How to Assess your Goals and Dreams

Goals and dreams, this is the next stop on this crazy train of living a life you love. Honestly, it is the best place to start. You need to evaluate and assess your goals and dreams in order to figure out what direction you want to go. But, what are your goals and dreams? How do you know that you are moving in the right direction? That is what we are going to focus on today!

Goals and Dreams: Where to Start?

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This might be easy for you, and it might be difficult too. You are going to start with jotting down some ideas. As we continue to move through this series, there will be a lot of writing down of things. I hope you grabbed a notebook to help you keep everything in one location! Trust me, it will be helpful as we continue our journey towards a life we love.

It doesn’t have to be a list, although that is my preferred method. It can be anything to help you better organize your ideas. I tend to use a bulleted list. I will have main areas of my life and then sub-points under those main ideas, then I will make connections or find common threads that appear throughout my lists. But, an idea web is a great way to do this as well. Take a two page spread in your notebook and just start putting ideas down and connecting them with lines.

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Considering Goals and Dreams

Maybe I should write dreams first, instead of goals. Because dreams are going to be where we actually start. This is your opportunity to write down what an idea life would be like for you. Obviously, you need to keep in mind your most important thing. Everything needs to be done in context in order to create harmony in our lives. It sounds silly to read, but it is true.

You may have dreams that are so unrelated to your most important thing, you don’t know why they are there. It actually will give you a chance to either evaluate how that supports your most important thing, or it can help you evaluate why your most important thing doesn’t have room for this dream. Do you need to make adjustments to your most important thing?

Dreams are where you want to start. You will write down everything. Anything. It doesn’t matter if it seems completely far fetched, that is part of dreaming! Yes, you will eventually have to pare down some of these dreams. It doesn’t mean you won’t get to them eventually, just that they may not be right for this season.

What Season are you in?

As you start to work through your dreams, you will definitely notice things that aren’t in the right season for you. Perhaps you want to travel, but don’t have the money to just jet off. Perhaps you want to live in a clutter free environment, but you just had a baby and are trying to also homeschool two older children. It is all about seasons. Again, it doesn’t mean that these dreams will never become a reality, instead it is the opposite. You know that you will be able to work on these dreams at some point, but just not this season.

Once you start to realistically look at what you have in front of you, you will be able to start to formulate some ideas on the dreams that ARE possible to work on now. And that is when a dream starts to shape itself into a goal.

Turning a Dream into a Goal

Have you heard this quote before:

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Let’s switch out wish with dream. When we are dreaming, we are thinking about all the things we want to do – at some point. As we go throughout this month I will have more resources and tools to help you hone in on your goals and create a plan to put in place, but starting right now, you can make little changes to help foster those dreams into reality.

Think about the steps needed to make that dream a reality. Are there steps that you can start taking now to make progress? Can you recognize the changes that you will have to make in order to make your dream into a goal? What are the dreams that stand out to you as being possible in the shorter term? Which ones are actually long term desires?

The great thing about dreams is that they don’t just disappear. Take a step back, think about any limitations that you have, and you can then rank your dreams. Which ones have limitations that act as low-hanging fruit? Those are the ones that you want to attack first. Easy wins for you!

The Bottom Line

You need to recognize what your dreams are. Put them into a concrete form (a list, an idea web, a scatter book). And then you can start to rank them as to what is most realistic for this stage in your life. Now, you can definitely have stretch dreams. If you have the margin to work on these dreams now, do it! But, if you don’t, that is OK. We are going to continue to talk about how to making progress, even if it is long-range.

Dreaming is a great way to think about a life you love. You are formulating in your mind, not the perfect life, but the life that is perfect for you. There is a distinction. You want to strive for the best life for you and your family, not for someone else. Remember what I said in the first post of this series? I will share a lot of what living a life I love means to me, but that doesn’t mean that what I share is the right thing for you.

I would love to hear what some of your dreams are! Which are the ones can you visualize becoming a reality in the short term? Email me here and I will share some of mine with you!