Maintain Your Course:

    The point of having goals is that it gives us a destination to journey to. A lot of our growth and our fulfillment in life is going to be alone our journey to our goals, but without the goals there, the journey turns into a rambling and aimless thing. We may find growth in that wandering, but it will be accidental and haphazard, where as we go instead focused and aimed at what we really want in life we can get it. A life without a goal is a life left to chance and the vagaries of the world. Instead of wandering aimlessly, we need a point to our journey to so that we can grow in a purposeful and active way, a way we desire.

    Part of the key to achieving a goal is to not look at the destination all the time so that we can’t become discouraged. Instead we follow the daily and weekly steps that we have laid out so that we can reach our goals and stop looking at the end destination. This is vital to make sure that we can achieve our goals, but we also need another skill in order to actually arrive where we want to go. Once we have sorted out our goal and made our plans on how we get there, we have to take a little time sometimes to make sure we are on the correct path. If we don’t look up at the goal from time to time, we may come to the end of our plan and see that we are massively off base because we only looked at the steps we were taking. We were taking the steps we had planned and that is good thing, but just as no strategy survives contact with the enemy, no plan survives contact with the constantly changing world. By taking a short break from time to time to assess how we are doing on our plan and if that plan is still aiming us towards the goal we can make sure that we don’t travel too far off base.

    My work when I was contract archaeologist is a great example of this idea. Each day we needed to survey about eight miles of rough terrain to make sure there wasn’t any historical culture that would be damaged when the big trucks came through to do their work. The goal was a point four miles away and not something that we could see at the outset. So instead of just walking, our plan was to follow the GPS lines that had been laid out for us to walk. These lines were made up of a series of flags spaced every one hundred meters or so along the path. While, as we walked we were constantly scanning the ground for any evidence of a historical site, but we also had to constantly look up to the markers laid out to make sure that we were still in line and still on the route to our goals. If we just stared at our feet, we might find ourselves miles of course by the end of the day and would have accomplished very little of what we had meant to accomplish.

    This is just the same with our big goals in life. We have to look up and make sure we are still on line to achieve those goals from time to time. Today is a good day to take some time and make sure that we are maintaining our course towards our dreams and the life of fulfillment we are moving towards.