December Goals

I learned something SO important about goal setting in November: don’t deviate from what works!

I believe in setting goals that feel impossible because they motivate you to have to think differently, act differently and show up to your day differently. In November, I made the ultimate mistake. I set realistic goals – and I didn’t hit any of them.

With that in mind, here are my goals for December:

I will easily get to 50 push ups in a row by December 31st, 2019.
I will easily put on an online workshop by December 31st, 2019.
I will easily meditate without guided audio every day of December, 2019.

I feel excited and slightly scared by these goals, which is how I know I’ve set the right ones.

What are your goals for the last month of the decade?

November Goals: Review

My November Goals:

1. I will easily craft a dedicated space in my house for meditation by November 30, 2019.

2. I will easily reach 30 deep, consistent, improved-form push ups by November 30, 2019.

3. I will easily stop working and begin winding down for sleep by 10pm for the entire month, until November 30, 2019.

4. I will easily create 1 new YouTube video by November 30, 2019.

Dear November Self,

You have forgotten your own rule: realistic goals don’t excite you. They don’t get you motivated. They don’t make you get up in the morning and think, YES! This is going to take all I’ve got, and I’m ready to tackle this challenge! Instead, realistic goals make you fall into the trap of thinking you have time, thinking you can easily pull it off. November Sarah, you convinced yourself that what you needed was rest because you were tired when what you really needed was a goal exciting enough to wake you up.

Therefore, I’m sorry to report, that you didn’t achieve a single one of your November goals. Wow. What a learning lesson. You need to taste your own medicine, walk your own talk. It’s so much worse to aim low and not hit your goals, that it is to aim high and not hit your goals. You aimed low, and a low goal wasn’t motivational enough to even attempt it. You did push ups just ONCE this entire month! By setting low goals, you set yourself up to fail.

This December, you must not forget that you thrive when you are inspired by a challenge, and pushing your limits is what you do best. Don’t dull your potential with realistic goals. Ignite it with impossible ones!

This lesson is probably far more important than achieving any of your November goals. Not only is it important that you learned this in time for December, but you learned this lesson in time for 2020, and a new decade ahead.

Girl, push. your. limits.

Love, future self x

P.S. Your December goals better be absolute fire 🔥

Design your life

You know what drives me absolutely crazy? When I see someone letting life happen to them.

I don’t care whether your ideal life is being a high flying executive or a bus driver, but you better be designing it yourself. You better be absolutely crushing it as a bus driver. You better be passionately in love with driving the your executive job. It doesn’t matter what you do, just do it on purpose.

You can let life control what happens to you or you can control what happens in your life.

Don’t get me wrong – you don’t have to actually HAVE the lifestyle you are designing yet. Design is a process. You’re constantly writing the next chapter, so there’s no rush to get anywhere – but you cannot sit back and let someone else write your story. Or else you’re going to wake up one day and realise you’re living someone else’s life.

If reading this makes you think – uh oh, I’m not taking control of my life – then here are some easy things you can do to start taking charge right now.

1. Purposely create a vision for your life.

2. Write it down, cut out pictures, create a vision board.

3. Look at it every single day, and actively take small steps in the direction of the vision.

Take a look at my Humble Vision post to learn more about how to do step number 3.

I’ll say it again: it doesn’t matter what you do, just do it on purpose.

2020 Goal Setting

Tonight I snuggled up with my journal and did some good old fashioned goal setting.

Except it wasn’t old fashioned at all. The old fashioned way tells us that we should be setting “SMART” goals. You know, Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, Time-Bound.

What a load of BS.

I’ve watched my clients set realistic goals, I’ve watched myself set realistic goals, and I’ve watched strangers set realistic goals – and quite frankly, they’re a flop.

Realistic “SMART” goals don’t make you jump out of bed in the morning with delight and passion.
Realistic “SMART” goals don’t make you take bold action towards your dreams
Realistic “SMART” goals don’t show you what you are truly capable of.

They keep you stuck. They keep you playing small. They keep you running on the spot.

What should you do, then?

Set an impossible goal. Something that feels so unattainable and unrealistic for you right now.

Why?

Because setting an impossible goal gets you excited. It makes you move across the world without a job or a place to live. It makes you leave a bad relationship. It makes you invest in yourself.

Impossible goals make you bet on YOU.

If there’s just one thing you do when you set your 2020 goals, please please please don’t let them be SMART.

Humble Vision

"Gatsby, he had a grand vision for his life since he was a boy. No amount of fire could challenge the fairy tale he had stored up in his heart. He had an extraordinary sense of hope but I had the uneasy feeling that he was guarding secrets. It had gone beyond her. It had gone beyond everything."
– The Great Gatsby

A Grand Vision is a beautiful but intense idea to thrust upon our psyches. A grand vision can bring a lot of hope, but it can also bring a lot of pressure.

