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Goals Revisited
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By Cathy Severson, MS
Have you heard the saying that life is what happens to you while you were doing something else? How many of us have felt that way at times? Retirement living that is fulfilling is means stepping up to your life and taking responsibility for what happens. An important question of most new retirees is how to retire happy? An aspect of this is the willingness and ability to create and realize new retirement goals. There is no better time to start creating new dreams than now. Instead of setting goals around a negative in your life, how about using this as an opportunity to get motivated and excited about creating a wonderful new retirement life?
Most goals are not very inspiring. Most involve losing weight, exercising, getting out of debt, saving money, getting organized, or breaking an unhealthy habit like smoking. Those aren’t goals. They are tasks to do. While tasks may be important and there is a sense of accomplishment when they are completed, they don’t make the heart sing.
Goals should be connected to the really important things you want to do in life. They should arise from your passions, gifts and values. Webster defines goal as, “an area or object toward which play is directed in order to score.
True goals should excite and tap into your childlike enthusiasm and joy. A goal should focus on more than just the end result. Select goals that you can also enjoy the process. Goals should be connected to what you really want in life.
I’ve found that often people get stuck in being able to come up with inspiring goals. This is especially true of older people. Isn’t it sad that it’s easier for us to come up with additional ways to press our noses to the grindstone, but get stumped in tapping into our heart’s desires? You may need to play and experiment with establishing a compelling goal. Maybe that becomes the goal for the year- determine inspiring new goals for your boomer retirement.
Once you’ve established a goal you want to work on, you need to nurture it, just like you would a seedling you plant in the ground. Here are some suggestions to help you goal grow.
- Write your goals down. Researchers studied former students to see who wrote their goals down and how it affected their lives. Only 3% of students took the time to write their goals down. Twenty years later, the researchers went back to the surviving class to learn the 3% with written goals had accumulated more success and wealth than the other 97% combined.
- Make the goal measurable and specific. If your dream is to live a healthier lifestyle, your goal may be to eat 4-5 fresh fruits and vegetables a day. To simply state you want to live a healthier lifestyle is too vague.
- Start small. In his book, “One Small Step Can Change Your Life: Using the Japanese Technique of Kaizen to Achieve Lasting Success,” Robert Maurer, a UCLA psychologist states the brain is resistant to change and will sabotage new endeavors. By starting off with very small steps, the brain will get used to the new behavior without balking.
- Create a routine. Find a consistent time on a daily or weekly basis to work on your goals. Block the time, and don’t let interruptions distract you.
- Find support. Find a buddy or coach who can help you when the goals becomes difficult. Even if you’ve chosen a goal that inspires and excites you, there will be challenges to overcome. A partner can help in those times.
- Don’ beat yourself up if you falter. Most of us have a critical parent in our head that is more than willing to tell us what a loser we are when we falter. While this may work as a very short term motivator, it doesn’t work for the long haul. Accept yourself and realize you will need to experiment with routines, goals, and behaviors to get where you want to go. It took me five years of experimenting before I found physical activity that I could embrace on a continual basis. Hang in there and don’t give up is easier done you like yourself during the process.
The boomer retirement is going to be different that previous generations. Creating new retirement goals is important. It is the first step in how to retire happy.
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