How Do You Make Sure Mantras About Goals Actually Work?

I'm glad I'm experimenting with comments on this blog. This year during the 100 days of articles in a row I realized I miss the good parts of having comments enabled. Last week's post, Joseph Coco commented:

Some of your mantras feel long to me.

Very fair and I feel that too. It's one of my creative process habits and quirks to generate more than I need as a place to begin.

Joseph shares some more thoughts too, starting with this question:

How do you make sure you're connecting and internalizing them instead of just reading them or is the hope that will happen naturally if you repeat them enough?

Let's explore that by looking at how I arrived at why I'm trying mantras to support my goals.

Tracing a path toward mantras.

Caught in the flow of moments day do day, how can you purposefully make things happen in your life? Do you feel that's even a real thing?

I was in my teens working at a Burger King when I started writing to do lists for myself. Creating an intentional dialog with my past, present, and future self felt possible. It felt more possible when I got the ideas out of my head and on paper.

To do lists.

I started with writing things down that I wanted to make happen. Any piece of paper at hand, write on it, put it in my pocket, refer to it daily. A to do list fits with parts of a day. I find them useful but not enough to accomplish bigger or more complex things.

Goals list.

Then there's goals of different natures and granularity and different ways to consider and compose goals. Goals supported by an ongoing fresh to-do list work well for me for a given project. In my later teens and early 20's is when I started with formal goal setting.

I find goals lists useful but also not quite enough to consider multiple areas, interests, or roles in my bigger picture.

Life roles, a list of goals lists.

What kinds of big concerns, relationships, responsibilities, and wants do you experience? This list of life areas is so different for so many of us: personal, professional, family, pets, home, hobbies, portfolio career projects, finance, health, the list can go on. I started thinking of this kind of systemic lifestyle perspective in my mid-20's when I read a college paper by a friend of mine (Hi Jeff) that combined strategy and goal planning.

For over 20 years now I've had a system of goals that was a mix of life role lists, goals lists, and to do lists.

This systemic perspective is quite useful for me. It helps me consider options, where to focus, and work toward gardening multiple areas in my life. Not all at once, but in a rotation of awareness and care. I'm inconsistent, imperfect, especially in a given day. Bits of small progress do accumulate into finishing things and forming habits. Over a week, month, year I get lots done in multiple areas of my life.

As useful as having life roles plus goals and todo lists, I find I want ways to make the process intuitive, instinctive, simple enough to keep using.

Habits, tools, and methods for support.

To support working toward goals I've tried some things.

• Digital tools like OmniFocus, Remember the milk, Trello. So many tools. One I miss was an app called Epic Win which every time you opened the app it would say "EPIC WIIIIN" in a deep voice similar to how the singer from the band The Crash Test Dummies. This is a huge topic on its own.
• I've built my own tools too, one was a multiple year effort I called my Personal Database then later Personal Evolution and later still chose to not keep that project going.
• Setting up a meeting schedule with myself. Making my own schedule to do the goal planning and keep tending to it.
• Methods like Getting Things Done.
• Journaling to then reflect and consider as part of the goal planning.
• Work task journaling and habit journaling trying things like the bullet journal method and the Emergent Task Planner.
• Choosing a word or phrase for the year, turning it into a trinket to carry in my pocket.

I tried all those things for lots of reasons. Mostly I seek to make the tending to tasks and goals simple enough while being thorough enough. Also I'm seeking to keep caring about the outcomes, purpose, and meaning of the goals more than I care about the tools and rituals.

Now also mantras.

Mantras are something I'm trying as a support for my goals. I share some of my why in last week's post. Revisiting Joseph's question:

How do you make sure you're connecting and internalizing them instead of just reading them or is the hope that will happen naturally if you repeat them enough?

I see mantras as a potential support to address the feeling, instinct, self talk kinds of storytelling aspect to goals. Mantras give me nurturing, positive stories to absorb about my goals and my abilities to accomplish them.

Here's how I am tending to the mantras to notice if they're connecting and if I'm absorbing/internalizing them.

Part of it is practice. I read my goal supporting mantras. Part of it is noticing what it feels like reading them. Does each mantra feel natural, encouraging? Do any of them feel awkward in a rough draft way or in a this doesn't feel like a good fit way?

As to repeating them, that's part of the practice that I do hope affects me. The practice is meant to evolve, which means I expect to notice mantras that don't seem like a good fit. Which then I'll think about my goals related to this mantra and consider. Also it may be the goal feels solid and the mantra needs a rewrite.

Mantras are a bridge between feelings and intellectual approaches to problem solving.

To do's, Goals, Goal System, Supports, Mantras

Ever read that poem/song about an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly? The observer in the song doesn't know but I think she knows why she swallowed the fly.

With any thing you try to manage your goals from planning to remembering and working with them as long as you have an idea why, you have something to work with to keep making the system work better for you.