Set your intention.

I’ve written about my long quest to make yoga a part of my life. Happily I’ve found an amazing class with a great teacher and my Sunday morning restorative class is one of the highlights of my week. Each week Natalie suggests we set an intention for our practice. Each week I think about why I’m there. My answer is usually to be kind to my body and mind and recover from the previous week. This is important enough to me to get out of bed early in the morning and walk a mile to the studio. I know that I’ll feel so much better after the class and never hesitate to go. 

I thought about this idea of setting intentions and finding inner motivation as I put together the workshop I recently led for She Says Chicago around setting and achieving goals. In this session we talked about setting SMART goals, and how even the SMARTest goals will be hard to achieve if they’re not important to you. I had the participants do an exercise where they each wrote four SMART goals they wanted to achieve, then they determined if those goals were important to them. If they weren’t important, I suggested that they rethink the goal, or remove it from their list. One woman said one of her goals was more “it would be nice” than “important”. This started a conversation in the group around how motivating “it would be nice” is or is not, and how taking steps toward this goal would likely not be prioritized once they became difficult or inconvenient. The participants and I thought back to goals we’d made and failed to achieve and found many examples of goals we’d set that just weren’t important to us, so we didn’t stick with our plans to achieve them. 

We agreed that you can find importance at different levels. Volunteering for a campaign might be important to you because it supports your values, going to the gym twice a week contributes to your health, getting a certification moves you forward in your career and cleaning the kitchen once a week improves your relationship. Not all importance needs to be lofty. Sometimes its very practical. You can find importance in doing your weekly status report because it helps your coworkers do their jobs. Completing your timesheet when asked is important because you won’t get paid if you don’t.

Before you commit to a goal think about why it’s important to you. If you can’t come up with a compelling reason, reconsider making that commitment. If your given a goal by a manager that you don’t understand, ask them why they’ve set this goal for you. Why is it important? 

Goal setting is an important part of personal and professional development. If you’re interested in offering a session like this to your team as part of your review and goal setting process, please message me. I can customize this session for your team to reflect your goals.