At The ONE Thing, the annual Goal Setting Retreat is always one of the highlights of our year. This year, instead of getting everyone together at a hotel, we spent two virtual weekends in November with high-achieving couples, individuals and teams helping them set big goals for 2021. If you didn’t get to join us, there are a few lessons you may have missed out on. But that doesn’t mean that it’s too late to implement these key insights in your life!
Whether you attended or not, the value from the retreat comes from the work we all do afterward. No one achieves their biggest goals in one weekend. The point of the retreat is to set our sights on the big picture, and to determine the smallest steps we can take today to make that big picture a reality. If you didn’t get to join us, use these takeaways to jumpstart your 2021.
Know the Difference Between Love and Fierce Love
During the Couples Retreat, Susan Scott, author of Fierce Conversations, spoke to us about how conversations not only shape our relationships, but how they are our relationships.
Susan says, “If you want to be a great partner, lover or spouse, you must gain the capacity and commitment to connect with that person who is so important to you at a deep level, or lower your aim.”
Fierce love means setting aside intentional time to have impactful conversations with the person who matters most to you. Not just running through the motions of, “I’ll take out the trash” or “How was your day?” but engaging in conversations about what you crave from the relationship and what you already love about it.
Understand That Your Habits Are Your Life
We had the honor of speaking with The ONE Thing author Gary Keller over the course of both weekends, who spoke about his process for forming strong habits to make extraordinary goals possible.
Gary says, “My goal setting is very purposeful. I’ve made a connection between asking big questions of myself and assembling the thinking, the habits, the actions and the relationships in achieving that. But also, I’ve become fearless because I’m not afraid to fail. Failure is a part of my recipe for growth.”
As you’re setting your goals, don’t be afraid to think big and go small. Don’t be afraid of failing on the journey. It’s sometimes easy to think that if you don’t achieve your biggest goal, the process wasn’t worth it. But that would be false. The purpose of goal-setting and thinking of the actions that you take in your life is to instill habits within yourself that make you a more successful person day by day. By looking at how your actions connect your big goals, you can make every day purposeful.
Reimagine Your Future with Your Community
Chris Hogan, author of Everyday Millionaires, spoke at our Individuals and Teams Retreat about how important it is to have the right people around you when you’re trying to come back from a financial setback.
According to Chris, you need a coach to push you, a mentor who can relate to your experiences, a cheerleader who believes in you, and a friend you can be open and honest with to help you grieve over your losses and move on. The right people won’t let you quit on yourself, and in turn you can be the person who doesn’t let the people around you give up on themselves.
Let Your Someday Goals Guide Your 1 Year and 5 Year Goals
Gary Keller says that the purpose of a goal is to know what appropriate action to take in the moment, not to achieve a result. The big goals we set for someday inform how we behave today, and that’s why we can’t sell ourselves short with goals that don’t inspire us to move forward.
When you’re setting your big-picture goals, start with Someday or the goals that you can only imagine could be possible. From there, work backward to what the goal could look like five years in the making. Then narrow it down further to what you would aim to achieve in your first year pursuing the goal. Before you know it, you’ll have narrowed down a giant goal to the smallest step you need to take to begin achieving it.
Even if you weren’t able to attend the retreat, you can do the work to make your goals happen in 2021 and beyond. You can download our KickAss Guide to Goal Setting, our Goal Setting Master Course, or join our Living Your ONE Thing Community to find support and advice for your journey.