Saturday, 4 November 2023

Personal Goals

Something that I have experienced a lot in the past is difficulty formulating and achieving my personal goals. In fact, I also have a poor track record for keeping a proper understanding of my goal. This is something I believe we touched on pretty good at the last meeting and several individuals offered good insights towards, and I thought I would form my own thoughts regarding it. 

The biggest thing when making personal goals is something that has been said multiple times; the goal needs to be a goal, but it needs a plan and a foundation. The goal should not be doing 50,000 kicks in a year- the goal should be something along the lines of "to improve my kicks to better my Kung Fu". On that same note, you add the 50,000 requirement to the goal so that you can properly measure it out and have a bar you can strive for.

In the past, I have had difficulty in focusing on the goal itself and not the plan. An example of this was a personal goal I had set several years ago; I was going to do a 36h fast, to better my own personal understanding of those in the world who have to worry about when their next meal would be. This was a busy year for me and at one point, after doing nothing but work and Kung Fu and school for several days, I was going and going and going before nearly passing out. When I managed to re-center myself, I realized that I was really, really hungry. Upon reflection, it occurred to me I had not eaten anything for nearly 40 hours. This is very clearly not a good thing, but at the time? I thought "hey, that's a personal goal checked off".

There are two things I want to note here. The first is that I was treating the goal as a check list; I was just trying to mark it off. The other is that I never completed the goal; I simply completed the numerical value assigned to the goal. This is not good. This defeats the whole point. 

I believe I had largely moved past this and I am quite content with my goals for next year, but in the event that I start to lost sight of it again in the future, this is why this blog exists. 

No comments:

Post a Comment