PhotoCredit: http://put-on-all-your-colors.tumblr.com/post/67443880686
I spent much of 2019 working towards goals that I didn’t have clarity on. Each week I would write my goal list and each week I would dismally fail at that list. This year I have a new approach. Each week I am picking a new goal and making that my focus for the week. So far I have added dry January, a daily writing practice and now - week three - I am focussing on daily meditation.
Each week I figure out the best time in the week (or day) to do the action for my goal. I investigate how to best incorporate the activity into my life. At the end of the week I examine if it’s working and whether I keep doing it. Whether I try something different? Or decide it needs to come off the list.
So far I have kept them all. But it’s early days.
There are 53 weeks in 2020. The overachiever in me is totally delighted by that. One more week means one more goal.
I love my overachiever self; she helps me get a lot of stuff across the finish-line. But I am learning that every day does not need to be a performance. Most of my life was spent this way. Come out conquering and firing on all cylinders, leave nothing left un-said or un-done. No stone un-turned.
I’ve been on a journey away from this; away from the need to be busy. Away from the need to do #allthethings in an attempt to win at life. Ambition, it turns out, is rather a shallow objective. It’s rather meaningless to get to the top of the mountain if you don’t have the equipment, don’t enjoy the journey and - once you get there - don’t know why you climbed it in the first place.
My quest of late has been to dig a little deeper than mere ambition. Because, let’s face it, it can be as blind as it is shallow.
Pushing yourself is fine until you stop to ask yourself, why am I doing this? What’s the point? What’s the point of my obsession with doing a handstand in yoga? To attempt to somehow win yoga? To look around the room and high-five myself that I am one of the few people who can do it? To get a good picture for my social feed?
Do you know your why for everything you claim to be important? For everything your overachiever puts on your list?
By the end of the year I will have investigated 53 goals. Some will not make the grade under closer inspection. Some goals will be elimination goals as I learn the art of not-doing.
I have a new sense of what it means to be an overachiever. Let’s see where I get on the handstand. I’ll instagram it. So you know I won yoga!