Aligned Goal Setting

Do you feel the “New Year, New Me” energy fading? You’re not alone! By mid-January, most people have already set aside their resolutions.  This week on the Live A Vibrant Life Podcast, I’m inviting you to rethink goal setting—and discover a kinder, more realistic path to achieving your dreams.

Let Go of January Pressure: Goals don’t have to be set (or achieved) in January. Your priorities can be nurtured year-round, whenever your energy feels right.

Choose Peaceful Productivity:  What if you could be productive without sacrificing your mental, emotional, or physical well-being? The secret is to align your goals with your natural energy, and approach growth as an ongoing rhythm—not a frantic dash.

Budget Your Energy Like Your Money If something matters to you, make sure it gets a slice of your daily energy budget. Your energy ebbs and flows throughout the year. Be kind to yourself in the darker months and shorter days. No one has “summer energy” all year long. 

Above all…be gentle with yourself. Your dreams are important—the process can be peaceful AND productive.

Links 

• Join Kelly's Group Coaching Program
• Join Kelly’s Free community on Skool

Let's connect.

I am cheering for you!

Transcript

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Hey friends, do you know that by the middle of January most people have put aside whatever it is that they wrote down or declared on January 1st That new year new me energy starts to go away. I wanted to offer all of us... what if there's a different way to think about goal setting and to move from setting goals into a season of peaceful productivity? I'm sharing some of the content from my group coaching program with you today. If you would like a community to help you think about what's important, align your thoughts and your feelings to take the small action steps, I invite you to join my skool community. It's free. I share workshops there. It's a way to create a community around you that's on the same path, and you can find out more about it by going to kellytibbitts.com. I'll also have the notes linked with this podcast. Welcome to the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I'm life coach Kelly Kibbitz, and each week I'll be here to encourage and equip you with the tools you need to grow in self-awareness and invest your best energy in your dreams and your purpose. I believe self-awareness changes everything. Let's get started. Welcome to Rethink Goal Setting. From this place of reflection and deciding what we want, we're going to move into our next series, which is called Peaceful Productivity. Instead of being productive at the expense of our mental, emotional, physical, spiritual health, what if we could be productive in a peaceful way that aligns with our actual energy? That's where we're headed. Once you've had a few moments to reflect, now we wanna shift. So we've looked back, we've learned, we know what kind of energy we want to be in, and from that aligned energy, nobody wants to be overwhelmed, confused, frustrated, aggravated. That is not anyone's desired aligned energy. So what do you want? From that aligned energy, let's shift and focus on the future. Now, in general, there is this great push for the first week of January to set and achieve New Year's resolutions. In general, somewhere around the middle of January, most people drop whatever that desire was because they didn't actually have the energy to add to their life. So here's a few myths. See if they are true of your life. Goals have to be created in January. I highly disagree with that. I think ideally, you are sitting in your best mental energy and thinking out three, five years and making smaller goals along the way. Who do you wanna be five years from now and then back it up three years, 18 months, a year, six months. What small goals would help you today become that version of you? Goals are not intended to be just a big list that help you hit the ground running without intention. We put. Our brains brain dump as the action steps for the day or for the week or for the year. What if we take our time to notice what's important, but then allocate our energy and make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time? Another myth is that goals are going to be created once and then held onto rigidly. Our time together every single week is to align our energy so we can decide what things we're deferring. What things we're deciding is a no for this season or maybe a no in person. It's, you know, a future. No, we're, it was something we wanted, but looking right now, we're going to say no or something that's important to us that we wanna say yes to. That keeps not getting any of our energy. And I think that's an on repeat practice. What do I want? What worked? What didn't work? What would I like to do differently on repeat? Staying in aligned energy while we make the decisions. So that's our goal for this workshop. What could goal setting be? I think it could be a process that has a rhythm and an ebb and a flow to it. Every week we come back, we breathe, we remember the energy we wanna be in. We notice what's working. We pivot and we encourage one another to take that next small step in the right direction. I think one of the most important things we can do is decide what priority