When I was in youth ministry in my previous church, we never fail to get the youths to do up a brief reflections of the past year and doing up a resolution list for the new year. Some youths frown at the annual routine exercise of the year, while some eagerly anticipate the quiet 'stock take' opportunity of their lives in the year.
Just how good and helpful are resolutions and how do we set for ourselves a good resolution? More importantly, how do we keep our resolutions and work them out through the year? (Read an interesting article on why resolutions are so hard to follow here.)
I cannot help but insist that resolutions and goals are indefinitely helpful and essential to our personal growth and development if we set good and achievable goals.
While we set the youths to take time to reflect upon their year, we often draft up and categorize their lives into different parts, such as physical, spiritual, social and family, and studies. We find that by categorizing into these simple and brief domains of their lives, it becomes easier for them to set goals for themselves. For example, for physical they may set a goal of a weekly exercise. For spiritual, they may set a goal of reaching out to a friend, or attending church weekly. For social and family, they may want to spend more time with their parents, or more time with a socially-outcast friend. For studies, they may simply aim to get a certain grade for a struggling subject, and so on.
We often have leaders to guide them along and have them duplicate a copy of their goals to their CG leaders for accountability's sake. And together as a CG, we have the CG leader to set cell group goals as a common benchmark for the members to work together and reach their goals.
To help everyone along, we instructed them to set SMART goals, which essentially stands for:
- Specific: it mustn't be too general, and often asking yourselves the 6 'W's (Who, Where, What, When, Which, and Why) will help to streamline your goals to a more specific one. For example, to get into shape would be a general goal, whereas to join a gym and workout two times a week would be a specific goal.
- Measurable: your goals must be measurable, or in other words have a basic criteria of measurement. This will help you break up your goals to small bits so as to help you work towards your end goal. For example, if the goal is to run a full marathon, it will be helpful to break it up into bite-size, such as to attempt first a 6km run, and subsequently a 12km, a 18km, and so on.
- Achievable: your goals must also be within reach and realistic. For example, one can be ambitious and set a goal to reach the moon. But while doing so he or she might have forgotten to ask if the required attitudes, abilities, skills and financial capacity to accomplish the goal is within the required reach.
- Relevant: goals must be personal and relevant to your self. For example, it would be meaningless to set a goal of walking the dog if we fail to realize that it is a need for the dog and not for ourselves, and neither is it relevant to set a goal to be closer to your own dog when it does not achieve a certain purpose.
- Time-bound: usually we set yearly goals, which inadvertently determines a year-long time frame to accomplish the goal. A common misconception is that goals are to be limited to a year, however that need not to be the case. For example, for a youth to get into shape it may not require a full year but six months instead. Hence, our goals can be a 6-month goal, or a 90-days goal, which can be more achievable and realistic.
Recently there was an article on why 90-day goals are better than year-long ones. Read more on the article here.
This sums up how and what kind of goals we encourage our youths to set up for themselves, and you can likewise do the same.
So, what new year resolutions and goals have you set for yourselves in 2015?
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