Most of us use certain time markers like New Years to gauge our personal success. Planning resolutions and dreaming in new endeavors can be an exciting time. And it can be challenging not to experience regrets or feelings of discouragement over things that did not come to fruition. Often this reflection can bring in negative thinking patterns and old ideas about ourselves that can jam the upcoming process of being on the precipice of what is next. I wonder how to enter this forward setting period in a spacious way to objectively get to know whether we are setting ourselves up for success or failure.
In our left-brained society most of us are familiar with the process of goal setting in terms of short term, within weeks or months, and longer term the upcoming year or decade. The technique is helpful to be clear about what direction you are heading. If your ten-year goal is to live debt-free, it is important to make decisions today to support this. It may not be in your best interest to carry credit cards or go on a trip that you don’t have the money for. And even though goal setting has plenty of merits, it does adhere to the land of logic rather than the realm of unexpected magical surprise.
So how can we accurately get perspective of what we want to accomplish? I find getting to know what you want and why is incredibly beneficial as a precursor to the manifesting process. If your goal is to be debt-free in ten years and in the past year you have actually accrued more, how do you assess this? Remember to be realistic, this may have been a hard year with a lot of unexpected expenses occurred. And there is the classic story which you can find yourself starring in, inadvertently setting yourself up for failure. It may be impossible to make any progress with debt because incoming and outgoing are about equal and staying stable is the best you can do. What does your goal really tell you about yourself? Is it reflecting your negative opinion of yourself with debt, like considering yourself financially irresponsible? What is the core value that you are attaching to the goal?
I find it helpful to write goals down and be willing to sit with them for a period of time. Set up a five-minute meditation or some time to do some free-form writing and see what appears. By examining it, you may learn about your fears around your financial future. You may also recognize that your holding onto debt is actually creating more debt rather than releasing it. An important thing about getting in touch with your coming resolution is rediscovering your core needs and claim what you want from a place of power.
Interestingly, I recently came across the idea of a “bucket list,” a list of things that you want to do before you die. One piece I like about this is, we may make the goal to hike the Grand Canyon as part of our yearly resolution and find ourselves with a broken ankle two weeks before departure. If it is on a “bucket list,” we open to the simple equation of the right time and space to frame what we want. It is an interesting process to turn over our expectations of how things should be, and trust that the elements align at the perfect moment to create what we want. Blessings. May 2011 find you encountering many perfect moments!