselves in being able to do so.  However, asking ourselves whether that goal aided us in becoming 'more' of the person we want and hope to be, is likely going to be a more challenging criteria.

Instead of simply establishing that almost inevitable New Year's resolution of weight-loss (come on... we all likely have a few pounds to lose after the holidays!) consider instead that the goal is not simply to lose weight.  In Planning your Becoming you take this a step further.  Perhaps you have always struggled to lose the weight, or perhaps your challenge was not in losing but in keeping the weight off.  The goal then is not truly to merely lose the weight but to gain the ability to remain with a lifestyle plan that allows you to create and maintain a healthy weight.  What do you need to 'become' in order to make this true of you?  A weight-loss plan merely becomes the vehicle by which you become the type of person that no longer needs a conscious weight-loss plan with a definitive start and stop, you simply 'are' the weight you want to to be, leading a lifestyle that supports that - effortlessly.

Your efforts shift slightly as your focus shifts.  No longer are you rewarding and celebrating each pound lost as the milestone, but instead rewarding the resiliency to stick with the plan, you recognise each donut you say no to as a nod to your determination, each sit-up and push-up as a testament to your internal strength and determination.

These are the life-lessons that surround us, that have not only helped shape the person that we have Become thus far, but that continue to shape us into the person we will be in the future.  Who do you want to be? Craft and plan now for your Becoming.  Build goals that test and strengthen and build the character traits you admire, the skills you want to possess, the values you believe in.  It's not simply about checking things off of the list, it's about checking the right things off.

Take a look at your list of resolutions and goals for the year and assess what their accomplishment truly means to you.  What life lessons will they provide, what character traits do they support or allow you to test or discover, what values do they build?  Who you Become is within you to create.  Begin shaping it consciously by establishing goals and accomplishments that support your Becoming.

Everything we do teaches us something about ourselves.  Spend your time wisely, teaching yourself those things that are worth learning.