is getting our best energy. So if it's safe to do so, you can put your hand on your heart. Close your eyes, you take a deep breath in, and then on your exhale, see if you can really breathe out deeply, maybe make a little noise. And when you do that a couple of times, you should start to find yourself back in aligned energy. And from that place of being fully loved, nothing you do can change that you're fully valuable. What priority would you like to focus on? What priority, what number one thing would you like to give your best energy to? It might be a relationship, it might be a responsibility. It might be something that's important to you, a dream that you have. If you can name it, write it down, say it into your phone, take a picture and add some text. What is your priority? And I think goal setting needs to be an ongoing habit. Something that's personal, something that's unique. It's not just one and done. So that's what we're going to do today. We're going to talk a little bit about how to rethink goal setting, because what's important to you is important, even if there's no urgency to it. So when we're thinking about goal setting, we wanna talk about making sure that it's effective for you. One of the most important things I learned is that energy, just like money needs a budget. We need to know where our energy is going. If something is important to you, it needs to be showing up somewhere on your energy budget with allocated energy that works. We can't be relying on two o'clock in the morning as the time to do the thing that's important to us. So what's important to you? Did you write it down? Can you. When you're thinking about how to approach your goal, your dream, your priority, some of the books and bible verses and songs and podcasts and workshops have helped you. You may be like me and just have a whole bunch of workbooks with lots of notes and books that are underlined. Some of those are going to serve you and we should review them, and some are no longer serving you, and we can just leave them to the side. So I'm encouraging you to take the whole month of January to spend some time reflecting, some time brainstorming and dreaming, and some time thinking into the future. What are your hopes and dreams for 10 years from now? And when you take the time and you go through it slowly, it's going to produce a more peaceful productivity, which allows us to avoid burnout. Sometimes people try to add to their life without taking the time to reflect, and often that gets very frustrating. One thing that might help you to remember is in a normal year, there are months where there's more daylight and you may have more time and energy in those months than you do in the months that are colder and darker. So maybe right now, the kindest thing for you to say is, I have about three blocks of energy in January, but I know in June I might have six blocks of energy a day. So I'm going to start to allocate my time and energy, knowing that's probably going to start increasing. But I'm not going to be unkind to myself and expect myself in January to live like I have June energy. Now, the months of the year are not the only thing affecting your energy. You might be in a season where you're taking care of yourself physically to heal. You might be helping somebody go through a hard season and you're giving out a lot of relational energy. So we wanna notice what it is that's serving us. When we think about our hopes and dreams, we want it to be something that encourages us and equips us and gives us energy, not something that we use against ourselves to judge ourselves. So at the end of the day, why do we need on Wednesdays to align our energy? To what we want to be, and that is what helps us become more resilient. There's many people who have said what I say over and over again. Ellen found specifically that Bill Gates has said, most people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can achieve in a decade. I know Tony Robbins has sentences like that. You probably can find people too, but what we're trying to notice is our human brain is going to say January 1st, set a goal. The first two weeks of January, squish that goal into your already overwhelmed life. Even if you're feeling tired from the holidays, even if you don't feel a hundred percent. And then if you can't achieve the goal within the next 21 days, something's wrong. And I just wanna push against that and say, let's rethink goal setting. I think your hopes and dreams are so important, and I want us to honor the reality of our energy. So now let's take a moment and shift to the future. So we've looked back and learned that's what we did last week. We looked back and we learned what worked, what didn't work, what we would do differently. Now, we're noticing today what is our aligned energy. Some people call that the word of the year. What kind of energy do you wanna be in? I'm often better at describing what I don't want than what I do want. I don't want to be resentful, frustrated, frightened, nervous. I wanna be at peace. I want hope. I wanna live in a loving presence. So from that aligned energy, now we're going to look to the future. Do you know what is important to you? Can you name it? As I mentioned, I had a few people to my home on Saturday, and it was fun to watch people