See previous Control Panel posts here.
It’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty, in determining what it will actually take to complete your goals.
First things first. Choose five of your goals. Which ones? Why, the most important ones, of course! You’ve determined which of these they were. If you numbered your list, take the top five. If you used ABC priorities, choose any five A’s.
Expand on your goal statement. Break it down into a series of steps required to get you to completion. For that matter, make sure you define “completion” clearly for yourself. If you want to climb Mount Everest, for example, is it enough to simply reach the summit? Or do you want to plant a flag, take photographic evidence, keep a journal of your progress, etc?
Back to the steps to get there; list everything you can think of that will be working towards your goal. There will probably be things that come up later that you didn’t anticipate, that’s ok. Plan what you can now while you’re sitting in your easy chair so you have fewer surprises that threaten to derail you. Put the steps in a logical order, and assess time and resource requirements. Then sit down with your Control Panel and fit these steps into your actual life. Oh, you don’t have time for your big dreams in your life? I “don’t have time” to write a novel right now either – I’ve got 4 kids and a myriad of other obligations myself – but I do have time to write a character backstory or a few pages at night when the kids are in bed and my chores are done. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step – and it continues that way too, one step at a time.
Have you heard the story about filling the chest? You start with cannonballs, and a few fit in and it seems full. But then you can fit some baseball-sized rocks in the gaps and it’s fuller still. Even so, many pebbles can still be squeezed into the space between. After that, a whole lot of sand can be poured into the chest. What was full still had much space to be filled. So it is with our lives. I look at it two ways. One interpretation is that if you start with the small stuff, the minutiae, the day to day recurrent nothing we fill our days with – the sand – there won’t be enough room for the important things, the big stuff – the rocks and cannonballs. On the other hand, one could say that the things we already do are the cannonballs. Life looks full and we say we don’t have time for anything else. But our large goals can be broken down into small and smaller pieces to be fit in around our other activities, like the pebbles and sand. Take it as you like, they both work.
For those first five goals, set out the steps to get there, starting with wherever you are. Add those steps to your daily life so you are actively working towards things that are actually important to you. Give yourself timelines and deadlines. If money is an obstacle, and you can’t yet move forward, plan instead how to raise the resources, and plan to keep track of your monetary progress and work toward beginning your goal. It’s all the same process, and it all takes small steps to reach large distances.
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