For a long time, I approached each new year without much vision. I didn’t want the potential failure or disappointment of unmet expectations, and I sure as heck didn’t want to have a great picture in my mind’s eye that went away with the wind.

So, I shut down my enthusiasm and excitement for the unknown. I put my nose to the grindstone, and I went about my days without much hope or plan for anything more than my daily life.

I can point to a few causes for this. My family and I endured a lot of loss over a six- or seven-year span, and we were burnt out. We knew injuries, deaths, illness, and changes in expectations that threw us for a loop over and over. After enough time, when another holiday approached, phrases like “Don’t die!” and “How many holidays are still safe?” became frequent flyers in our interactions.

If that sounds crass, it’s because it was. Our coping mechanisms activated with full force, and they leaned toward the irreverent. Like I said, we were burnt out.

Combine life’s losses with my brain, which likes to know what to expect but doesn’t enjoy planning, and that can get real blurry, real fast.

Thinking about life after these kinds of traumas became difficult. Daily tasks were the marks of survival and called for celebration on their own. We made it, and that took all we had. The horizon of hope felt so far away. How could we possibly get there from here?

We could make it if we took one day, one step, at a time.

I’m one who likes to know the next steps and expectations in front of her, so I took the opportunity to only do one day. I wasn’t promised any others, after all, and God gave me enough to do today. Why bother putting attention toward anything else? (That isn’t to say that I didn’t worry – that was the exercise in obedience: setting aside my worries to do what I could do, each day.)

Now that life has opened up somewhat – my blinders are down, my breathing and sleep patterns come a little easier (unless I mention the little peanut that’s growing), and I generally feel more stable – my vision can, too.

And the first thing that goals need are an objective, an end game, a vision for what you want to have or make or be. I can say I want to start a pattern of working out, but if I don’t have a plan or something I can name for where or how I want to be, then that will become difficult for me to visualize. How will I know if I’ve reached it? If I didn’t arrive where I wanted to be, how will I know if I’m close? What could I do differently? Goals become milestones that help us mark where we are and where we want to be.

Meeting the goal isn’t always the fulfilling piece, oddly enough. Sometimes, out of respect for ourselves, we adjust a goal to recognize that life is a little crazy and we need to manage our expectations. Other times, a goal comes much more quickly than we anticipated, and we can get a better idea of proportions for next steps. Sometimes life turns upside down and our attention must go somewhere else entirely, so the goal gets put on hold. While goals have the potential to discourage and even berate us if we let them, we must keep goals in the place they belong: in service to us, as guideposts of what we know instead of a measurement of what we are.

While goals have the potential to discourage and even berate us if we let them, we must keep goals in the place they belong: in service to us, as guideposts of what we know instead of a measurement of what we are.

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With the help of coaching and friends and family with helpful input, I’ve grown in my understanding of goal setting from a booby trap for disappointment to a tool that can help me quantify the ideas and hopes that ramble around in my head. Granted, some seasons in life allow for more structure than others. We are imperfect people living in an imperfect world, and not everything will go our way (pandemic, anyone?). At the same time, we can choose to take hold of the factors and opportunities within our control and make something beautiful with them. In a way, goals are the pieces that help me paint a picture of how I see myself loving and serving others better.

When put that way, goals become friendly, useful, and important.

So, yes, goals scare me, but I’m becoming more comfortable using and communicating them in clear ways to people who respect me and my work. Like most things, I guess they require practice.

What is your experience with goals? Have they scared you, or excited you? Stay tuned over the next few weeks as I share about dreaming, the health we need to dream, and then the process of goal setting to keep us moving forward, however slowly.