Day 24 – Writing Challenge – What are the three things you are unable to let go of?
Let us dive into another exciting Day 24 of the Writing Challenge. While you attempt today’s challenge and share the three things you are unable to let go of, you can also check the below topic which will help to plan your goals ahead of time and keep them productive throughout the journey of life.
Another topic of the day – How to write your short-term and long-term professional and personal goals?
What are the three things you are unable to let go of?
Three things that you cannot let go of can be a huge list for most people. There is nothing bad in holding on to something you love but you need to analyze whether that thing is making your life better or it is just what you want because you have got used to it.
When you write about the three things that you are unable to let go of, write down everything that comes to your mind and choose those three things that have the deepest impact on you and your life.
It is not easy to let go of anything you hold dear, but you have to choose your priorities and that should be the well-being of your life. That does not mean hurting someone else but it means giving yourself another chance to make your life better.
The thing can be a soft toy you have since your childhood, a pen you got as a gift, or a toxic relationship you wanted to work out. It can be anything. So choose wisely.
With this, today’s challenge comes to a close and now we can move on to another topic of the day.
How to write your short-term and long-term professional and personal goals?
Goals play a very crucial part in shaping our lives in the right direction. When you have a goal to achieve, you work towards it and along the way, you learn to build yourself in a whole new way and achieve much more than you ever imagined. You can have a goal but if you do not take action, that goal will rot away and leave only a bad odor in the form of demotivation and wastage of time.
You should have professional as well as personal goals and keep them balanced throughout your life. Take baby steps but do not stop and that is the only trick to achieving remarkable goals.
Short Term Professional and Personal Goals
Professional Goals
Once you figure out what you want to achieve in the next 12 months of your career, you are no longer walking a path that is taking you nowhere. When we have a set of goals to achieve, we strive to make it happen and in the process of doing so, even if we fail, we reach out to a better place than our present. 12 months is a short term and so the goals will be such that can be independent of the long term goals or a part of them.
Sit down with a piece of paper and write down all possibilities that you can try out to improve your career and take it to the next level. Write down every goal and later you can divide it into short-term and long-term.
Below are some of the career goals ideas which you may target to achieve in the next 1 year:
- Upskilling – Take a new course and upskill in your area where you need expertise. If your career has become stagnant, try to learn a new skill through online or offline courses. Some of the best online courses are available on Udemy, Coursera, and edX. These learning platforms provide a wide range of valuable courses.
- Read books and formulate a plan that helps you cut down wasted time and lower the need to procrastinate your tasks. Below are some of the books which will be very helpful
- Communication and Coordination – Analyze your current communication and coordination capabilities. Accordingly, try to improve by getting yourself involved in team activities and participating or volunteering in leadership initiatives.
- Set up small daily targets for yourself at your workplace
- Try to come up with new ideas
- Be more proactive and prompt at your tasks
- Ask questions
- Be focused and participate in healthy conversations
- Appreciate the hard work of others in your team and also highlight your effort
- Career change initiatives – Do you feel the need to change your career then do it as soon as possible before your enthusiasm levels get lower and you get back to the career you are not satisfied with right now.
- Choose a skill you are good at and you are interested to make a career in the future.
- Prepare yourself for that interview you want to crack and get into the career you want to do and not that you have to do.
- If career change means an idea, give it a shot and check if it can become a full-time career for you
- Create a healthy and productive work environment: When your environment is calm, your mind is calmer and it gives you the ability to be productive and efficient. I have also written a blog post on Products to create a Perfect Work Environment. You can check out that.
Personal Goals
Personal goals are as much important as professional goals. The below points will highlight the area of your life where you can add the short-term personal goals and achieve growth in your personal life too. Your personal life plays a crucial role in helping you handle your professional goals too. Eventually, all the short-term goals will add up to fulfill your long-term goals as well.
- Start a new hobby or revive an old one – Focus is the key here. Try to start a new hobby that will make you happy and add productiveness to your daily routine
- Habits – Quit a bad habit and try one habit at a time. When you are trying to quit a habit as your short-term goal take up a realistic and achievable target so that you do not go back to your old habits.
- There is a book that will motivate you to form new habits and discard old bad ones. The book’s name is The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg.
- For example, You want to include more vegetables in your diet or you want to wake up early in the morning
- Clear your debts or pending credit card dues
- Cut down interacting more with toxic people
- Creating a morning routine and following it
- Healthy diet – When you are trying to replace your current unhealthy food habits, do it slowly and take one item at a time.
- For example, try to cut down on the number of times you eat out.
