Resilience Part 1: Setting Goals

Having a goal or focus in service to something bigger...it is often the extra reach and dedication we need to really build the habit of following through even when the going gets rough. We want to have goals for ourselves to strive toward, but in trying times such as we are in, if falling short disappoints only our own self-realization, we might be inclined to just give up.

Goals are hard. They expect things, require things, they can nag, and feel like they are hitting us extra hard when we fail. This is why setting your personal goals toward a target resting focus on a greater good can significantly help you in getting back up off the ground when you fall and push forward with determination.

This is resilience.

And we have ALL been practicing it in a master-class level of requirement for nearly a year now.

How many times have you taken a hit, financially and/or emotionally, this past year? You have been forced to practice resilience in every aspect of your life:

• Budgeting
• Finding new jobs
• Figuring out new working-from-home situations
• Teaching your children
• Withstanding the political unrest
• Keeping your employees
• Keeping your family healthy and safe
• Even forging for basic necessities like beans and toilet paper

We are at Baby Yoda-like levels of resiliency at this point. But its requirement across different parts of our lives has left many of us dropping our longer-term or more personal goals for the simple reason that something has to give.

We get it.

But working just to work, surviving only to survive, giving up our dreams and vacation holidays and stretch-goals can be a large part of the frustrations we are feeling as we round the corner to our one-year anniversary of COVID.

For good or bad, we are a society of, "what have you done lately?" Especially in this current environment, survival should be a good enough answer. But we feel in our gut, it is not. For many of us, it feels like we've had a year of our lives just taken from us, a year of sitting and waiting and managing and dealing, with nothing to show for it.

Picking up, and dusting off some of those dreams, aspirations, and goals that went dormant in early 2020, will help you feel more productive and self-affirmed:

• Reigniting your love of painting or your desire to write
• Getting out maps and travel books to start planning your next trip -- where you want to go, what you want to see
• Finishing that degree
• Planning the growth of your business or creating a new one

Because your art matters to others. No one else can write that book. You and your partner deserve a delightful vacation when this is all said and done. Our community wants your business to grow and succeed for the benefit of all who live here. With a completed degree, more education makes you a more seductive candidate for what you want to succeed in.

Pick up your non-essential goals and begin reinvesting in them once again, for the payment of joy their ideals bring to you, to your family, for a more secure future, for a more enjoyable day-to-day.

We've had months to sit in various forms of lock-down, our minds swimming with the fantasies of where we would be, and what we would be doing, if only---

Let's start the habits of building a plan now so that the moment we are free and able, we are already headed in the direction we have been dreaming toward.

For more on the 8 elements of resilience, and to see where we got our inspiration for this series, head over to [Psychology Today]1.