“Uhmm, yeah. I’m gonna need you to work on ... Saturday...”

Setting goals can be a spiritual experience that helps make sure everything you do supports your core personal values. Background photo by: NASA

This post originally appeared on the Hermit Haus Redevelopment website on 2019-11-12.

I know a lot of people who hate the idea of setting goals. This aversion can make it difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish anything useful—except by accident. I believe the reluctance to set goals stems from the way we were forced to set them and ignore them in favor of 10,000 trivial tasks in the corporate world—only to be punished for not accomplishing them in our annual review.

Yes, I’m talking to you, computer industry!

But I have come to view goal setting as a spiritual practice. It focuses your intent on what matters to you.

All of your goals should derive from your personal values or principles. But you must first identify what those are. Once you do, you can use them to determine whether the 10,000 things that beset you in the course of your daily life support your values or distract you from them. With well-defined goals, you can quickly determine which tasks are important, which you should do now, which you should put off, and which you should ignore. Many of the things that seem urgent in the moment resolve themselves if you ignore them, but others can still come back to bite you in the butt.

An Example

Scheduling your time appropriately probably supports every value you have, from fighting homelessness to spending more time with your family watching Power Ranger reruns for the hundredth time.

Values

Before you can set goals that support your personal values, you must first determine what those values are. Values are what really matters to you. I like to think about values as nouns—ambiguous ones at that. Some values might include:

• Integrity
• Frugality
• Kindness
• Social responsibility
• Family and other relationships
• Independence
• Spirituality

SMART goals help you stay on track to support your values. This picture is one of my computer desktops. I am such a geek!

Attainable Goals

The goals you set to support your values should be attainable, something you can get done. I have talked about SMART goals elsewhere, as has my partner, Russell Mangum. So, I won’t distract you by repeating myself here. Not too much.

Let’s say you have an aspirational value of Social Responsibility, and you’ve decided you want to do something about homelessness. An attainable goal to support that value might be to help Habitat for Humanity build two affordable houses this year.

Milestones

Each of those two houses is a milestone you can check off once it’s built.

Steps and Tasks

Now it gets interesting. To meet that goal, you can contribute your time, your money, or both. Each of which involves layers of tasks and sub-tasks.

If you choose to donate $1,000 of your time, you have to:

• Determine how much an hour of your time is worth.
• Divide $1,000 by your hourly rate to determine how many hours (more or less) you need to contribute.
• Coordinate your schedule with Habitat’s to know when you need to work.
• Prioritize that time to keep it available so nothing prevents you from helping out.

Real World Intrusions

Understanding your values and the goals that supports them helps you decide what to do when an “urgent” task tries to invade your awareness. It enables you to focus your intent on what matters to you and even helps you identify and resolve conflicts between values. So, the next time your boss wants you to work on a Saturday you already have devoted to something else, you can think about it and decide what you want to do. Working that day may bring in more money that you could satisfy multiple values. You could donate the extra money (assuming overtime) to Habitat and provide for your family by keeping your boss happy. Or you could decide what you already had planned is more important to your values and happiness.

Each new request, each new item on your unending to do list is an opportunity to support your values or a distraction from them. It’s really all your choice.

Food for Thought #3

This chicken and broccoli casserole is called Chicken Divine. It looks divine, and I think I’ll try it some time.

Photo source: recipetips.com

Appetizer:What was the last song that got stuck in your head?

Honestly, I haven’t had a song get stuck in my head that I didn’t consciously put there in a while, so I’m having trouble answering my own stupid question. (Why did I pick this one when I wrote these a couple of weeks ago?) I’m going to go with Kris Kristofferson’s “ Who’s to Bless and Who’s to Blame?” It’s the last one I picked up a guitar and started singing for no apparent reason.

Soup:What does that song make you think of?

I think it’s about a man wrestling with belief versus disbelief, something I do constantly. If there is a God, why does the world suck? Or how much worse would it be without one? I want to play this song together with Greg Lake’s “ Closer to Believing.” If I can find or write a couple more, I’ll have a spiritual journey in music.

Salad:What is your favorite song in a language other than your native tongue?

That would be “ Lo Siento Mi Vida” by Linda Ronstadt, Kenny Edwards, and Gilbert Ronstadt. It was the first song I ever heard Linda sing in Spanish, and I keep it close to my heart after all these years.

Entré:If video killed the radio star, will the Internet kill Literature?

I believe it will certainly change the predominate forms of literature. Shorter forms will previal: poetry and short shorts. Short stories and novels may become rarities.

Another thing is that the predomince of video on the Internet seems to be part of a change in brain wiring. We seem to be shifting back to a more visual, less linear form of thought. For more on this, see The Alphabet versus the Goddess: The conflict between word and image.

Dessert:What was the last thing you read for the pleasure of reading?

I’m currently reading a compilation called Vampires, Wine, and Roses: Chilling tales of immortal pleasure, among other things. I thought it would be cheesy, but it’s turning out to have some really thoughtful selections. Who realized that Shakespeareused the language of vampirism to make the separation of Romeo and Juliet more poignant? I certainly didn’t recognize it until JR Stephenspointed it out.

Book Review: Initiation

Haich, Elisabeth, (2000). Initiation. Santa Fe: Aurora Press.

Photo source: LibraryThing

Initiation is a strange book. A novel set as an autobiography of a bodhisattva, it hits all points of the readability spectrum.

• The description of life through a child’s eyes is captivating and humorous. I loved this child and could not put the book down during this phase.
• The adolescent girl really annoyed me, again capturing the self-centeredness, depth and shallowness of adolescence. I did not like the character very much at this point, but I wanted to see her grow up.
• Unfortunately, by the time the novel describes the woman as a young adult, the author devolves into preachiness. I no longer cared about the character because she flattened out, becoming a mere tool for a message spiritual message Haich wanted to convey.

While dialog was never Haich’s strong suite, when the character enters adulthood, conversation becomes stilted. The plot sickens, and the author falls into preachiness. I put the book down one night when I got sleepy—once the character became an adult, it becomes very easy to put the book down and go to sleep—and I haven’t been able to make myself pick it back up again.

It is sad that this was Haich’s only work of fiction. This novel shows her potential. Writers aren’t supposed to reach their potential with their first novel. Unfortunately, Initiation was published six years after her death.