At one point or another, all of us have felt how good it is to be content with ourselves, for example when you have fulfilled a dream or achieved a goal. If you want more such moments in your life, read on. Management consultant Maarika Lember writes about dreaming, goals and shaping habits.
We all strive to be who we were made to be – we want to be content with ourselves and our achievements. Unfortunately, there are many reasons why our dreams don’t come true and we don’t often feel that contentment, from not noticing and dismissing our progress to deeply rooted unhelpful beliefs.
To get somewhere, you need to know the goal of the journey. To get there faster, it also pays to set interim goals and think through an action plan. Most people do all this enthusiastically at New Year (which is a very good time for it). But the initial momentum tends to fade quite soon, and a few months later it is hard to even remember which goals exactly were set. What went wrong? And how can you help yourself?
How to turn dreams into a driving force?
The turn of the year and the beginning of a new year are a great time for dreaming. Adults often don’t allow themselves to dream, or have forgotten how altogether – a serious Estonian keeps their feet on the ground. But a saying by Vishen Lakhiani made me think hard: “Realism is socially accepted pessimism.” Why should we be pessimists? We simply don’t dare to dream! And so we find all sorts of reasons not to.
But if dreams didn’t move us forward, a great many discoveries would never have been made. We would probably still be sending telegrams from town to town and travelling by horse and cart. Throughout history, dreams have always been a driving force – you just need to learn to harness them.
Visualisation is a very good aid for making dreams come true, and one form of it is a collage. When you create a picture of your dreams or goals, it programmes your brain for what matters to you. It doesn’t matter whether you make your dream collage the good old way with paper and glue or electronically (e.g. with a vision board). What matters is that you put the picture somewhere visible in your everyday space (e.g. as your computer wallpaper). That way, even a passing glance at the picture can subconsciously steer our efforts.
Create a complete picture of the life you dream of
There are no rules for dreaming. It does help, though, to think about all the important areas of your life while doing it. Striving for balance is good, but it is also healthy to recognise and accept imbalance – at different times, different areas of our life get attention, which also means that complete balance at every moment is impossible.
The picture of your dreams could still be as complete as possible at this point in time. Here are the areas you could definitely keep in mind when creating it:
- Health and physical fitness – sleep, nutrition, exercise, drinking water
- Emotional fitness – how to stay in the mood you want and be a friend to your feelings
- Intellectual fitness – memory, knowledge, horizons, mental sharpness and coping with setbacks
- Spiritual meaning – a wider vision for life, what legacy I want to leave
- Character – my values, what kind of person I want to be
- Relationship – what I value and what kind of partner I want to be myself
- Being a parent – what kind of parent I want to be and what I want to pass on to my children
- Social life and friendships – what quality of relationships nourishes me and what I offer in return
- Financial capability – what quality of life I want, my standards
- Work and career – what goals and activities inspire me, where I want to contribute
Towards a big dream in small steps
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. If you try to focus on all these areas at once, you won’t make progress in any of them. So once the bigger picture is in place, choose the main theme for the year ahead and two topics that support it. To do this, ask yourself: What is the one area whose change would support my efforts in all the other areas as well?
That is your one and most important theme for the next year. Next, choose two more areas where you want change and which, together with the main theme, support your development most strongly.
For example, my choice for this year is health and physical fitness. They have to be in order for me to have the strength and capacity to deal with everything else. In addition, I am working on correcting my thought patterns and broadening my horizons in my professional field (intellectual fitness), and setting goals for the character traits I want to develop in myself (character).
Next, set goals, metrics and actions in each of these areas.
Set goals: where do you want to get to in each area?
Because we tend to overestimate our abilities over 1 year and underestimate them over 3 years, it is worth setting both a 1-year and a 3-year goal.
E.g. developing healthy eating habits. By the end of year 1, understand what works for me and what doesn’t; by the end of year 3, the new eating habits have formed and I apply them without special effort.
Define metrics: what has to happen for you to say that your efforts have paid off and progress has been made?
It is worth thinking this through carefully, because you need many experiences of success along the way. The metrics must help you experience them.
E.g. Metric 1: I feel good after eating – I have eaten the right amount and my stomach feels light. Metric 2: My body weight stays within the desired range, positive, my energy level stays steady.
Put an action plan in place: which concrete actions will help you move forward in the chosen areas?
Put into words the actions and new habits that will help you move towards your goal.
E.g. I use smaller plates when eating. The last bite goes in at least 3 hours before sleep. I start every day with a glass of lemon water. I avoid wheat flour.
Good tips for shaping habits
Once the actions for reaching the goal are in place, they need to be turned into habits: e.g. to improve your physical fitness, it makes sense to develop a training habit. But shaping habits should be approached consciously.
First, whether you are a “lark” or a “night owl”, it pays to plan new habits for the first half of the day. The reason is simple – we have to make many decisions during the day (from what to wear and eat to work decisions), but our willpower within one day is limited. Once we have used up all our willpower during the day, we can no longer make the right decisions in the evening – keep our eating in check, go to training, go to bed on time. New habits that require self-discipline are therefore much harder to apply in the evening.
Second, setting a goal and putting an action plan in place is only half the victory. The other half comes from moving steadily along the chosen path – from consistency. When change is hard to see, enthusiasm fades and consistency disappears. A powerful way to help yourself is to set a specific time for analysing your progress. This could be, for example, in the evening before going to bed, at the end of the last working day of the week and on the first working day of a new month.
Whatever time you choose, book it in your calendar and ask yourself the following questions.
Once a day (3 min):
- What went well for me today (there is always something)? Noticing and naming small successes is a source of motivation!
- What did I learn today?
Once a week (5 min):
- What went well this week? What do I recognise myself for?
- What will I do better or differently next week?
Once a month (10 min):
- How have I managed to stick to my action plan? What helps or hinders it?
- What needs correcting to make moving forward easier or more effective?
- Who could give me meaningful feedback about myself? What will I do to get it?
Once a quarter (20 min):
- How does my action plan support moving towards my goals? Why does it matter to me?
- What excuses have come up? Are they justified?
- What corrections do I need to make and why?
- What else can I do to become the best version of myself?
Once a year (1 h):
- What kind of person do I want to become?
- What values do I want to bring more of into my life?
- Am I living my life the way I really want to? If not, what do I want to change?
- What inspires me? What makes me lose track of time? What activities do I look forward to?
- What do I need to develop in myself to become the person I want to be and get where I want to go?
Analysing your progress and learning points makes your thoughts clearer and more concrete. It is especially effective if you can do it in writing! Even a monthly summary is hard to do without notes along the way – memory usually can’t be relied on.
Big dreams come true when we don’t cling to them too tightly. Let us learn to focus above all on today. The ability to be present at every moment, to focus on one topic at a time and to notice even the smallest progress is what to strive for every day. Small experiences of success give us the power to move mountains and achieve big goals too.
NB! Goal setting is a powerful tool in both private and working life. In our goal-setting e-course, designed above all for leaders, you will:
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- get an overview of what makes goals work,
- build an understanding of how goals and metrics are connected, and
- learn, with video lectures and sample videos, to set and achieve effective goals.
About the author: Maarika Lember is an HR management practitioner, inspired by the wish to support the development of people and organisations and to see real results. For more than 20 years, Maarika has worked both as a consultant and coach, supporting teams in different companies, and as HR manager at the retail company Circle K. Today Maarika Lember works as a management consultant and partner in the team of the consulting firm Sunergos.
