Goal Setting and Personal Growth with Littles

Ever felt the rush of setting ambitious goals at the start of the year, only to find yourself overwhelmed and exhausted? Let us take you through a transformative journey of effective goal setting that promises balance and focus without the burnout. Discover how to prioritize your aspirations across different life areas, like business, family, and personal growth, using the insightful metaphor of a wheel with spokes. We'll walk you through three practical steps to help you decide which goals deserve your attention right now, reminding you that January isn't the only time for fresh starts. Achieving a goal is just the beginning; new pathways to growth are always emerging.

Consider the notion that life’s ultimate fulfillment lies not in reaching an end point but in embracing perpetual motion. Through personal stories and philosophical insights, we challenge the conventional wisdom that success is a destination. Instead, we invite you to find meaning in the ongoing process of growth and learning. Whether you’re juggling the multifaceted responsibilities of family life or seeking a harmonious blend of personal and professional ambitions, this episode offers a reflective dialogue on finding peace and purpose in the journey itself. Join us as we redefine what true achievement means and encourage you to see the beauty in the voyage of continuous improvement.

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Chapters

• 0:02 Effective Goal Setting Strategies
• 3:15 Journey of Continuous Improvement

Transcript

Aliese: 0:02

Hey friends, goals, goals, goals. Right, it's the new year. That's all we're hearing. That's what we're talking about. We're excited about starting fresh, starting new and getting things done. I get it.

Aliese: 0:14

I love goal setting. I love it. I love dreaming and figuring, thinking of ways to improve myself and things that I should get rid of, and just like what new life could look like, different than what I currently have. Right, I love goal setting. I really do.

Aliese: 0:31

But let me tell you, as someone who has done it, trying to do everything at one time will crush you and, like I said, I've done it and it will steal your joy. It'll steal your peace. It'll steal your peace. It'll make you someone you don't wanna be, because you're trying to do all of these things and attain something that you set up for yourself to be better, but now, all of a sudden, it's worse, right. So you can't do it all, my friend. You cannot do it all, and that is what I wanna tell you. As you're setting up new goals, as you're setting up new things for this year, for 2025 or whatever year you're watching this in, you can't do everything at the same time.

Aliese: 1:17

Now, I'm a firm believer that we should not be focusing on just on one area of our life and ignoring all of the other ones. Right, there are seven areas of your life that you should be setting goals and I heard about this first from Dave Ramsey, but he didn't come up with that. But if you focus too much on one of them, then basically it's like a flat tire is the way that they explained it. So you're the wheel of life and then each area is a spoke right. We're not going to get into all of the areas of life and then each area is a spoke right. We're not gonna get into all of the areas of life. That's not what this is about. But you do need to be working on several or on different areas of your life as you move forward. Right, you don't always want to be just focusing on your business, because if you do, then your family will suffer, and we don't want that right. And if you're always focusing on your family, then your family will suffer, and we don't want that right. And if you're always focusing on your family, then your business will never get off the ground and then your friendships will suffer and maybe you'll never read a book again and you'll be burnt out by doing more and more and more just for your family, right? So we want to make sure that we're balanced when we're making goals, but I'm here to tell you that you do not have to work on them all at the same time.

Aliese: 2:26

Every goal that you have, my friend, is not for right now, and we're gonna take. We're gonna walk through how to set up goals that you can achieve right now. We've got three steps to figure out if the goals that you're setting at this moment are exactly what you need to be doing right now and how to actually achieve them. That is what this episode is about. It is about stopping setting all the goals. You don't need to do all of them at the same time. Plus, you don't have to just start them in January. Right, say, you set a goal right now and you achieve it. Well, praise the Lord, good job, that's awesome, and it only takes you till March to do it. So what do you do after that? You set new goals, my friend.

