Commander, Fort McCoy Garrison
“The size of your dreams must always exceed your current capacity to achieve them. If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”
- Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
Every year in January, much to my wife’s chagrin, I outline a list of 20 personal, audacious goals that I want to accomplish by next December.
These objectives require a significant level of motivation to achieve. At a minimum, they involve a deliberate and sustained effort over time.
This year’s list is different. I’ve looked across the five domains of the Army’s Holistic Health and Fitness (H2F) doctrine and fit my goals into those categories: mental, physical, spiritual, nutritional, and sleep.
As I put the finishing touches on this year’s list, I both felt the satisfaction of challenging myself along with the immediate stress of having to meet these goals over the next 12 months. The question always comes back to why I place this stress onto my year-and believe me, it is incredibly stressful!
Goal setting
Goal setting is a fundamental tenant of leadership. If you have no idea where you’re going, you’re never going to get there. However, these audacious, personal goals help mold me into a more holistic leader at work along with improving as an individual, husband, and father at home.
This year, I’ve divided my personal goals into the five domains of H2F and one additional category of encouragement.
Mental helps me think broader and more deeply, building mental capacity over time.
Physical is geared towards training my body to deal with the stressors of life.
Spiritual focuses on staying in touch with God to build faith and resiliency.
Nutritional creates the greatest challenge with defining tangible ways to improve my body’s fuel.
Sleep is a whole new category. This year is about getting ahold of the number of hours I sleep.
Finally, encourage helps me build up those closest to me and help others grow.
To be clear, none of these 20 goals are work related — they’re all personal achievements. Work goals stay in the office where they belong.
I also throw in a bonus category to challenge myself to get out in the world and see something new. These always include taking the family with me and enjoying time together.
Big, hairy audacious goals (BHAG)
Your goals must be bold and audacious. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was the first female elected head of state in Africa. As a young woman, she repeatedly questioned Liberia’s ability and desire to stand up for equality, and she set a goal to solve this problem.
Along her journey, she faced prison, death threats, and exile. Yet she never gave up on her dream to improve the nation in the face of naysayers and setbacks.
Along the way, she graduated from Harvard, participated in numerous levels of government, won the presidency, and ultimately earned the Nobel Peace Prize. Her goals in life were always larger than what was possible and fraught with peril. Audacious goal setting is a scary journey to embark on but one that bears incredible success.
Resourcing your goals
My annual goals can’t compare to President Sirleaf’s, but collectively they provide a roadmap to improving my life mentally, physically, spiritually, nutritionally, and sleep-wise. It provides focus and forces me to invest time and energy to achieve these goals.
Once you determine what your goals are, you can efficiently use your resources to attack those priorities. You can plan your year and ensure you’re not wasting the precious commodity of time, but instead harness the power of the calendar.
A personal goals list will not get you promoted or earn a better paycheck in itself; it will make you a better leader and direct your focus. You’ll see sustained growth in multiple areas and achieve more than you thought was possible. Over time, your capacity will grow across a wide range of skillsets as you seek to be more than you could ask or imagine.
Without this mindset, the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland said it best. “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road’ll get you there.”
It’s the journey, not the destination
One note: rarely do I achieve every task on my list. However, the energy put into working towards these goals bears tangible benefits in many other areas. For example, three years in a row I had the goal to read 26 books. However, I was again heavily involved in a degree program, and my personal reading took a back seat to academic reading and writing.
While I didn’t achieve my original goal, the books I did read helped shape my academic lens and assisted in many of the assignments. A task strived for and not completed still bears great fruit. Oftentimes it is the journey, not the destination.
Goal setting is hard. Great leaders pick goals to improve their personal habits, which leads to gains across the spectrum of leadership. This year, I challenge you to select some bold and audacious goals. You’ll see benefits over time as you steadily work towards accomplishing more than you thought possible.
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