I am a total nerd when it comes to setting goals (or…New Year’s resolutions). I’m not sure where it started. Maybe it’s the fond memories I have of my family New Year’s Eve tradition. No matter how old my sister and I were, we would share a family meal, and then my dad would enter with his yellow legal pad and a pen. We would go around our table and share our dreams for the year: where we wanted to travel, what we hoped to achieve in school, or in our extracurricular activities. My parents would talk about our family, ministry, and work. I may have rolled my eyes, but thanks, dad, because I never stopped setting goals, even now as a wife, mom, and entrepreneur.
This time of year gets a bad rap because, yes, historically so many of us set these goals, buy a gym membership, and then by February we’ve stopped setting our alarms to get up; the gym membership is cancelled by April.
As a stay-at-home mom myself, I think it’s easy to believe that if you aren’t working outside of the home, then what’s the point in setting goals? And, friend, today I just want to encourage you that no matter what season you are in, no matter if you stay at home full-time, work from home, work outside of the home, have kids in school, daycare, or home school, there is room for you to set goals and achieve them.
Creating SMART New Year’s Resolutions
There are lots of different ways to set goals, but I believe using the SMART acronym is incredibly helpful to actually narrow down what your true desires are and make the necessary steps to achieve smart New Year’s resolutions.
S IS FOR SPECIFIC
Many of us tend to be too general in goal setting, and this is, by far, mistake number one. It’s not enough to say, “I want to lose weight,” or “I want to get more sleep.” Be specific. How much weight do you want to lose? How many hours of sleep do you want to get (I know all you mamas are laughing right now, because the struggle is real). If you want to take a vacation, where do you want to go?
If you want to be better at tackling that laundry, what’s your number one struggle in getting it done? Is it starting it, switching it over, or putting it away? Take that specific struggle and make it your goal. So if it’s putting that laundry away, then your goal wouldn’t just be, “Do better at getting laundry done,” it would be: “Put away the laundry in a timely, organized fashion.” Break it down. The more specific you are, the more likely you will be to actually make it happen.
M IS FOR MEASURABLE
Depending on what your goal is, you may already have this covered this by making it specific. Sometimes our goals can seem really big, so how can we make it measurable over time?
I think it’s very important to celebrate small wins within the bigger picture. I struggle with this! This highly driven overachiever girl forgets to celebrate the journey until my husband reminds me, “Hey, look how far you’ve already come!” So, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds, how will you measure that? Will you do a weekly weigh-in? Will you simply go by the way your clothes are fitting? If you want to eat healthier, how many fruits and veggies will you consume daily or how many times a week will you cook at home? Give yourself mini milestones to measure—something to look forward to, something to celebrate.
A IS FOR ATTAINABLE/ACHIEVABLE
This is about how you are going to make it happen. This is probably my biggest downfall when achieving goals. I love to dream and to get so excited, and sometimes I go a little overboard.
The point here is you honestly need to know yourself really well. For example, is it attainable to go from eating out five times a week to immediately doing something like Whole30? Like I mentioned earlier, notice the small wins along the way and make sure to dream big, but also make sure your plan is attainable so that it can be achieved. So instead of jumping to something like Whole30, you could simply scale back and commit to the 80/20 rule (healthy 80% of the time, more freedom with the other 20%). That could look like cooking healthy meals at home during the week, and then on the weekends enjoying a couple of meals out and not stressing about it.
R IS FOR RELEVANT
This is all about focus and taking a good, hard look at what your priorities are right now and what season of life you’re currently in. You may want to change lots of things, but are they all relevant to where you are right now? Maybe you are a brand-new mama and know you’ll want to go back to work when your kiddo goes to school, but if that’s five or six years away, that’s not a relevant goal right now. It may be a good idea for you to do a brain dump on all the things you want to achieve in each area of your life and prioritize the ones that are most relevant and more urgent to where you are right now.
T IS FOR TIME-BOUND
This is one of the biggest pieces to this whole goal-setting deal. Whether you are a planner or procrastinator, if you don’t have a deadline, then you are setting yourself up for failure.
Set the time for the deadline but understand that life happens. Don’t beat yourself up when you fall off the horse; simply get back up and keep riding. There will be times you may need to pull back on those reins and times you may want to speed up, but that’s for you to decide. It helps your mindset along the way and gives you something to look forward to with the big picture.
MORE TIPS TO ACHIEVE YOUR GOALS
- Get an actual printed planner. Seriously, there is so much research about the power of writing things down. I rarely ever use an electronic calendar. Honestly, the only time I open up my iCal is when I need to put a reminder in it and then I move it to my written down planner. I have found (especially with mom-brain) I actually remember things off the top of my head more because I write them down. There’s something about the action of doing it and seeing it visually. My number one favorite planner is The Passion Planner. Because I have a lot going on between homeschooling my son, his activities, managing my home, leading and serving in two different ministries, and working from home as an author and blogger, this particular planner really helps me to keep it all in one place but break it down and organize it well. Some other popular ones are Erin Condren and Power Sheets. Find what best fits your personality, but I’m telling you, put the phone down and go old school.
- Have a master calendar for your family where everyone can see it. I am a big proponent of a dry-erase calendar. Put it somewhere that tends to be the “command center” in your home. For us, that’s the kitchen. This is something both you and your spouse can write on, edit, and use as a quick reference to plan accordingly. You can add meals on there, grocery items needed, chore chart, or if you want to get real nerdy like me, you can even color code it.
- Give yourself grace (I’m preaching to myself here). I am my own worst enemy and my greatest critic. Life happens. There are weeks that you may have all these things planned, but you-know-what hits the fan and none of it happens. That’s okay. We are all human, you are only one person, so give yourself grace. Ask for help, say no, and don’t be so hard on yourself.
Christa Jordan is a wife, mom via adoption, coffee consumer, and Mary Poppins wannabe. A born-and-raised-Texan, she is doing all the things she said she never would, like homeschooling, going gluten- and dairy-free, and using essential oils like they are going out of style. She and her husband are both former social workers-turned-writers and entrepreneurs. She loves sharing about the joy and pain of adoption, and helping to prepare others along the way, and published her first book in 2018: Before You Adopt: A Guide To The Questions You Should Be Asking. She keeps it raw and real, and you can find her rocking the mom-bun, making more coffee, and processing through words on her blog at spoonfulofjordan.com and other real-life shenanigans over on Instagram @spoonfulofjordanblog.