- Cut down on sugar and include more veggies in your diet
- Daily Resolution – Instead of creating long-term resolutions, we can formulate daily resolutions which are short and achievable. These resolutions will make you feel accomplished every day and boost your confidence to take a long term resolution
Long Term Professional and Personal Goals
Professional Goals
Forming long-term goals give you a clear idea of the kind of life you want for yourself. It might change but having a goal is better than having no goals at all.
- Leadership roles – We all want to grow in life and getting into more leadership roles will help you make an influence on your surroundings. We need to choose to be a leader in our fields otherwise we may get smudged in the chaos and will not be seen in the crowd. To make a mark and get highlighted in the crowd, you need to take leadership roles. You can start small, but what matters is you want to start.
- Think and make a choice of the leadership role you want to achieve in the next 5 to 10 years
- You should create a plan and follow that plan with discipline and consistency
- Create a vision for your career
- Ask yourself – Where do I see myself in the next 5 -10 years?
- Meaningful and Impactful career – We all work for a living but we seldom think about how our work is impacting others’ lives in a better way. When your goal is to create meaning and improve others’ life along with your own, you make your own life better every day.
- Ask yourself – What impact does my career have for the next 5-10 years?
- How your career creates value in your and others’ lives?
- Start something of your own – It might be difficult to do at first. But if you have an idea and you are not able to make it happen through others, why not try it on your own and live a satisfying life without worrying too much about the consequences. Nothing is a success at first and even if you fail, you can live life peacefully if you tried to create something on your own.
- It can be starting a small scale business like Soy-candles
- Starting a blog you always wanted to start
- It can be opening a new store of healthcare products
- Overcome Hindrances – Nobody is perfect but if we want to excel in a chosen career, we need to be good, if not perfect in that particular field to make a mark. Study your career and check the skills needed to accomplish success in that career. Hindrances can be communication skills, organizational skills, or limited knowledge in your chosen field
- Take a degree course in your field and study in-depth
- Take workshops to improve communication skills, You can also join a club
- Practice is the key and never procrastinate. Tomorrow never comes.
- Expand your horizon – By expanding your horizon, I want to convey that do not try to excel at one and overlook the other possibilities. Always be aware and stay relevant to the current market needs and upcoming skills. We will always need to upgrade otherwise we will not stay relevant and may not be needed in the future. To create demand, we need to have multiple skills and be good at more than one.
- Focus on your main skill and also try to funnel out other possibilities
- Look around and learn – If you are good at coding skills, also show interest in managerial skills
Personal Goals
I have listed out long-term personal goals that shall be needed to be continued for a long time to see actual results. These may look short-term but it’s lifelong and not just for a year.
- Physical health – Start Exercising. It takes a lot of motivation to get started and continue for the initial days but once you get to a point where you start getting results, you will never want to look back to a life without it. It is a long term commitment you make for long term benefits
- Goals can be attaining the right weight
- Participating in a marathon and winning
- Other physical health goals can be eating healthy and healing from a disease
- Mental health – Start Meditating. Include meditation for as less as 10 minutes when you start but with consistency, you will see the results and a calmer mind thinks better. There are many other ways too for better mental health:
- Keeping a gratitude journal
- Give yourself some alone time
- Self-care is not selfish
- Forgive everyone including yourself – It may not be easy but it is all that will help you to live a better life
- Write down your problems or random negative thoughts on paper and tear it
- Financial health – Savings are a very crucial part of living and it all adds up to making us financially independent and ready for emergencies
- Assign 50% of your income to savings and never touch them unless there is an emergency
- Pay your bills and debts from the left at 50%
- Utilize the rest of the money to enjoy your life
- The sacrifices you make today will keep you and your family safe in the long run
- Focus on the needs and less on the luxuries as your needs can be satisfied but there is no end to the luxuries that we want in our life
- Emotional health – As far as emotional health is concerned, it is something that we need to control in our life so that nobody can influence us to a level where everything falls apart in our life
- Make friends who are kind and accept you as you are
- Spend quality time with your parents
- Do not let others control your emotions – For example, if someone said something that is hurting you, get over it as soon as possible as the person who hurt you does not care or that person is going through some trauma. Take the control into your hands and do not let others make you sad, angry, happy, or anything
- Do not get trapped in a relationship – Choose someone who will value you and see the good in you, not someone who wants to see someone else in you
Finalizing the short and long-term goals is very important in life if we want to make our life meaningful and useful in some way. I hope that you will like the post and write down your personal and professional goals. Grow like the tree in the above picture and bear the fruits of success with each goal.
Below is a link that has all the types of 30-Day Challenges with their checklists:
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