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Hi friends! So this month I’ve been talking about goals and like setting goals and working toward goals and making goals and I’ve been talking about goals all month so far. And I just a couple days ago, took a mini workshop about anti-planning from Elizabeth Goddard, and it has me thinking maybe goal setting isn’t the best idea for me, always. So I want to acknowledge goal-setting is super great for a lot of people. It may or may not work for you or me or your friend or whoever and I wanted to give another perspective kind of based off of the information that I’ve already given you. So, I’ve already talked a lot about goals and like ways that you can set them and things like that, but I wanted to also talk about getting things done without having really rigid goals and plans.

As you have already heard, I’ve set some goals for myself and I’m already starting to either not want to do them, or I’m just, like, feeling behind on them already and it’s not even February yet, or I’m just like, they feel like an obligation that’s not really fun. And I’m wondering why I want to do them. So let’s talk about anti-planning and doing things to work towards things we want to do, but in a less structured, you have to do it this way, this time, this place, kind of way. So let’s do it. 

So Elizabeth Goddard, I don’t, I don’t think I’ve talked to y’all about her very much but she’s in the UK and she’s like a business online business, kind of person and she teaches some courses and stuff and she recently did this Christmas party thing where a lot of her students offered free resources and guides, and worksheets and courses and stuff to anybody that wants them for free. So I downloaded of those and Elizabeth Goddard‘s anti-planning workshop was part of that big bundle of things that we could get. So I did that. She had this option where you can listen to it like a podcast which is really helpful for me because I was able to do the whole thing while I was waiting three hours in line to get a covid test. So I was doing something while also doing something else. Um, so that was really helpful for me, but I wanted to talk a little bit about what Elizabeth said during that anti-planning workshop in this vlog post.

Click here to learn more about Elizabeth Goddard

I’m not going to go over everything. Obviously. I’m not Elizabeth Goddard. I’m just sharing some of the things that she shared. So first off acknowledging that goals and like rigid planning is not necessarily going to work perfectly for everyone. Everyone’s different. Some people work really well with goals and plans and some people really don’t. So, that is just the beauty and magic of being an individual human. Everybody has different needs and wants and desires, and ways that they go about doing everything in life.

So, one of the things that Elizabeth shared in the workshop was making a decision about what you want and then figuring out ways that you can work towards that in small increments. So this kind of already like goals, but it’s kind of also not. So once you have a why of what you want to do that helps you have a reason to continue working towards whatever this thing is. You can set smaller goals, like maybe monthly goals or income goals, things like that, but you don’t necessarily have to. She talked about how she doesn’t necessarily make a plan for what she’s going to do any further out than like a month. But what she does do is she has several things that she wants to work toward on an every day, or like a weekly basis that she needs to do her business anyway, which is like growing her audience, nurturing her audience, and selling to her audience. Which that makes sense, right? Like that’s what most online businesses need to do. And for her it’s not necessarily about I have to do this thing, this day, this other thing, this other day, this thing that day, it’s more, like what actions can I do everyday to slowly work toward these things that I want? So growing nurturing and selling you can work toward that every day without having a specific checklist.

Like she could be I think some of her examples were she would work on emails to her email list. She has Facebook groups that she is in a lot. So she communicates with her people there. Finding new ways to find other people. So, like reaching out to other entrepreneurs and seeing if she could be on like podcasts, things like that. So it’s not really like this huge list of all these things she has to do. It’s she knows the direction she wants to go in and every day she does a little bit in that direction.

Another thing that she talked about was having like a word or a theme for the year to kind of keep you centered on what it is that you want to work on. So it could be like Focus or Community or Sharing like whatever you feel is important to you and your business right now. Like for me personally, I probably would say Sharing and Community for like if I were to think of a word or theme for the year, because I know that I kind of struggle with like I’ll make a lot of content, but I don’t actually share it anywhere or I’ll just put it behind a pay wall for members like y’all. So that means way less people get to see it, and I’m not really growing and kind of staying in the same place because I’m making things but I’m not really sharing them with anybody. So that would be for me. Like sharing would be a thing that I would like to work toward.

She also talks about having core desired feelings. Like what do I want to feel this year? And how can I make a steps in that direction? Like I want to feel calm I want to feel happy, I want to feel like I’m helping people… so that can be another way to orient yourself towards what is important for me to work on right now.

She also talks about making incremental upgrades instead of trying to do like one huge, massive project and a short amount of time. Try to just make one thing a little bit better today and then one thing a little bit better tomorrow or next week or whatever.

She also talks about creating be do have lists. So things that you want to be, things that you want to do, and things that you want to have. And in that little course thing she was talking about how sometimes when she writes this be do have list, she doesn’t even necessarily have to like be going after all those things all the time, sometimes once she figures out what it is that she wants to be do and have they kind of find their way to her sometimes.

So I think this is kind of a reiteration of the fact that we need time and space to like mull things over and like, not be doing doing doing all the time and to just kind of be and exist in order to make room for those things to happen or those changes to come to life or whatever.

So I wanted to make sure that I shared some of this with you because I know that me personally I’m already kind of doubting that I’ll be able to do all of the like weekly and monthly things that I set out that I wanted to do just earlier this month. And just the fact that it’s been a couple weeks already and I’m already like am I really going to be able to make a short for YouTube every week? Do I really want to do that? And with the amount of time it’s taking me to edit this one video, I’m wondering if I’m actually going to be able to like, create a whole video for YouTube every month.

So, here is me being an imperfect human. I have goals that I may or may not work towards that I have hopes for, but I also don’t want to pressure myself too much about doing them super consistently, because then that’s when I feel like bogged down and like I really don’t want to do it. When I have too many things on my plate, I don’t want to do any of the things. 

Um, I wanted to tell you I’m an imperfect human, you’re an imperfect human and we all have things that we want to work on and whether or not we do that in a really structured way… as long as we’re doing something in the direction of where we want to go, whenever we can, that’s the best we can ask for, right? Just surviving 2020 and 2021 is a feat. Congratulations! You are still here! Good job! I’m proud of you, I’m proud of me! We are still here! So that means just like, yeah, everything… everything will be okay whether or not we’re super planning and goal oriented or not. Like we exist, we survived 2020 and 2021. We’re doing good.

Okay. Yeah. Just wanted to share some anti-planning stuff with you since this whole month has been about goals. So just want to say hi. I love you. Thank you for being here and I’ll talk to you soon! *MWAH* Bye!

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