You do the same thing over and over. You make the same New Year’s resolutions every year, and every year you give up, forget or have some excuse for not achieving your goals. Or maybe you’re miserable in your job and can’t figure out what really motivates you. As a Four Tendencies Questioner, I’m not really a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but I find great value in gaining clarity. Having clarity can support us in making changes we want or continuing on a certain path.

This is an exercise I came up with around the beginning of 2018 to gain some insight on how and where to focus my time and attention during the upcoming year. There wasn’t a template that I followed, and my process was formulated through inspiration from multiple sources. Below is an outline of this process. Depending on how much time you want to spend and how focused (no rabbit trailing) you want be, start by giving yourself some guidelines such as I mention – limit to 5-10 top goals – or set a time limit. If you run out of time you can come back later and pick up where you left off. I think being able to leave it and come back to it over and over again, and make adjustments as needed is part of the beauty of it. Also, for this exercise I do not recommend separating personal and professional goals as I believe it is important to see where they in alignment and/or diverge. 

1. Start by listing your goals – Brain dump your top 5-10 personal and professional short term and long term goals leaving several lines of space in between.
2. For each goal answer the following questions:

WHY is it important?

Why do you want to do it?

What are your driving factors (top 4-5 things that come to mind) 

What will it mean to you if you accomplish it?

What will it feel like if you accomplish it?

What will it mean to you if you don’t accomplish it?

What will it feel like if you don’t accomplish it?

3. Review – identify any potential conflicting goals. If any, continue here, if none, move on to next review in step 4.

Example: Goal #1- Be a consistent presence in my children’s lives Goal #2 – Travel the world solo for a year.

Add 2-3 more “why’s” to each to a little dig deeper, find the why to your why.

4. Review – Look for any external “why’s”. These are based on someone else’s opinion or perception. If any, continue here, If none, move on to next review in step 5.

Example: My family expects it of me.

Write down: WHY that person(s) drives you to succeeding on that goal; WHY does their opinion matter? If I remove the external why, what is my internal why?

5. Review – where do your “why’s” align? Where do they diverge? Is there a theme to what your most important “why”/ driving motivator is? What one “why” is non-compromisable?

Use the above information to reprioritize and/or eliminate goals.