remember what's important to them. Oh, I wanna be strong. I wanna have a great relationship with this person. That's important to me. I wanna go this place that I've been dreaming about. What's important to you? See if you can write it down and try to consider all of your life area. Not just work, but what do you want in your relationships? What do you want, um, for the home that you live in? I saw a really neat little phrase of you could make your home look like a five star Airbnb. By making the decision that you want your home to be a place you love coming home to, and so you're going to let go of some things. You might change some paint. And my little picture to help me think about that is, could I make just a little corner of my home in my living room downstairs in particular, that I love coming home to? I think that's what a Christmas tree did for me. I loved walking in and the lights and the ornaments and looking at it, it drew me into that space. Well, I could make that very simply in different areas of my home because. Having a home I love coming home to could be a really important priority for me to have. And if I don't pay attention to it, there's no urgency there. It won't get any energy. So do you know what's important to you? Have you written it down? This is what I want. I want this for me. I want this for these relationships. I want this for my home. I want invest more time and energy in a hobby or education. Now what you need is some good mental and emotional energy to answer some of these questions. Like what thoughts and feelings do you have about that? Before I found coaching, I spent very little time asking myself what I would like. I spent almost all my time asking what everybody else would like often at my own detriment, and it did not produce in me an abundant, vibrant mentality. I was a very exhausted human. And so now my first question is, what would I like? And I think I'm more enjoyable to the people that I love, and I know that I'm creating the life I wanna live from that place. So what thoughts and feelings do you have about deciding today what you would like to do is actually important? Sometimes your brain, my brain will use logic against us. Well, I know better. Well, I don't even really think that The reason we wanna write our thoughts is to be able to say with love. Oh. I think I'm thinking this now. How I know I'm thinking something is I'm aware of my feelings. I'm not always aware of my thoughts. You might be aware of your thoughts or feelings, or you may be aware in your body an action that you wanna take or not take. Letting yourself know that not every thought we think is true is a very helpful place to start. Not every thought you think is true, but if you can write them down, if you can notice them, if you can share them with somebody else, that allows you to say, Hmm, I think I'm thinking this. So for instance, if I think I am too old to start something new. I am not going to feel excited, vibrant, aligned. My body is not going to be in that energy. So it's good for me to notice I'm thinking it, but it doesn't mean I have to keep thinking it on repeat. One thing that might help you as you move towards your desired goal is to notice all of the responsibilities. The soul care, the body care, the physical energy you wanna be spending on yourself, the places you wanna go, the things you wanna do. Notice it, put it down somewhere. And then decide, is this something that could get energy in 10 years, in five years, a year from now, a month from now? For instance, I work with people who wanna create a podcast, and they don't often have the energy currently to add a podcast to their life. But what we can do is say, well, in three months we can think about 20 things you'd like to talk about. And in six months you can record your first three podcasts, and in nine months you can launch that. What would it look like to notice what's important to you and start to give it a date when you'll give it some energy? What's your priority focus for this year? Am I taking good care of myself so that I have love to share with others? Are my thoughts aligned to love? Are the actions I'm taking kind and loving? Those are the things I wanna be asking myself. What are my three to five small action steps that move me towards that this week? That's why I have a coach. I use her time with me every week to help realign. I have books and podcasts and journaling, and then I'm trying to add in some creative things like painting and going places where I can look at art because I enjoy it. If you have a word of the year, if you have a desired energy you wanna be in, let's name it. Let's decide that it's worth your time and effort to notice what's important to you, and then we'll come back together creating peaceful productivity, creating the results that are important to you from a place of aligned energy and peace. I thank you for joining the Live A Vibrant Life podcast. I hope our time together encourage you and will equip you with the tools you need to move into the vibrant life you desire. I'm here to help you live a brave, creative, purpose-filled life. And if you'd like to learn more. You can follow me on Instagram or Facebook, Kelly tibbits life coach, or visit my website kelly tibbits.com. I look forward to connecting again soon.