Mindful Goal-Setting

It’s the last day of our Mindful Goal-Setting Workshop! We hope this has been a helpful and encouraging resource for you as you enter this New Year.

And today is all about taking action — but in a way that’s still in line with the mindful heart of this approach.

Again, it’s easy to get caught up in traditional ways of taking action that can feel hard-driving. Mindful goal-setting isn’t about pushing yourself to be something or someone else; it’s about allowing yourself to be who you really are.

So set a timer for 15-20 minutes. Take a few deep breaths and reflect on or journal about these things:

• Of the possibilities you visualized yesterday, select one.
• In a kind of “reverse engineering,” start from the point of realizing the goal and go backwards. What are the steps that might be needed to get you to your goal?
• Now think of a few different ways you could do these steps. Stay open and creative, and follow what feels good. For example, if one of your goals is to learn how to make a delicious curry and then host an amazing dinner party for your friends, you could take a cooking class, sign up for video tutorials, try different cookbooks, or ask a friend who’s a great cook to help you. How do you like to learn? What feels fun and interesting to you?
• Set a timeline of when you want to do each step that gets you to your goal in a reasonable time frame. Remember that you can always adjust as you go!
• Set “check-in” times along the way where you stop and assess how it’s going. Not if you’re doing it right (that’s pushing + striving), but if what you’re doing feels right (that’s allowing + trusting). Allow for flexibility.
• Give yourself permission to revisit and refresh your plan if you need to. It’s a structure that’s made to give you more freedom, not make you feel trapped.

When your timer goes off, take a few deep breaths to end your practice.

If you find yourself feeling discouraged or getting caught up in "I should" … keep going back to gratitude, imagining possibilities, and visualizing outcomes.

Stay rooted in acceptance and appreciation.

Celebrate each step.

Be gracious with yourself along the way.

You can go through these 4 steps as many times as you like. They’ll always help to bring you back to a place of mindfulness.

We hope these practices have been helpful for you, and we’d love to hear about the mindful goals you set!