Failure Hurts

I failed!  Ugh…that hurts, but it is the truth.  Technically it wasn’t just me who failed, they are family goals after all and all of us have ownership in completing them.    But as the designated household manager, I feel like I let us down and should have done a better job of helping us stay on track.  Putting the blame aside, here are the main reasons I we didn’t reach our goals in 2011.  Hopefully you can learn from my our mistakes….

Overly Ambitious – Looking back, our goals should have been less ambitious.  We had three family goals (community service, family nights, and saving for a vacation), and each goal had a little too much stretch.  This year we are going to keep similar goals, but scale them back to hopefully something more manageable and  achievable.

We Didn’t Have Regular Family Meetings – Having regular family meetings is REALLY hard for us.  There never seems to be a perfect time to have them and coordinating the schedules of six family members (two of which are teenagers with busy social and academic lives) is challenging to say the least.  And if I am being really honest, I should have done a better job of forcing the issue.  If we had been better about having our family meetings we would have reviewed our status more regularly and done a better job of staying on top of the goals.

We Didn’t Expect the Unexpected – One of our goals was to save for a big family vacation in 2012 and when we set the goal, we didn’t plan on having to replace a water heater AND a garage door.  Looking back we should have done a better job of planning for the unexpected when we set the goal.

Reasons aside, we are moving onward and upward in 2012 and have already begun to set our goals for the new year.  Wish us luck!

Goal Setting for Mom

Laura Rolands of My Attention Coach

I honestly love this topic.  As moms, we tend to set family goals, work goals and goals for how we can support others.  Unfortunately, our own goals, those intended for our own personal benefit tend to get pushed to the bottom of the list.  We can list all the reasons why this happens, but I suspect you already know the reasons!  Let’s move directly to setting and achieving our goals.

What Goals?

What goals would you like to achieve over the next three or four months?  Grab a piece of paper and write them down.  Brainstorm and list anything that comes to mind.  Does it seem outrageous?  Good!  Does it relate to your kids more than you?  Write it down anyway!  Keep going until you have at least 10 goals written down.  I would love to see 20 goals, but I’ll take 10!

Priorities

Next, go through and prioritize your goals.  Stop for a moment before you prioritize.  I would like you to take a different approach to prioritizing these goals.  Review each goal you wrote down and cross off any that involve someone else or are on the list for someone else’s benefit.  Now, take a look at the remaining goals.  They should all be focused on you.  Which one of these goals is the most important and/or would make you the happiest if you achieve it (or even part of it)?  I encourage you to make this one your top priority goal.

Make it SMART

I am a huge fan of SMART goals.  The acronym SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Timely.  When you make your goals fit these criteria, you significantly increase your chances for achieving them.  For more information on SMART goals, head over to my blog and search for goals.

Plan Your Actions

After selecting your goal (or goals), write 5 action steps that need to be completed in order for you to achieve them.  You might need more than 5, but this will be a good start for you.

What goals did you set?

Let us know in the comments and how we can support you!

Laura Rolands is the founder of LSR Coaching and Consulting, LLC. She is a coach whose passion is to support, lead and inspire independence and success for people who have either been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or who are facing other attention-related challenges. Her clients include individuals with attention-related challenges and/or their parents. If you have any questions or more suggestions to add, please visit her website at www.MyAttentionCoach.com.

Overcoming Obstacles to Your Goals

Laura Rolands of My Attention Coach

In order to achieve your goals, you often need to overcome obstacles.  In fact, those obstacles can very often derail your goals.  Identifying obstacles ahead of time is key to your success.

Think about a family goal you have.  Don’t have family goals?  Set them up using this advice from Polly:  http://www.familieswithpurpose.com/family-goals.html

Once you have identified a goal and what you need to do to achieve it, brainstorm what might get in your way.  For example, if your goal is a financial one, other spending priorities might become obstacles.  In order to overcome this obstacle, start by brainstorming solutions as a family.

Examples include:

• Take that vacation next year instead of this year to have more time to save money.
• Eat out less – pack lunches, plan menus ahead of time.
• If saving for something longer term, set up small automatic deposits into a dedicated savings account and increase the amount over time.

After you have brainstormed your solutions, make a decision as to what will work for your family.  Making these decisions ahead of time and together will help you stick to your goal and ultimately to achieve it.

