Brainstorming Your Own Goals

One of the toughest things for so many of us to do is decide what it is we want to do with our life. Even when the pressure of earning an income is removed, as in retirement, it's a known fact that retirees who don't have something to keep them occupied die sooner than those who do.

For the Baby Boomers the crunch seemed to come in the forties and fifties when they hit a mid-life crisis, suddenly re-assessing their lives, what they had done and where they were going.

For Generation X (the children of the Baby Boomers) the problem seems to come about earlier in life. I can't count on both hands the number of my friends in their late twenties and early thirties who are changing careers, taking big chunks of time off (a year or more) to travel, going back to school or whatever to chase their dream. I have gone and continue to go through the same issues, and it's a tough time if you're stuck with no idea how to move forward.

One exercise I found helpful was a kind of brainstorming your goals. Sit down with a piece of paper and write 100 goals that you want to achieve given no restrictions and unlimited opportunities. This would include health, financial, personal, career, achievement, recognition goals and anything else that you can possibly imagine you would like in your life, no matter how big or small.

Doing this exercise, which takes between one and two hours I found the first forty or fifty quite easy to rattle off, but as I wrote more it became harder and harder and I had to really think about each one.

I did this with my wife. We sat opposite each other in a cafe and wrote down our goals independently. Then after we were finished we read them to each other one by one. It was a great learning experience for me about my wife as well as for myself.

The exercise forces you to think and re-think what you want out of life, and a theme to many of the goals will probably become fairly evident.

"Enjoyment is not a goal, it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity" - Paul Goodman (1911-1972)