Aliese: 3:15

We never arrive. We never arrive. We're always getting better. We're always learning and growing in the grace of God and learning new things, building relationships better, being smarter by reading more books, learning new skills by watching YouTube videos and trying it out. There's all. There is such an abundance in this life. We never arrive, and so you are always moving forward, but you can't do everything at the same time. So that is exactly what this is all about, right, and it's true for everyone. You can't really do everything at the same time. It's very hard, no matter what season of life you're in, but especially for us. We are moms with young kids, right? Yeah, little people that are depending on you. Do not stress yourself out by doing literally trying to literally do everything. It just won't work out. So let's walk through this three-step process to be able to set attainable goals for you in this season of life, right? And I have a little bonus at the very end. So stick around and don't leave, because this will help you attain these goals, right? So we wanna stretch ourselves 100%, definitely want to stretch, wanna be learning, but we don't wanna break and we don't wanna be overwhelmed to the point that you do nothing at all. So let's start. Okay, the first step is to dream. This is my favorite part. I love dreaming. I like all the steps, actually, but maybe not the follow through. That's not my strongest suit, but I've put in things in place to make sure I do do that Anywho. So the dreaming part. I love the dreaming part. Like what life would look like if I did X, y, z, right, like it's probably very easy for you to come up with what you want to do. Like, what is that goal that you have, right? Do you want to run a marathon? Do you want to stop watching so much television? Are you trying to read one book a month? Are you trying to I don't know any of the things learn how to bake sourdough or cookies, or, you know, grow a garden, or those are all things that I do. But your goals could be totally different, right? And so, whatever those are, now I want you to think of these goals Like what are they? And I want you to think, like, very specifically about what you want to do. And after you have what you want to do, I want you to dig into that a little bit deeper. Why do you want to do that? Why do you want to run a marathon? What would that make you feel? How would that help you? How would that help your family? Like, what is it? I ran a marathon once and I've only done it once and I keep telling myself I'm gonna do another one and I do wanna do another one and I think I will at some point. But what I really want in this point in my life and I keep saying I want to run a marathon is I just wanna be healthy. I wanna not lose that ability to run that I worked so hard on. I want to be healthy and strong and be able to run around with my son without being tired, right? That's the why of what I wanna run a marathon. The other whys of why you wanna run a marathon is because it's freaking cool, man, to say that you did it. It's neat, I like it. So I mean it doesn't have to be anything profound, but you do want to know why you want to do the things that you want to do. Why is it that you want to watch less TV? Because it's a good idea is not enough One. It won't help you propel yourself forward, but it also. We're also trying to dig into the why, to see if what your goal is in the next step was we evaluate it and rework it. Because if you have the why, but the season of your life right now is not conducive for that particular goal, then maybe not. Maybe then you can take that goal, the reason why behind the goal, and figure out how to do something different for that goal. I'm getting ahead of myself, okay? So right now we're dreaming, we're thinking about things we want to get done, things we want to change in our life, things we want to add, things we want to take away, like whatever that looks like, and we are digging deeper to figure out what the driving force is. Why do you want your kids to stop watching so much TV? Or maybe yourself? Maybe you want to stop watching TV? And because I know it's good, for me it's not enough. Keep going. Keep going, girl. Like, is it because you know you're a nicer person when you're not watching TV? I know that if I have a podcast on or the television on or something happening in the background and my son is there, I get irritated because he's distracting me from this junk that is not actually important at that moment, right? And so I want to not do those things when he's around, because I know that I'm not. I'm less, it's it's not. It's harder for me to be overwhelmed when there's less going on around me, right? So I want to be present with him and in a good headspace. So that's why I want to not listen to podcasts. When he's awake and with me and I'm supposed to be spending time with him, right, and so that is my why. That's more than just I know. It's good for me, right? Do you know that you're a nicer person when you're not watching television? Do you know that you get more things that around your house when you're not watching television? So, like the deep, why, right? Why do you want to start baking sourdough bread? Because you've read that it's better for you and that it's a cool new skill that you can, it's cheap and it takes