A Grand Vision is your full of impossible achievements, their legacy, and their overall mission. It’s not just for wealthy romantics like Gatsby – Martin Luther King Jr had a Grand Vision, a dream. It helps shape our lives and direct our efforts.

However, day to day, a Grand Vision can leave us feeling overwhelmed and unfulfilled, and the gap from where we are now to where we want to be is so huge it can be crippling.

That’s why I like my coaching clients to set both a Grand Vision and a Humble Vision.

Unlike a Grand Vision, a Humble Vision is full of things you can do right now to be living your dream. It doesn’t require you to be richer, thinner, better looking, more accomplished or any of the things you think you need before you can achieve your Grand Vision. You don’t need to become anything other than who you already are. Your humble vision is available to you right now.

How do you set a Humble Vision?

For example, if your Grand Vision is to win a Gold Medal in freestyle the 2024 Olympics and raise a million dollars for sports education in underprivileged schools, then your Humble Vision might be to train every single day at the local pool, and volunteer at your local school teaching kids to swim. This relieves the pressure of being a Gold Medalist today, but still moves you towards the ultimate goals of your Grand Vision.

Another example?

Say, in your Grand Vision, you’ve got a full-time live-in assistant to help you run your tech business. To live your Humble Vision, you could start by hiring a Virtual Assistant from Craigslist for an hour a week.

I love setting a Humble Vision. It feels so authentic and really helps dissect what is important about your Grand Vision. The point is, your Humble Vision is a way to live your Grand Vision today – but on a smaller scale. Doesn’t that just feel so good?

Anti-goals

I think I might be one of the only people I know to set anti-goals (consciously). So I want to share my anti-goals today, in the hope that you might want to set an anti-goal too.

What is an anti-goal? An anti-goal is something you purposefully don’t want to achieve.

I created my first anti-goal in 2017, when I decided NOT to go to the gym for an entire year. I had been trying to get myself to go to the gym for years, and every year I would set it as my New Years Resolution, and I always failed miserably. Having the goal every year wasn’t actually working, and on top of that, it was just making me feel guilty because I wasn’t going. So in 2017, I just decided that I would make a new rule: No gym allowed.

I felt LIBERATED.

Did it mean that I exercised more? No I didn’t. But it removed the guilt I was feeling. By making it a rule, an anti-goal, I wasn’t actually getting any fitter, but I had released myself from feeling bad about not achieving my goal.

But hang on, what makes an anti-goal different from a regular goal?

A regular goal achieves something. An anti-goal achieves nothing, on purpose.

A goal to not smoke is still a regular goal because it achieves something. A goal to not drink achieves something too. An anti-goal doesn’t achieve anything, it keeps you exactly where you are, except it changes the way you feel about the situation.

If you always eat doughnuts, and you feel guilty about it but you don’t actually think you’ll stop, you could set yourself an anti-goal of continuing to eat donuts. That way, you’re not changing, but you’re now fulfilling a goal so you can stop feeling the guilt.

This can be a dangerous tactic, as it requires you to really evaluate why you are setting the anti-goal. It’s not a good idea to set an anti-goal if it’s just an excuse to behave badly. An anti-goal is purely there to give you permission to not feel bad, and to focus on other things.

Other anti-goals I have:

To not go skydiving.
To not run a marathon.
To not write a book.

Some people probably will not understand the concept of anti-goals. I can almost hear my logically-minded cousin saying, “If you don’t want to do something, why don’t you just not do it? What’s so hard about that?”

But see, that doesn’t work for those of us who feel obliged to others, or to our feelings. The purpose of an anti-goal is to give us permission to do what we actually want, and will probably do anyway. It just removes the pressure. Now that I know I’m not allowed to write a book, I don’t have to worry about doing that. It’s totally gone from my list, and I feel so much freer than when I had a general sense of unease: “Should I be writing a book?”

More examples of potential anti-goals:

To not go to that party.
To not buy Christmas presents.
To not wear makeup.
To not make your bed.

What are your anti-goals?

I've been thinking about it all wrong

Goal setting is amazing, but I think we should stop calling it ‘Goal Setting’. Goal setting is only part of the process, but it’s not just about setting a goal. It’s about setting an ACTION. Setting a goal is the first part – setting a possible commitment is the most crucial part. We should really be calling it “commitment setting.”

I shouldn’t only be saying “I have a goal to reach 100 push ups” – I should be saying something like, “I have a commitment to train push ups everyday.” Because in truth, I don’t care about 100 push ups. It’s not about the number, it’s about the action.

