The wording of goals is quite important

When you think of a goal as a tool for focusing your intention, you will understand why the wording of a goal might be so important.

If your goal is stated as an objective to be reached, what happens then? You will discover, as I have, that striving to achieve a goal is an adventure of the highest order and extremely absorbing. Reaching a goal on the other hand is a short-lived pleasure and it has little staying power.

If your goal is to achieve an ability, on the other hand, it's like you have given yourself another tool to improve your life. There is adventure while you are achieving the goal and there is continual satisfaction as you exercise your new ability.

This is not idle conjecturing. I have been working with misworded goals for some time. How do I know? Because reaching the goal provided little or no satisfaction!

There is a goal that I have been working on for many years with little lasting success. It is the goal of achieving and maintaining an orderly workspace.

I think I discovered today why I cannot seem to accomplish this task which is easily achieved by so many others. I am using the wrong wording for the goal.

If I stop and think about it carefully, I do not WANT a totally neat workspace or desktop!

What I want is a workspace that will let me efficiently handle a wide range of activities at high and low volumes without loss of control.

Now THAT is a goal that stirs my imagination!

This kind of workspace design is an open-ended challenge as it must provide for expansion and contraction of workflow and rapid access to records. I am sure there are historical precedents that can be simulated with modern technology so that I do not need a large staff to fetch and file documents.

I do not need to belabor this further. I think you probably get the idea and I have some work to do on creating workspaces that fit this new goal. I will report later on what results I achieve. It shouldl be interesting.

Comments

[jennifer rice]

I always had a tough time keeping to any goal, especially new years resolutions. This year, however, I too discovered that I wasn't framing them in a way that was motivating... I was using "should," which is such a deadly, unhelpful word. A friend of mine asks herself, "what can I do this year to make it the best year of my life?" Wow, that's powerful. When I heard that I scratched some things off my list and added some new ones. And I'm keeping to them, because I know that these accomplishments will make me really happy come December.