To help you get started in your brainstorming, here are a few potential obstacles and ways to overcome them:

• Worried about forgetting your goals?  Make a picture and post it in a prominent place where everyone will see it every day.
• Wondering if everyone will buy into the goal?  Setting the goals as a family can help to overcome this obstacle.
• Not committed to the goal?  Change the goal.  State it positively and make sure you are motivated to achieve it.

These are just thought starters.  Plan a brainstorming session with your family.  Grab sticky notes or a flip chart and start identifying obstacles and solutions!

What obstacles do you have?  Let’s brainstorm together – share your ideas here!

Laura Rolands is the founder of LSR Coaching and Consulting, LLC. She is a coach whose passion is to support, lead and inspire independence and success for people who have either been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or who are facing other attention-related challenges. Her clients include individuals with attention-related challenges and/or their parents. If you have any questions or more suggestions to add, please visit her website at www.MyAttentionCoach.com.

Goal Setting=School Success

By Susan Heid of The Confident Mom

Do you know where your child typically gets his academic motivation from???

For the most part, it is you!  As parents, we have a huge role in influencing our child’s desire to learn and create lifelong habits in the process.

I have to admit; I had not really given goal setting much thought as a parent, until recently.  Both of my older children have truly never struggled in school.  They have easily motivated themselves and been determined to do their best work from an early age. I must have contributed something to these characteristics, but obviously I wasn’t that intentional about it.

Along comes child number three, and as parents we are a little more challenged.  We received a report card just before the holidays and have decided it is time to set some specific goals together with him to hopefully narrow down some specific areas for him to focus on.

Goal setting is a great life skill and it is never too early to start.

Why Set Goals?
In order to succeed in school and in life, children need to develop the skill of self-determination as well as self-motivation.  In other words, they need to be able to make their own decisions, guide their own behavior and take responsibility for their choices. Setting goals can facilitate this process because it helps kids make the connection between their own personal choices and the end results.

Creating Goals

You can begin a discussion of goal-setting simply by asking your child what he hopes to accomplish. While you might have a few suggestions in mind, you’ll want to let this idea percolate for a few days.  It is amazing the difference that can come when you allow your child to be involved in this conversation.  If he feels really heard, they feel more a part of the solution rather than you just telling them what they must do. You might even be surprised to find that the expectations your child has for himself or herself are higher than you imagined.

Developing a Plan

Once your child picks one or two areas to focus on, you’ll want to help him or her develop a plan for accomplishing it. This will most likely include defining the goal, setting a time frame, and making a list of ACTION steps necessary in working toward the goal. You’ll also want to talk about how your child will realize that the goal has been accomplished.  For example:  Our child has an issue with not turning homework in on time, so the goal now is to turn in homework on time.  We then brainstormed ways he could take steps to make this happen, these are the ACTION steps.  Then we decided a time frame to review how we were doing with the goal.  We will review this goal in one month and make any adjustments necessary.

To Reward or Not to Reward

Try to avoid the temptation to dangle financial or tangible rewards in front of your child to achieve success.  The idea behind setting goals is for your child to get a sense of personal achievement that comes from reaching goals.  If your child is always looking for outside rewards to keep him motivated his chance of success in the real world could be quite challenging. Instead, allow your child’s feelings of personal accomplishment to be its own reward.

Celebrating Success

Make sure you acknowledge the work you see your child doing along with way!  Being specific with praise will inspire your child to continue to move forward.  Instead of a “Good job” – let your child know that you see the time and energy he expended in doing his best work the first time. Knowing that you noticed will increase your child’s sense of accomplishment and fortify his or her self-determination.

What goals do you think you could help your child set?  How can you support him to reach those goals?

Susan Heid loves inspiring Christian moms to make small changes managing their home and family life giving them more time, order and less stress! As a Certified Parent Coach and Family Manager Coach she enjoys sharing her expertise with moms through workshops, teleseminars, public speaking, and individual and group coaching.  She is a proud mom, step-mom and foster mom to 3, married to her very own prince charming, loves coffee, cloudy days, and does think the “bluest skies you’ve ever seen are in Seattle.”  Make sure you get a copy of her FREE ebook, “Getting Kids to Cooperate and Become Team Players.”

Making Your 2011 Goals Happen

Laura Rolands of My Attention Coach

Did you set goals in the beginning of the year?  Maybe you called them resolutions?  Whatever the name, it is necessary to follow up on them to help make sure they happen.