time, and so you will be working through the process of what that looks like, right? So like it's healthier for you and it's a skill that you can bring back and it's very frugal, right? Because once you have a sourdough starter, you don't salt, so you should put salt in there, but that's basically it to make some artisan bread. So there's just these things that are underneath, why, underneath your goals. That is what we want to do first, right? Dream wonder what those things are. Look hard at yourself, figure out what is it underneath your goals. That is really important, right? Do you want to go for a walk every day with your spouse after he gets home from work or after you know, you guys are done with whatever it is that you do, like that's great, but it's not because you want to go walking. I mean, maybe it is, but it's probably because you want to connect with them without the distractions of electronics, right, but maybe walking is not for you guys right now. All right, moving on, okay. So that there's all those examples, and so the second one is evaluate and rework, right. So we want to look at where we are, right. You know what you can do, right. You know what your life entails, you know what your kids need, you know what your business needs, you know how much time or you can figure out how much time you have available for new things. Because the thing is, you can't just keep adding stuff without something either suffering or getting ditched, like something will fall through the cracks or you will. It'll just suffer over there, right? I do believe that you can expand your capacity as you move forward, but it's not, it doesn't just happen. You have to work at that, right. So what you need to be doing is evaluating the season of life that you're in. And this is not to make excuses, we're not making excuses. It's looking at a realistic place that you're in. You want to be honest with yourself, stretch yourself, because if the goal was easy to get to, you would have already done it right. So the goal that you've set is probably not that easy. We don't want to set it so far in a you know out of reach that we can't get it. That's super discouraging, but it does need to stretch you and you need to be thinking about where you are, what you can actually give to it. And if that goal that you set, let's use the marathon example as continue with that example, right. So you want to run a marathon, and I say that probably once a year, that I want to run a marathon. I'm like I'm going to do it, let's do this thing. So my husband we when I did it before, we didn't have kids, we both worked full time, but then afterward we didn't have a lot going on. We had like Bible study and church, but not a ton of else, and so he would get on the bike and I would run. That's what we did, and we did it a lot, because running a marathon takes a lot of time, but at this moment in my life you can't run a marathon. I mean, I guess I could if I really really really wanted to give up some other stuff and do it. But my underlying reason of wanting to do it that we talked about earlier in the dream section was because I wanted to stay healthy. I didn't want to lose my ability to run, because I worked hard on that and I started running when I was like 15, 14. I don't know, so that's over half of my life, I'm 34. So it's been a bit, and so I don't want to lose that ability. And that's one of the big reasons that I want to run a marathon, why I keep saying I want to run a marathon. Other than the cool factor right, you may not think it's cool, I think it's cool, but in that example, I don't want to lose my ability to run. I want to stay healthy, I want to stay active and I want to be able to just like play with my son, right, and so and I didn't add this in there earlier, but this is true I want my kids just my son to see me being active and healthy and want to emulate those things. Right, so that's important to me too, the legacy of being active and healthy, and want to emulate those things right. So that's important to me too, the legacy of being active and being healthy. I want him to have that as well. Now as I dug into that, why in the dream section and I move into the evaluate section and I say right now, in this season, can I dedicate three days a week to running regular, like runs, dedicate three days a week to running regular, like runs and one day a week to doing long runs? That will just continually get longer until they are taking several hours on a Saturday or a Sunday. Now, if I wanted to rework my life, I could probably do it, sure, but I would have to change a lot of stuff. And I'm not willing and this is what you need to be looking at whenever you're deciding if your goal is the one that you need to keep, I'm not willing to change around a bunch of stuff in my life to reach this one goal, and that's okay. If you decide that you're not willing to change a bunch of other things like if your goal is really big like that, like running a marathon, to be able to accommodate that goal, then you need to step back and say, okay, how can I reach the whys that were underneath that goal and still achieve those whys without doing that specific thing? And so that is where we're evaluating and reworking. So in the marathon example, instead of running a marathon, I could just make sure that I go to the gym or work out