Goals, not Resolutions

A couple of years ago I stopped setting New Year's Resolutions. I'd grown weary of excitedly setting lofty resolutions each January only to have them blown out of the water by February 1. (Let's be honest, usually well before February 1.)

Multiple goals by shersteve on flickr

So in January 2011, I changed my mindset. I was no longer setting resolutions but would be setting goals for the coming year. And, as much as I bemoan the "SMART" goal during annual review time at work, I was determined that my personal goals would be SMART. They would be specific, manageable, attainable, and all that corporate-speak stuff. As usual, I went a little crazy and set myself about 12 different goals for 2011. And do you want to know what happened? I achieved almost all of them. When I revisited them at the end of the year to do a final tally, I had fully achieved all but four and had made at least some progress on three of those four. (And the fourth one - losing weight - I decided didn't count any longer because I'd been pregnant and had a child in 2011.)

So, feeling proud of my 2011 accomplishments and energized by my dreams and visions for 2012, I set about determining my goals for 2012. What I learned last year was that I did best on the goals that had mini-goals or benchmarks within them. For instance, one of my 2011 goals was to complete four craft projects and I then listed out the four projects that I, ideally, wanted to complete. Not only did I complete those four, but also eight others!

My 2012 goal-setting started in the middle of the night in late December. I had just given my son his middle-of-the-night feeding and, upon returning to bed, found that I couldn't shut my mind off. I couldn't go back to sleep because all these ideas for craft designs, story ideas, book projects, business dreams kept swirling in my mind. Giving up on sleep, I sat up in bed, grabbed my iPhone, and started to type out notes about these ideas. I ended up with nine different notes files including ideas, dreams, and goals. My next several blog posts are going to present most of these goals, starting with one that has already been realized with the creation of this blog.

My goals for 2012 are varied and contain simple, easy-to-achieve ones and also a couple of borderline scary putting-myself-out-there ones, like writing and publishing a book and starting a business. I'm looking forward to sharing them with you.

What's your put-yourself-out-there goal for 2012?