Habits, Dreams, and Goals

I’ve been talking to people in the halls about what they learned about goals from last year, and what they are going to do differently this year.   We’ve had chats about New Years Resolutions, habits, goals, and big dreams. (My theme is Dream Big for 2015.)

Here are a few of the insights that I’ve been sharing with people that really seems to create a lot clarity:

1. Dream big first, then create your goals.  Too many people start with goals, but miss the dream that holds everything together.   The dream is the backdrop and it needs to inspire you and pull your forward.  Your dream needs to be actionable and believable, and it needs to reflect your passion and your purpose.
2. There are three types of actions: habits, goals, and inspired actions.    Habits can help support our goals and reach our dreams.   Goals are really the above and beyond that we set our sights on and help us funnel and focus our energy to reach meaningful milestones.   They take deliberate focus and intent.  You don’t randomly learn to play the violin with skill.  It takes goals.  Inspired actions are the flashes of insight and moments of brilliance.
3. People mess up by focusing on goals, but not having any habits that support them.  For example, if I have an extreme fitness goal, but I have the ice-cream habit, I might not reach my goals.  Or, if I want to be an early bird, but I have the party-all-night long, or a I’m a late-night reader, that might not work out so well.  
4. People mess up on their habits when they have no goals.  They might inch their way forward, but they can easily spend an entire year, and not actually have anything significant or meaningful for themselves, because they never took the chance to dream big, or set a goal they cared about.   So while they’ve made progress, they didn’t make any real pop.   Their life was slow and steady.  In some cases, this is great, if all they wanted.  But I also know people that feel like they wasted the year, because they didn’t do what they knew they were capable of, or wanted to achieve.
5. People can build habits that help them reach new goals.    Some people I knew have built fantastic habits.  They put a strong foundation in place that helps them reach for more.  They grow better, faster, stronger, and more powerful.   In my own experience, I had some extreme fitness goals, but I started with a few healthy habits.  My best one is wake up, work out.  I just do it.  I do a 30 minute workout.   I don’t have to think about it, it’s just part of my day like brushing my teeth.  Since it’s a habit, I keep doing it, so I get better over time.  When I first started the workout, I sucked.  I repeated the same workout three times, but by the third time, I was on fire.   And, since it’s a habit, it’s there for me, as a staple in my day, and, in reality, the most empowering part of my day.  It boosts me and gives me energy that makes everything else in my day, way easier, much easier to deal with, and I can do things in half the time, or in some cases 10X.

Maybe the most important insight is that while you don’t need goals to make your habits effective, it’s really easy to spend a year, and then wonder where the year went, without the meaningful milestones to look back on.   That said, I’ve had a few years, where I simply focused on habits without specific goals, but I always had a vision for a better me, or a better future in mind (more like a direction than a destination.)

As I’ve taken friends and colleagues through some of my learnings over the holidays, regarding habits, dreams, and goals, I’ve had a few people say that I should put it all together and share it, since it might help more people add some clarity to setting and achieving their goals.

Here it is:

How Dreams, Goals, and Habits Fit Together

Enjoy, and Dream Big for 2015.