The Goal Setting Ghost of Thankfulness Future! A Play Along Meme.

Sometime last year, I wrote a goal-setting post as part of one of those annoying viral meme things.  Recently, Reg of Elemental Truths revived it, and I thought…. what the heck.   We’ll pull the idea out of storage, polish it up, and become annoyingly viral again!!  

Memes are pretty popular in the blogosphere, both because they make for good blog filler, and because they are great for networking and traffic building.

But about THIS meme…  

It’s the  <cue overdramatic music> 
The Goal Setting Ghost of Thankfulness Future! 

Ok, enough with the drama.

The core idea here is an exercise in goal setting: 

Visualize yourself in a successful future, one where you have much to be thankful for…   now, turn that thankfulness into concrete goals.  Put those goals into a blog post,  link back here (and to whoever tagged you) challenge a friend or five to participate as well.  I’ll collect a big ol’ list of participants and publish it at the end of the month, and you can sit back and watch as new people find your blog and we all have a lot of fun.

Simple, right?

And no worries, I know it’s Thanksgiving and most of you won’t have time to get to this over the weekend, so I’ll remind you in a week or two : )

Here’s mine:

The Spirit Of Thankfulness Future

As I look ahead, jumping past this year’s stuffed turkey and on to a future Thanksgiving Day,  I’m struck by a feeling of warmth and contentment.  Things just seem better – more relaxed, more comfortable and confident, less frantic and pressured.  A friend is in the kitchen with me, helping me fix the meal, while a couple of kids (hers?)  scamper through, stealing spoons of pie filling.

I’m thankful for the friend, thankful for the presence of children around.  I’m thankful for the sense of comfort, accomplishment and success I have with several projects that have been completed and borne fruit, and thankful that there’s no pressure to finish them lurking in the background of the holiday.

I steal a spoonful of pie filling myself, and one of the kids bumps into me, I’m thankful for the cute new outfit I’m wearing, in a smaller size.

The phone rings, and it’s someone involved in one of those projects, wishing me a happy Thanksgiving – and I’m thankful for my partners in those projects, the people who helped bring them into focus and produce them.   I’m thankful that my strengths are being used, and my weaknesses backed up and supported by others. 

The Goals:

So what do I need to do to make that a reality?

• Expand my social circle & network both in the online and local communities
• Attract and develop partnerships with people for project development
• Write a paper about my strengths and weaknesses, and use that as a means of attracting appropriate partnerships
• Set up a more systematic way of keeping in touch with both social and business contacts.
• Find a way to include more contact with children in my life:  Maybe teach art or writing classes for kids?
• Keep at the household organization planning
• Keep at the health and exercise plans (and quit stealing spoons of pie filling )

Wow. That’s not so tough.

The really cool thing about this method? Just like with the previous "Wildly Successful Goals" project, I don’t really need to break this up into action steps, or spend time making complicated plans.  It’s ok to just let these sink into my subconscious, and let them bubble up periodically to motivate me.

So wanna play along?

I’m not going to "tag" anyone specific just yet, because it’s a holiday and it will likely just get lost in the shuffle, so I’ll save that for next week.   So just spend the next few days thinking about the idea, and I’ll nudge some of you specifically once we’ve all had our fill of sweet potato pie.