Sunday, December 30, 2012

Contemplating the New Year

I have never been good at and have always resisted "goal setting."

I've owned my own business for more than 25 years... never wrote out goals. For the 10 years before that, I worked as a department manager for an expanding company... hated goal writing, procrastinated, delegated, produced only the briefest goal reports.

To the best of my memory, I've never written a list of personal goals.

So, when the end of the year rolls around, and I start feeling peer pressure to set some goals, I go right to the kitchen, seeking solace in food. Why?

Ten Possible Reasons for Not Wanting to Set Goals:
  1. Fear of failure. Fear of failure. Fear of failure. (Do I make my point?)
  2. Not wanting to be controlled, even by my own stated goals.
  3. Love of an improvisational life style. Desire to be free to follow my nose at any given time in any given direction. Impulsive personality?
  4. Lack of training and/or experience with how to write realistic goals.
  5. Dislike pressure.
  6. Feeling of irreversibility involving this type of list. This point has to do with a preconceived notion about what goal setting "should" be.
  7. Could there be something in childhood? Some "lesson" that setting goals is asking to be "thwarted?" Maybe.
  8. Could I have learned from my mother that setting goals results in disappointment?
  9. The farther out the goals (as in setting a 5-year or 10-year plan), the more angst I feel about it. Is this a trust issue? Do I not trust anything about the future?
  10. If there's a 10th reason, I'm blocking it...
Is it OK to not set goals? It must be... I've gotten along in life in a way that satisfies me without ever writing out a list of resolutions or goals. I don't have regrets. There are many things I don't do that I wish I would do, but nothing that could be called major regret. I make commitments  to myself and others, but don't think of them as goals. Life goes on in a pretty good way.

Guess I just need to count my blessings and stay out of the kitchen during the week right around Jan. 1st. That's a commitment!

***

Thanks to my visitors for your comments on my 2 previous posts. I'm totally blown away that I've had any visitors at all after not writing for so many months. I'd love to hear your thoughts about goal setting.

2 comments:

  1. I've never been one to set written goals either. Okay, maybe not even unwritten goals! So many reasons. I could very much identify with your list. Let's have the goal-less best year ever!

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  2. I had a bit of a break from reading blogs over the holiday period but now I am catching up and have just read your recent posts. I am sorry that you have had to reset your counter but you did amazingly well to clock up over 800 days of absinence and, as you say, you caught yourself and are back on track now.

    I never used to set goals and I can identify with many of the reasons on your lists for not setting goals. Fear of failiur would be at the top of my list also.

    I started setting myself some goals in January 2011. At the time I felt a little overwhelmed by all of the things I needed (wanted) to do and procasination was preventing me from doing anything. I thought it would help if I wrote down the things I wanted to achieve and prioritise them. And I think that it did help. Most months, I did a review of my progress and at the end of the year I did a review of the year and looked at what I needed/wanted to do in 2012. I put it all on my blog so I have a record I can refer back to but I have found that the comments and support I recieved from readers also helped me stay focused on what was important to me. I have just repeated that progress for 2013.

    I am having a problem deciding what my immediate priority is, at the moment but I have to decide soon because I am wasting precious time prevaricating!

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