three days a week and have one of them be running at least one of them be running because I don't want to lose my ability to run, right, so I know I can fit that in. I've been doing it for a while, so I know where it fits. But maybe for you, right, you can't get to the gym. Maybe that's just not a possibility. Where I live, my gym has a childcare and so I can take my son with me, and so that's super convenient for me, and so I know I can make that happen. It works in the season of life that I'm in. But let's say you don't have that and you don't have the support and you don't have help or whatever it is in your season, right, what else could you do? Maybe, if you're just trying to be healthy and stay active and leave that legacy for your children to stay healthy and active, why don't you just decide to do two or three workouts at home every week? Maybe you do a Pilates wall challenge those are all over the internet, right? Or whatever it looks like in this season, and do not beat yourself up because you couldn't hit that really big, lofty goal. Maybe you will one day, but today may not be that day. When you have littles in your life, your life looks different. You can't do everything that you used to do, and there'll be a time where you can do more than you can right now. That's okay. That's good, because you're putting your emotional energy and physical energy into the little people that God has blessed you with. That's what we want. So, as you're evaluating and reworking your goals, being realistic with yourself, stretching yourself, not making excuses, you still want to change those things because you know the why. Now, right, like the example earlier when you were talking about going on a walk with your husband or your spouse every day after he gets home from work. Maybe that's not realistic. Maybe every day is a lot for you guys, because you have things to do. You got to cook dinner and feed the cows I don't know if you have cows, but you know, whatever it is that you do, got homework and things going on and piano lessons and the things that happen whenever you have little people or you just know people and you have a busy life things happen. But what if you decide to do it twice a week? Does that still fulfill the why, which is connecting with your spouse without the distractions of electronics? Sure does. Maybe it's just sitting down at the dinner table instead because your why wasn't necessarily working out, your why was connection? Sure does. Maybe it's just sitting down at the dinner table instead Because your why wasn't necessarily working out, your why was connection. So maybe you guys just eat dinner with no electronics, no TV, no phones, no, nothing. You can just rework your dream, your goal, into the season that you are in, because, because you know the underlying reason, that underlying reason will help you so much. Don't skip that first step, right? Okay? So now you have done the dreaming. You set a goal, you reevaluated, you evaluated and reworked your goal. If you needed to right, we're stretching. We're not making excuses, we're moving forward. Now the next thing is to create a plan. Now you need to make a plan because the thing is, if you just wish that it happens, it's very unlikely that it's gonna happen, because that's just not how things happen. We go into our habits that we've always been in, and without intentionality, nothing gets done right. So I want you to break that dream down into steps. Break it down and then put it on the calendar, or talk, not or. And talk to whoever it has to deal with it with, right? So if we're talking about that marathon and you've decided, okay, marathon's not for me, I can't do this marathon, but I am gonna go to the gym three days a week right Now, look at your calendar. Where will that fit? Can you do it in the evening? Can you do it in the morning? Like, pick some times, put them on your calendar, tell anybody in your life that it affects. Tell your spouse, tell a friend that's going to keep you accountable. What are? What can you do to make sure that that actually happens? Because lots of goals get set and lots of goals get put in the trash, can right? So we don't want your goals and your dreams to wind up on the pile of other stuff that we didn't do. Right, I got a lot of pile. I got a big old pile of things that I didn't do. It's because one I didn't actually know why I was doing it, or it wasn't really important, or I just didn't put any actual effort and intentionality into it, and we don't want that because we already went through all the reasons why we're doing it. We know we wanna do this, we know it's good for us, we know it's good for our family. So we have to create that plan, break it down into steps, put it on your calendar, put it tell your friend, tell your spouse, tell somebody who can hold you accountable, tell the people that it'll affect. So if you're going to start going to the gym three days a week, right? So in my actual life this is what we do. My husband and I meet at the gym on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the evening and we work out together with a friend, and then on Wednesdays I go during the day. I go to a class during the day, and so I talk to my spouse about the Tuesdays and Thursdays that we do, right? So he knows I know we go to the gym on Tuesday night. We go to the gym