Goal Setting Your Feelings

7 minute read

“Our tomorrow is the child of our today. Through thought and deed, we exert a great deal of influence over this child, even though we can’t control it absolutely. Best to think about it, though. Best to try and shape it into something good. Best to do that for any child.”
Octavia butler

Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but [something about how our lives are not meant to be all goals and striving and we are perfect beings without all of that]

I also feel like I’ve written about this before…maybe in another life, another blog.

That being said, posting only once per week means that yes, it took me until the start of April to write about goals. Goals are my jam. Was that a misstep? Who knows?

It’s a good reminder that there is never a perfect or wrong time to set some goals. As I like to tell the Not Ladylike Community Accountability Club, January 1 is just a day on a calendar. Like February 7 or October 31, both of which are considered “new years day” by other cultures.

With that in mind, let’s talk about goals!

How I set goals every year
Accountability
WOOP
Transforming the world

HOW I SET MY GOALS

A feelings map.

This is the foundation of how I set my personal goals every year.

I use this method because I find that:

setting only specific task-focused goals leaves me floundering once I have completed them
if I am struggling with a task-focused goal or I get stuck, it can be hard to let it go or change it up without a bigger-picture viewpoint ready to go
the point of goals is to keep me moving, growing, and exploring my own humanity, which is harder for me to do if my goals are only task-focused
I struggle with feelings, and this helps me complete goals and learn how to regulate, understand, explore, and express my emotions

Sooooo essentially, instead of setting specific, task-focused goals, I set a goal to achieve a certain feeling.

There are many ways to get to that feeling that align with my values. Those are the tasks, the ways to get to the feelings. They are not the focus, so if I have to change tack mid-year, it’s much more fluid.

Some of my target feelings this year are:

awe
curious
competent

These all connect back to my word of the year – shoshin – through many webs, “ley lines”, etymology. But that’s another post 😉

BUILD YOUR FEELINGS MAP

Here are 5 easy steps to building your own feelings map to help guide your learning, growing, and goal chasing for the year (or longer). I refresh or rewrite my Feelings Quadrant a couple of times throughout the year.

Grab a plain piece of 8.5×11″ paper, doesn’t matter what colour
Draw or fold it into 4 equal quadrants
At the top of each quadrant write “I want to feel” and then draw a line. You’ll write one of your feeling words on this line later; use a marker in your favourite colour, or the colour you have chosen for your year
Now comes the real work…crafting those feeling goals!

GET THE ZINE!

Hey, I did some of that work for you if you’re interested. You can send some moola my way and get the paper template and instructions sent to your mailbox.

Heck ya!

Plus it includes some original Lisa doodles.

ACCOUNTABILITY

There are two ways I get some accountability throughout the year for my goals. They are both successful – and accessible, but require different resources.

Accountability Club
Writing things down

Not Ladylike Community has been running an Accountability Club since 2020. Wow, was that ever the year to get started with a new club! We had our first meeting (in person), then got locked down.

The basis of the club is to have a group of folks who are also committed to their goals helping you out with:

feedback
reminders
cheerleading

It’s made a huge difference in my life, both in terms of achieving some of my goals and as another way to build a resilient community. And I’ve come out with a few lovely friendships as well.

Learn more about Accountability Club

All the goals blogs and videos tell me that by simply writing down your goals, you are substantially more likely to complete them.

I like to add another layer to this by reviewing my goals weekly and monthly. I have different checklists for each, and it definitely helps keep me on track and let go of things faster when they aren’t working. The check-ins take time, but also save me from wasting my time for longer than necessary on actions that aren’t working.

For example, checking in with my written goals definitely helped me see that setting goals that relied on other people was not quite a waste of my time, but would never happen on my timeline.

Get Lisa’s weekly and monthly checklists.

WOOP

This is both a celebratory cry when you achieve your goals, and an acronym for getting stuff done! It’s backed by science y’all.

W – wish

O – outcome

O – obstacle

P – plan

I got turned on to WOOP in 2024 when I was watching everything on YouTube. While I haven’t explored the entire concept much, I have enjoyed dipping my toes in to help me consider and plan for obstacles that I might encounter.

This has made a huge difference to achieving my goals.

We all know we’ll encounter problems as we go along, right?! This method offers a way to get ahead of them and move through more easily than having them pop up unexpectedly and offer an impenetrable barrier or roadblock.

Don’t get me wrong, I love barriers. They can help me get rid of bad habits, and teach me a lot about myself. But more often than not, they prevent me from reaching my goals or just make it take longer (ugh).

GOAL SETTING TO CHANGE THE WORLD

I consider it an obligation to use my privilege, energy, and access to set goals that help me change the world.

“transform yourself to transform the world”

Grace Lee Boggs

All of my feelings goals push me (kindly and gently) into realizing my full power as a human being alive at this time. I am not a neutral party in my life, or in my society. I have obligations to my friends and neighbours, and working toward my goals, getting that accountability and anticipating setbacks gets everyone closer to a more equitable, liberated future.

That’s the ultimate goal.

But boy howdy, goals are a controversial thing. For good reason as well. They have often been used as a cudgel to “fix” ourselves, to bow down to the modern gods of Productivity, White Standards of Beauty, Misogyny, Patriarchy.

So I write all of this with this poem in mind:

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.”

Mary Oliver

Y’all, I love goals, but I also love (and appreciate) living and noticing and being. That in itself is a challenge in these turbulent times.

Goal Setting Your Feelings