Maybe you set family goals, professional goals or other personal goals.  Whatever goals you have for yourself, action plans and measuring success are key to achieving your success.  Read on for tips on using action plans and measurements to help make your 2011 goals happen.

Action Plans

After setting and prioritizing your goals, your next step is to establish an effective action plan.  It is important to identify the steps you need to take to reach your goals so you have a good roadmap.  Identifying the steps is not enough though.  Each step needs to have a due date associated with it to help you create momentum to move towards your goal.

When developing your action plans, focus on one goal at a time so that you can minimize the distractions to your plan.  Keep the following questions and tips in mind when developing your action plan:

• Take your strengths into consideration when making your action plan.
• How can you build on your strengths to implement your action plan?
• What behaviors are you willing to change or give up to achieve your goal?  Consider how open you are to making this change.
• Plan in small, manageable steps so that you can act on them in a reasonable amount of time.  Your plan will be less likely to overwhelm you.
• Post a checklist where you will see it and pay attention to it every day.

Measure Success

Keeping track of your progress can be motivating and help you create forward progress in many ways.  By keeping a measurement of your action plan and goal visible, you can keep your goal front and center with all of the other distractions in your life.  A line chart is sometimes very helpful with this.  By measuring your success you can also help to keep yourself motivated with positive feedback.

A few ways of measuring success include a chart, calendar or journal.  Even just writing a short note to yourself each day on a calendar can be helpful.

How are you doing on working towards your goals?   Let us know how we can help!

Laura Rolands is the founder of LSR Coaching and Consulting, LLC. She is a coach whose passion is to support, lead and inspire independence and success for people who have either been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or who are facing other attention-related challenges. Her clients include individuals with attention-related challenges and/or their parents. If you have any questions or more suggestions to add, please visit her website at www.MyAttentionCoach.com.

Hit the Rewind Button and Achieve Your Goals

By Jennifer Ascher of Organizing without Limits

It’s the end of February.  Have your New Year’s Resolutions fallen by the wayside and are all but forgotten?   One of the reasons that resolutions don’t work is because they are generally not specific enough, are focused around I want to… (Lose weight, get organized, get rid of debt etc.) and are made with no action plan as to how to go about accomplishing them.  So if resolutions don’t work, what is one to do?

You hit the rewind button and switch your resolutions to very specific, intentional goals. Setting up goals will help you accomplish what you set out to do because they …

• Are manageable and attainable
• Are specific and not vague
• Provide you with laser sharp focus
• Give you a sense of direction and purpose
• Require continuous action
• Give you long-term vision and short term motivation

Now that you know how setting goals will help you. Here are some action steps you can take towards achieving them.

1.       Get very specific with what you want it.

Make sure your goals are simple, clear and focused. Saying you want to get organized is way too broad and overwhelming.  Saying I want to organize my pantry is very specific, clear and meaningful.

2.       Know the Why.

Goals need to have a purpose. Make sure you truly understand why you are investing time and energy in accomplishing said goal. Without the why you will lose motivation and interest.

3.       Write it down, make it a priority and do 3-5 daily tasks that will bring you closer to your goals.

Writing out your goals is an important step to make them a reality. Think of it as a visualization and reinforcement for your brain to keep you from procrastinating and on task.. An easy way to do this is when you write out your to do list for the day. The very first thing on that list should be your goal and the 3-5 intentional, action focused tasks you need to do for the day specific to that goal.

4. Set deadlines and review.

You need a way to gauge your success and see if you are on track. By setting specific deadlines it will enable you to track your progress and adjust fire if need be.

5. Get Help.

If you are having a hard time and are not making progress.  Think about enlisting the help of a coach who can help you. Sometimes you need that support, accountability and guidance from an outside source to keep you on track and motivated. I see this in my clients all the time.

6. Never forget

To stay positive and that action + consistency = results.

Jennifer Ascher (better known as an Organizing Geek among her friends) Professional Organizer and founder of Organizing Without Limits started the company because of her sheer passion for organizing and helping other people. Being a busy mom and business owner, Jennifer understands the importance of getting and staying organized as well as efficient time management. With her hands-on approach Jennifer prides herself on being able to meet client’s needs on a personal level. It is her belief that organizing goes beyond pantries, closets or even time management.  It’s about taking control of your WHOLE LIFE.