on Thursday night Like he doesn't come home, he just meets us right there, and so that works out well for us. And so who do you have to talk to, to make sure that those things can happen and, if they affect them to, to make sure that those things can happen and, if they affect them, that they can be on the same page as you. Let's say, you want to be spending, you know, more time on your business, right? Because it, you know, because you are building this thing and the people that you're serving are important to you and you know that God has called you to it, right? And so you want to spend three extra hours a month, not a month a week on it, but you don't really know where to fit it. And then you and your spouse, you look at your schedule and you decide, like, okay, on Wednesday and Thursday night I'm going to work for an hour and a half after the kids go to bed and that will be the plan. That's the plan. You need a measurable part, like an actual like step that you can say, yes, I am doing it or no, I'm not doing it, because wishing does not get it there, my friend. So create measurable steps, and the measurable step might just be put it on your calendar and freaking, do it, my friend. And telling somebody, having someone to hold you accountable is super, super, super helpful. Now, those are the three steps, right? So we're going to dream, we're going to decide what that thing is. We're going to set a goal, we're going to find out the real reason we want to set that goal, that underlying reason, the why, the driving factor. We're going to evaluate and rework with the season that we're in. If we have to rework that goal, we're going to change it to something else that is still gets us to that why, that driving factor, the really important part. And then we are going to create a plan. And with that driving factor in mind because you're not just doing it because it's a good idea, you're doing it because you create you found the reason why, the underlying thing that is going to change your family and change your life. You've already found that. So you know I can do this and this is why I'm doing it, because hard things. Don't want to do hard things just for fun, unless you want to run a marathon, I guess. But people like it, but they. They do it because it's good for them and because they have a good reason to do it. So find your good reason, that driving force, make a plan, tell a friend, tell the people around you that it's going to affect and break that dream into steps. Put it on your calendar, make it happen. Make it happen, right, so okay. So I told you there is a last thing to this. There's a bonus, right? Those are the three steps. You can do it with those three steps, but this is the one that will make it, but that will help, let me tell you, it will just help you. I need you to switch your mindset and let go of perfectionism. I read this book by John Acuff. It is called Finish super good and he talks about the enemy of done is perfection. Now we want to be moving towards excellence, like we do everything we do unto the Lord and we serve him well by cooking meals and going on walks with our husbands and going to the gym and working on our businesses and changing diapers. We serve the Lord as we do those things, because we do them with excellence and we do them with, like a joyful heart, which we try, right, I try, you try, we try and we lean on the Lord to be able to do those things with a joyful heart. But if you are always looking for perfection from yourself and for others, you will never finish anything. You just won't because you'll feel like because we all fail, right, we all miss a day at the gym or forget to feed our sourdough starter and now it's dead. It's not that easy to kill it, but when you're first starting it's a lot it could be, and so you do that. You miss a time. You said you were going to work on your business because you didn't want to right. Sometimes we just have feelings where we don't want to do things and I'm not saying to do that. But if you do do that, don't let go forever. It's not dead forever. Now you didn't do your one day Pilates challenge. Now you can't do the other 29. Like that's not the case, my friend, you have to let go of perfection. It's not going to serve you, it's not going to help you Strive for excellence and just let perfection go. And I know that's really easy to say. It's hard mindset shift to make. But I know you can do it and once you do do it you will see the freedom that comes from not having to be perfect all the time. It's okay if you're not perfect, because perfectionism it's not even real. Perfectionism it's not even real, it's just an idea that we strive towards. That just kills our goals, kills our plans, kills all of our creativity and everything that we want to accomplish. So, my friend, let go. Let go of perfectionism. All right, that is everything, okay. I hope you had a great time. I hope that you were able to glean stuff from this and that you will set the best goals for 2025, but only the right ones, not all of them. Don't be getting crazy. Setting everything, okay. Set a couple. Set one if that's all you can handle emotionally, physically, just time-wise, at this moment, and move forward, because we're always moving forward towards excellence, and that's just it. That's it, okay. My friends, I will talk to you later.