The blog post below contains affiliate links. Please read here for my disclosure.

Pulse check. How are you doing?

Are you ok? Feeling blessed to be healthy and supported during this time? Overwhelmed? Or maybe you are feeling a little bit of everything every day. It’s ok. I’m right here with you.

I spent last week crossing off to-do lists and crowning myself the productivity queen. Just to have it all fall down Friday night, to spend the weekend feel defeated and unmotivated.

You have permission to feel what you need to feel; just remember to give yourself grace.

I’m all about goal setting! I believe in it, I’ve seen it work, and I have been so excited to use the Cultivate What Matters Goal Setting Powersheets this year. Lara and her team are inspiring, and you can see their hard work and dedication in every page of this book. But goals look different right now. Despite not wanting to accept this new reality, last weekend, I finally sat down with myself and evaluated how I could incorporate goal-setting into this new season of life.

A quick overview of the Powersheets:

This goal-setting planner starts with prep work. The Cultivate What Matters Team has a “prep-week” where the team assigns pages to work on daily and has a podcast with helpful points guiding you through this process. As a newbie, It took me about a month to do my prep work this year. You can take a peek into my prep work here and here.

The prep work helps you outline your goals and sets you up to chose a word of the year that will help guide you through this season of life. My word of the year is Balance. During the prep work phase, you have the option to set eight goals that you either re-commit to or change at the start of every quarter.

Here’s what I do differently. The Power Sheets methodology is to set eight goals for the year. Here is a picture of the eight goals I set for this year. But instead of focusing on eight specific goals, I instead intentionally examined eight specific areas of my life, like fitness and finances. And for each of these eight areas, I listed four goals, the bullet points you see below. Completing these four bullet points by the end of the year would leave me feeling like I had accomplished the “goal.”

So here we are at the start of April (the second quarter), about a month into a global pandemic.

With the pandemic sweeping the globe, everything, included my goal planning, has gone up in the air. Being flexible and creative is essential during these uncertain times. So I’ve had to creatively re-think how I want to approach goals this quarter.

I started by re-examining those eight goals. But instead of just focusing on the broad idea for each, I went ahead and chose one particular thing I can accomplish within the framework of the larger goal. In some cases, it’s one of the four bullet points I initially listed in November. But in most cases, I had to dig deeper to chose one thing that I could actually accomplish this quarter considering the circumstances.

Some things look different. For example, I have decided not to pursue a Work goal — every day, my work priorities are shifting and it doesn’t make sense to focus on one specific thing with so much uncertainty. And I’m re-evaluating other goals, such as Creating a Home. When I set these goals in November, we had no intention of moving. But here we are about to move for the second time this year. Isn’t it something how things can change so fast?

 

I will be the first person to say that I started the year VERY ambitious. And by setting a high bar, I have had trouble seeing the goals through. In this next quarter, I want to focus on consistency by rooting myself into very specific monthly, weekly, and daily action items.

So I’m approaching this next quarter differently.

First and foremost, I photocopied these pages from a blank page in my power sheets. I tried multiple combinations until I found something I feel comfortable and confident with. What I’m doing is simple.

For each of the seven goals I have defined (having excluded my Work goal), I will accomplish one very specific task monthly. For example, Goal #1 is Showing Up for the people I love most, and this month I will be organizing something special for a friend’s graduation.

My weekly and daily tending list will stay the same for three months. I intentionally set these tending list items, but I also left them vague enough to be interpreted as needed as things change over the course of the quarter.

For example, I want to practice gratitude daily, and I want to journal weekly. Both fall under working on Goal #7, Mental Wellbeing. By making these action items a part of my daily and weekly habits, my hope is that consistency will allow these items to not become checkmarks on a to-do list, but a part of my normal routine instead.

(insert photos of tending list)

So this is where my head is at. And this is what I will be trying and working on for the next quarter. It’s a big change in how I am approaching goal setting, but I think it’s a change in the right direction and will give me something to focus on during this time of uncertainty.

If you want to see more about what I am talking about, and some other goal-setting tips check out the video below from my Youtube channel.