If you are a little freaked at how quickly the past year has flown by, join the club. The Home Depot has had Christmas lights up for 6+ weeks already, yikes!
Have you had an amazing year of accomplishing all that you hoped for? Or has procrastination, lack of clarity and election fatigue thrown you off course a little?
Learning and Relearning a Few Things
Learning and Relearning a Few ThingsOur team has been meeting this week working on goal setting and plans for next year. My mind and prayers are soaring with the possibilities the New Year holds for life and mission.But it is FAR TOO EASY to fall into the trap of not taking the time to be intentional and truly assess where we are at in all of life before heading into the next year, phase of life, or whatever. We sort of believe (hope) things are better than they really are, and/or they’ll somehow just get better by themselves.
Here are some things I’ve learned–and I’m relearning–as we turn an eye toward next year:
3 Things to Avoid
- Not starting with an accurate view of “where you are at”. Before effectively planning the win at home or at work forward, it is vital to first be honest about where you’re at on the journey. Without first accurately assessing and processing what’s working and what’s not, we will severely limit our affective goal setting and planning.
- Making excuses or beating yourself up. Once we’ve taken a hard look (gulp) at how we’ve been doing this past year, it’s easy to go down one of two equally dangerous paths: a.) Make excuses for everything that didn’t go as planned. Or b.) Shame and blame yourself for being such a failure.Both of these choices leave us frozen and unclear as to where to go next.
- Thinking that goal setting is only for work or finances. I recently spoke to a friend who’s a working mother of two who admitted she has never really seen “goal setting” for the year as something she needed to do. “That’s more of a thing business people do to make more money…isn’t it?”
Yes and no my friend. Planning for our financial or business future is certainly wise, but there are several other categories in our lives that have much greater impact and therefore need even greater planning and preparation in order to grow and succeed to the fullest extent.
5 Treasures to Measure
Here are five categories, I call “treasures”, that are to be measured and stewarded in our lives. Pay close attention to the order of these as they go from lowest to highest value.*
Download my 5 Treasures Evaluation Tool to help in future planning.
5. Financial Treasure. This is measured in dollars, hard assets and investments. One can be considered very wealthy by measuring this treasure alone, but we all know that having all the money in the world can never truly make someone happy or replace relational and spiritual prosperity.
4. Intellectual Treasure. Your ideas, creativity and knowledge are valuable to you and others. Every product, company, book, painting or song has started as an idea in someone’s mind. How have you grown your intellect over this past year?
3. Physical Treasure. Time, energy and health are the measurements for this category of our life. How are you doing at stewarding your health, body, and your precious time? Who or what are you giving your best energy to? How could you have more of this treasure in the next year?
2. Relational Treasure. This can be measured by both the quantity and quality of relationships we have with family, friends and our network. Who of us, if we had loads of money and were super smart, but had no real and healthy relationships, would consider ourselves a wealthy person? No one!
1. Spiritual Treasure. The most valuable of all of our treasures is our relationship with God. The Bible teaches that His words, ways and wisdom are more precious than gold. (Psalm 19) When we are rich in our spiritual lives, we are able to truly grow and become wealthy in all other areas of life.
Sadly, most of us spend more time planning out what’s for dinner, and where we’ll go on our next vacation, than we do setting goals and investing in our spiritual lives… Or the spiritual growth and health of our families.
Often these five treasures go unmeasured or stewarded in our lives.
As a result, this list is flipped upside down in true worth, and we falsely value financial treasure above all others. In this way our life and treasures lie to us—deceive us—into a sense of false prosperity or security.
Download this 5 Treasures Evaluation Tool to set you up for future planning.
Hello New Year
As you get ready to unpack those holiday decorations yet again, I hope you’ll avoid these common pitfalls and begin to measure what is truly valuable as you set goals and plan ahead.
Here’s to the best year ever!
P.S. I will be sharing more life and goal planning tools with you in the weeks ahead…it’s that time of year.
* I am grateful to my friends Mike Breen and Ben Sternke who first opened my eyes to seeing life divided up in these five categories.
