REAL Woman Wednesday: Not in my Drawers

Get your mind out of the gutter…no, I am not letting you in my ‘drawers.’ Those are reserved for Captain America and Thor. But as we wind down this blog series on goal setting, I want to talk about what happens to them. And that reference is about what becomes of all too many goals…you go to all the trouble of writing them down and they end up stuck in a drawer somewhere.

Don’t feel bad. It is not just you. It is major corporations too. They pay consultants a small fortune to come in and work with all their stakeholders…employees, customers, management, suppliers. They spend weeks, sometimes months, researching with surveys and focus groups.

They may even do ‘retreats’ to fancy resorts or worse yet those ‘team building’ wilderness weekends (oh yeah, because we ALL want to spend our precious days off with work colleagues sans showers). In the end they write a three to five year business plan that will ‘transform’ the company…make it the best place to work…earn billions of dollars for stake holders…ya-da, ya-da, ya-da.

Then you know what happens? That nice shiny three-ring bound business plan that cost tens of thousands of dollars or more gets stuck on a shelf somewhere collecting dust. While the company goes back to business as usual. Actually…worse, because now employees are disenfranchised. They keep thinking about all that big talk about change and making things better for them…that came to nothing.

So how do you keep your goals from becoming a nick-knack collecting dust in a drawer somewhere?

This is a quilt I sewed last year. It hangs on the wall at the foot of my bed. It is the first thing I see every morning and the last at night. My Wheel of Life is at its center. And my goals for those eight pieces of that pie (five this year) are all around it…along with other things like quotes, words to favorite songs and different inspirational exercises. It is a constant reminder. But even before I made the quilt, I would do something similar using poster boards and hanging those on my GOALS wall.

But it does not stop there. Remember those objectives? Well, I use those to plot a course on a monthly and weekly basis using my notebooks. Yes…To-Do lists! I know, joy of joys.

It gets worse too…

At the end of each year, I take down the old…evaluate how well I did. Forgive myself and then file all those goals and Wheels of Life away in a special box. When you are feeling down/depressed, it is wonderful to look back and see just how far you have come in the past five (this makes six) years.

So those are my ways for keeping those goals from becoming just another set of New Year’s resolutions that are broken and forgotten in the first week.

And this year…in an effort to deplete my sewing hoard, I am GIVING AWAY a goals quilt. Yes, I am sewing another one…and will mail it anywhere in the world.

So how do you win, you ask? Several ways…

• Sign-up for my newletter via email at taraneale@virginmedia.com
• Friend me on Facebook at:
  •  https://www.facebook.com/tara.neale.author or
  • https://www.facebook.com/RealityRomances/ (Fan page…no comments allowed and fewer posts)
• Follow me on Twitter @tara_neale
• Comment on any of those or this blog.

To be fair…I will max entries out at five…so twenty comments still only earns you five chances. Deadline to enter is January 31st, 2016.

Tomorrow, we finish this series by looking at the importance of clearing out the old to make way for the new.