Here’s the thing: It’s not about setting end-goals. It’s not about attaining something. (Reach 100 push ups, complete a marathon, achieve xyz…) It’s about the dedication of doing the thing. A daily practice. A weekly practice. A practice. An act. A present moment experience. It’s about cultivating the practice of an action, not achieving an end goal.

(Is it okay to say my mind is being blown as I’m writing this?!).

That way, we are growing, and yet we are content – as every single moment we practice is a moment of success. There is nowhere to go, nowhere to get to. The goal is just a container for the practice to occur.

What does this look like in action? My 365 day meditation goal is a great example. Yes – it has an end-goal. But I’m not doing it to reach day 365 and check it off my list. I’m doing it to cultivate the practice of mediation. And so each and every day practice, I succeed. Once I reach the finish line, I don’t wish to stop. I want to continue this practice.

So, should we not set goals at all? I think we should still set goals. Goal setting can give helpful instructions and direction. However, I think action setting (or commitment setting or practice setting, whatever you’d like to call it) is a crucial part of it, if we are to develop and grow.

Goal Rush

Something I love so much about goal setting is the rush of adrenaline you get when you set something that feels impossible, but there’s part of you that believes you can do it – and that voice suddenly becomes louder than the voice that says you can’t do it. And then you come down off that high, and you think, ‘Am I crazy?’ and there’s a dark cloud of questioning if you can do it. The voice that says you can’t is there. But no matter how loud the voice that says you can’t is, the voice that says you can will always be there.

I’ve just experienced that adrenaline-fuelled rush of setting an impossible goal. It’s so delicate, so recently born into my mind, it’s too fragile to share with you right now. But when it grows into a small, but sturdily formed idea, I will share it.

All I can say now is that my heart is pounding with excitment and anticipation for what could be.

Do you ever feel that way about goal setting too? Or is it just me?

November Goals

Is this not the best meme ever?

I’m super happy with my success in October, as I completed all of my goals.

However, I did find myself run off my feet and running around trying to do far too many things at once. So my overarching theme for November is: The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.

What is my main thing? My main thing (right now) is my coaching.

With that in mind, I am setting myself goals that will foster self-care and make me feel as energised as I can be, so I am better able to show up for my goals, my clients, my friends and family, and my work.

Here they are:

1. I will easily craft a dedicated space in my house for meditation by November 30, 2019.

2. I will easily reach 30 deep, consistent, improved-form push ups by November 30, 2019.

3. I will easily stop working and begin winding down for sleep by 10pm for the entire month, until November 30, 2019.

4. I will easily create 1 new YouTube video by November 30, 2019.

I’m feeling so good about these goals, they feel like exactly what I need in order to move forward and to foster a better work-life balance.

October Goals: Review

Flying back from NZ to England today!

I can’t believe we’re already done with the 10th month of 2019. Here were my goals for October:

• I will easily create a training video opt-in for my website by October 15, 2019.
  It’s up! Go and download my free masterclass to create a step by step plan for achieving your impossible goals. You can check it out on my homepage by clicking the button under the headline (just click on my name, Sarah Arnold-Hall to head to the homepage, or scroll to the top of the blog!).

• I will easily do 25 push ups in a row by October 30, 2019.
  I did this! However, in my last exhaustion test, I actually ended up only doing 22. I don’t know if that means I shouldn’t count this, but I feel like since I did actually reach the goal at one point, it should count. Now I’ve just got to keep it up!

• I will easily photograph 3 high resolution photoshoots for my blog by October 30, 2019. (Trying this again this month!)
  Done! I’m counting these posts: Push Ups: Week 8, Just Call Me Tiger, Dress for the Job You Want. I also did quite a few other blog posts where I was happier with the level of photography I shot too. Even though I had to consciously plan when I would do these photoshoots, they mostly fit as part of what I was already doing, and weren’t staged, which is great because it suggests higher quality photos on my blog are sustainable for the future.

• I will easily create and upload 2 YouTube videos by October 30, 2019.
  Also complete! It got to almost the end of the month and I thought I wasn’t going to make it, but I chose to push through and create a video! I found it WAY easier creating videos while I was in NZ, because it was sunny and I had lots of places to film with great lighting, which I don’t have in England (where I’m currently living). My two videos from this month are: How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others and my first 100 Push Ups Vlog
  

I’m super happy with completing all four of my October Goals, because last month in September I didn’t complete all my goals. I think the difference was I was more realistic about the action I could take. And before you say “Sarah! You always say being realistic is a bad idea!”, remember I believe that when you set your goals, you should set impossible goals, but when you create your commitments, they need to be realistic and actionable. Possible action makes impossible goals happen.