Goal setting is a valuable skill throughout your life, but rarely is there a time when it is more important than when you are going through recovery and heading towards a rebirth.
The act of setting appropriate and achievable goals will give you milestones to look forward to along the way. These milestones make an open-ended and scary process easier to wrap your head around by providing short-term victories on the road to a long-term triumph.
So how does goal setting specifically help you during a journey towards rebirth? In short, setting goals helps you stay focused, provides a measuring stick, and ensures you stay motivated. Not to mention setting goals has been proven to boost self esteem and lead you to success of all kinds.
Goals Help you Stay Focused
Goals give you a distinct target for you to focus your energy on. When you are on a path to rebirth your long term goal is rather abstract and hard to grasp, so short term milestones are a great way to keep yourself focused. When you can look forward to a tangible result in a short period of time it is far easier to keep pushing forward.
Goals Help you Measure Progress
Setting short term and achievable goals provides a step ladder to success. If you set your goals effectively you will consistently achieve goals and arrive at benchmarks that help you feel like you are gaining traction on your ultimate goal. By splitting up your long-term goal you are able to provide yourself with short-term victories that make it all seem more manageable.
Goals Help you stay Motivated
Along with being focused and being able to measure progress, goals help you remain positive and motivated on your journey. When you have a long term mission like a life of sobriety or a journey to rebirth, it is very easy to lose motivation. This is because the process is so abstract and long. When you are rewarded with short-term victories it is far easier to keep the final goal in sight and keep pushing towards it.
Setting Goals
Now that the benefits of goal setting are clear, lets dive into good strategies and techniques to set effective goals that are reachable but not too easy.
There are two memorable acronyms that provide a great rule of thumb to setting effective goals. These two ideas are ABC goals and SMART goals.
Under the ABC method you should make sure goals you set are achievable and believable, while also making sure you are committed. ABC.
The SMART method obviously involves a few more steps but follows a similar type of thinking. Goals set using the SMART method are:
- Specific
- Measurable
- Attainable
- Realistic
- Time-Bound
Because these two methods are so similar you can choose whichever one feels better to you. The keys are just to set goals that are achievable enough to keep you motivated, make it easy to measure your process, and have some sort of time constraint to keep you moving towards your end goal.
Whichever method you choose the important this is to remember the 4-steps to successful goal setting.
- Make a Plan
The plan is the most important part of the goal setting process. Think about a long term goal and them plan smaller steps that help you get there. This will ensure you are on the right track and help you decide where to focus your energy and actions.
- Explore Resources
To set your mind at ease and make sure your plan is achievable and well thought out it can be very helpful to do some research. Chances are someone has been on a similar journey to you, so you can use some of their knowledge to plan effectively the first time.
- Be Accountable
Without accountability goal setting doesn’t work. It is vitally important to have someone checking up on you and asking about your journey as a secondary motivator to keep you focused. Think about it, it is way easier to flake on a responsibility when you don’t have to tell anyone that you skipped it. So get a partner or teammate who will help you stay focused and on track.
- Use Rewards
As you start checking goals off it is important to give yourself some rewards. Rewards convince yourself that you are doing a good job and help keep you motivated to get to the next goal. Rewards are different for everyone but can be as small as a bag of candy, fancy dinner, or whatever works for you!
These processes you will go a long way in helping you navigate through a life of sobriety towards a complete rebirth.
Goal Setting on The Way to Rebirth
What do goals specific to sobriety and rebirth look like?
Well like everything else in life there is no hard and fast answer to that question. The key is to start with a short term goal that you think you can achieve. Once you achieve that goal you need to reflect on that step of the process, learn from it, and then set off to achieve your next goal.
As an example you may start with just staying sober for a week, from there you can see how difficult that was for you and decide your next goal is a month without relapsing. Now that you are more comfortable with your new life you can add in other goals.
The next goal could be something as simple as researching holistic healing and planning on taking one day a week to stretch and start practicing yoga. As that becomes a habit you can then expand that goal to start to eat healthier or progress in other ways.
No matter what time frame or end goal you choose you just have to remember to keep your goals within the parameters above so that you don’t stretch yourself thin and become overwhelmed.
While goals are great for helping you move forward in life they have also been proven to boost your self esteem and self confidence in all aspects of life. Research has shown that when you live a goal-oriented life you are more likely to have a positive approach to life and better handle small setbacks and short comings. This in combination with your forward progress will go a long way in your journey to rebirth.
