QuiverX Newsletter - SMART Goals

Happy New Year!

Parenting

One very useful skill that we need to teach our children is goal-setting. This skill can help our children achieve more in their lives, because they won't waste time being distracted and they won't leave a trail of unfinished projects behind them. If this is a skill you are still learning, start by applying these principles in your own life and see what a big difference they make!

- Goals should be WRITTEN DOWN! If you don't write them down, you'll forget them, and then you can't achieve them. Write them down and keep them in a place where you see them regularly.

- Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely (SMART). In other words, don't just say "I want to get in shape" but rather say "I want to lose 20 lbs before our vacation in August". Writing goals according to these criteria will help you achieve them. Keep in mind that different goals have different time lines. The goal to lose 20 lbs has a different timeline than the goal to save for your child's college or for retirement. I try to have some goals that are shorter term as well as some that are long term.

- Break down your goal into steps. Let's take our goal to lose weight. We can break this down into steps. Maybe we'll exercise 3 times a week, give up our daily latte and eat more vegetables each day. These are each steps to take that are small enough to implement, and they are measurable. You can look back and count how many times you exercised or how many servings of vegetables you had this week.

- Track your progress. Make it a habit to check your progress toward your goal periodically. Monthly might right for most goals, but some might need to be tracked more closely while others might not need to be tracked that often. For the weight loss goal, a monthly evaluation is just right, but a weekly check to make sure we're doing our steps properly is useful too. Then monthly we'd check how much weight we'd lost and make sure our steps will be enough to reach our goal on time. If not, we might need to change our steps so we have more weight loss each month.

So, sit down and give some thought and prayer to your goals for this year, and help your older children do the same. One thing I try to do is set goals in 5 different areas of my life: my health, my wealth/finances, my personal development, my social/family development, and my spiritual development. That helps me to make sure I don't neglect one area while I'm focused on something else.


My goals

Here are some of my goals for this year. I'm writing some of them here to help me hold myself accountable for working on them.

Health - keep going to karate, eat more veggies
Wealth - work on improving communication with Jim in this area
Personal - read some of the classic literature my kids are reading for school
Social - improve my daily schedule
Spiritual - memorize Romans 5-8 by practicing a verse or two each day


Homeschooling

This is the perfect time of year to take some time and evaluate how your school year is going. I did this earlier this week and was very happy with what I saw. I looked at what I wanted to accomplish in each subject and compared that with how much time is left in the year. We have a couple of subjects that might cut it close, but I can focus on those more closely at the end of the year as we finish up other subjects. I also made a note of a few pieces of curriculum I'll need to buy in the next month or so.

I'm excited to get back to school next week, but I realize that my kids are not all going to be excited. They've been enjoying their vacation! I have been too, and I've gotten a lot of things done over these two weeks. So I am preparing myself for the challenge of those first couple of days after we get back to school. I know some of my kids will complain about how much school they have to do, and I know my little guys will try to interrupt at the worst possible time. But I also know that it won't take very long for us to get back into the swing of things. After the first week, we'll be back into our routine - hopefully with improvements to our schedule!


Quick Tip

K.I.S.S. - Keep It Super Simple - Christmas decorations

I just put away most of my Christmas decorations today, as usual. We try to put them up on Thanksgiving Day and take them down on New Year's Day. As I was taking the ornaments off the tree, I realized that my storage system is not very efficient. I'm going to have to think about that and improve it for next year.

Mostly, though, our decorations are stored pretty simply. We have a big plastic bin for all the outdoor lights, another one for big bulky things like wreaths, and another for the tree decorations. Some of the other indoor decorations go in the tree bin also. These bins stack in the garage. The plastic keeps everything safe from bugs and moisture.


Bible verse

Philippians 1:6 (NKJV) "[B]eing confident of this very thing, that He who has begun a good work in you will complete it until the day of Jesus Christ"