Today is the 66th day of the year. To put that into context, in just one week’s time 20% of 2014 will have GONE. How are those goals coming along?
Back in August of 2013, one of my readers (let’s call her… Jenny!) dropped me a line and asked if I could take a look at her goals which until then had failed to deliver any meaningful results. Well now, if you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that (for a small fee, I mean really small – quite pathetic in the general scheme of things) I’m only too happy to help with any aspect of concepts discussed in the book, and with this in mind Jenny and I booked a one-hour ‘Happy Talkie’ into the diary.
Without going into too many specifics Jenny’s goals did indeed require some tweaking. They were a little drab. A little unambitious. Extremely practical. In short, were she to achieve them there was every chance her overall happiness would remain exactly as it was.
And after some discussion (much of which revolved around whether she deserved to feel happy) we threw away the goals she had and created new ones.
We wrote a work goal designed to motivate Jenny into leaving her less-than-fulfilling desk job and going it alone. We wrote a goal designed to address her work life balance and make more of her free time. And finally we decided that she DOES deserve to be happy and that she should get herself that brand new Golf GTI she’s always wanted but was too shy / scared / {insert appropriate emotion here} to splash out on.
We made some other changes too, such as the introduction of a notepad to her usual handbag paraphernalia so that Jenny could start creating a NOW List when ideas presented themselves.
A few weeks later I got an email from Jenny telling me that her NOW List was growing nicely, she’d broken her ‘work’ goal into baby steps, and that finally she’d signed up for an evening class purely for interest/enjoyment. Things were going well.
She’d also found the following ‘motto’ (from “The Man Who Wanted to Be Happy” by Laurent Gounelle) which was now stuck to her bathroom mirror on a post-it note.
“In life you need to know how to aim straight at the goal”.
Well, six months later, in preparation for this blog, I dropped Jenny a line to see what the latest was.
Jenny’s self-employment hadn’t progressed any further – but only because when she came to discuss them with her employer they offered her a more senior, challenging role as part of their expansion plans!
As well as enjoying work, she was also spending her evenings and weekends making and selling items at craft fairs – just for fun!
And the VW Golf? Well apparently it’s still on the cards for the Spring.
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