Organizing Without Limits provides organizing solutions to transform your life and offers both hands-on and virtual organizing services. You can reach Jennifer at her website, as  well as on Twitter and Facebook.

Setting Family Priorities

Laura Rolands of My Attention Coach

What are your priorities for 2011? There are so many areas for us to direct our attention, especially as we are still in January. This is still the time of resolutions without a doubt. I would like to share a few ideas with you for setting family priorities and invite you to add your own.

Schedule Time

Schedule time with your spouse and/or kids to talk about family priorities. Go ahead, put it on your family calendar… Okay, back from putting it on the calendar? Good work! Without this important topic of family priorities on the calendar, it is likely that we will forget to discuss it. Talk about what is important to you and your spouse for yourselves and your other family members.

Input from Kids

When you are setting priorities for your family, input from the kids is important. Yes, the parents have the final vote, but your kids may surprise you with some inspirational priorities. Be sure to incorporate their wisdom into your final priorities.

Themes

I have heard this idea from many people this year and thought it would be great to share here. Think of a theme for your family this year to help you focus on your priorities. For example, if you want to increase the priority of saving money, you might make the theme something like, “Saving Today for Tomorrow’s Education” to help everyone see the end goal of education. If you want to put priority on giving to others, you could choose a theme like, “Giving is Good for the Heart”. Do you already have a theme for your family?

Important or Urgent?

As you think through your priorities, make a decision if something is important, urgent or both. Use this information to help you and your family prioritize.

Share

Talk about your family priorities with your friends to help gather ideas for family priorities. Remember, this is not a competition, just an opportunity to share and collaborate. In our family, our priority is on spending time with extended family. We are planning a trip to a family wedding and planning a week’s vacation with my husband’s entire family. Share your priorities here to help inspire others!

Laura Rolands is the founder of LSR Coaching and Consulting, LLC. She is a coach whose passion is to support, lead and inspire independence and success for people who have either been diagnosed with ADD or ADHD or who are facing other attention-related challenges. Her clients include individuals with attention-related challenges and/or their parents. If you have any questions or more suggestions to add, please visit her website at www.MyAttentionCoach.com.

Setting Family Goals and Intentions for a Successful 2011

By Sandra Huber of the The Soulful Parent

Can you believe we have started a new decade with New Year 2011?  After the activity of the holidays, the pace has slowed down a bit and the weather is colder. And this time of the year is by far my favorite.  I love it because I believe there’s a great opportunity to start over and decide what things we want to let go with the passing of the old year and what new things we want to hold as our intentions for the New Year.   So many people are focused on their New Year Resolutions right now that you can’t help but feel the excitement of a new opportunity to start over.  My hope for all of us is that we decide that this is the year when we are going to start intentionally practicing the tools that will ultimately give us the results that we want.

Here are some suggestions to make this time of the year and intention setting work for you:

Let Go of the Wrongs

Ask everyone in your family to take some time and write down anything they feel went “wrong” in the previous year.  Nobody has to read it out loud; this is not for the purpose of venting or blaming anyone!  Once everyone’s pieces of paper are gathered, decide on a place where you can safely burn them, a fireplace, a barbeque grill or even just a spot on the backyard.  Even though I always focus on family strength, this exercise helps everyone symbolically let go of what didn’t work and have the opportunity for a fresh, new beginning!

Write Down Your Goals

Asking everyone to write down their goals for the new year is a great opportunity to have everyone’s opinions, hopes and dreams gathered in one place, where each family member can create his own list of goals for the family. Everyone can get together, compare goals and decide what to work on. Be open and listen carefully to what every member of the family has to share from their own lists.

Make a Plan

Now is time to turn these intentions into goals for the family to work on. For example if your spouse wants to see the house more organized and clean, then the goal is “Organization and Cleanliness”, which then would require a system that assigns family members with age/time appropriate tasks to accomplish this goal. Get as specific as necessary to make sure everyone is clear about their respective duties and expectations and you will save a lot of arguing later.  Once the list is put together, have everyone in the family “sign” the agreement. Type it up and print it in nice color paper and put it up on a visible spot in the house (the refrigerator door is a good place!) and “voila”, you have a plan!

Make Them Realistic

Set a realistic time frame.   Following the previous example of organizing and cleaning, it would not be encouraging to expect the entire house to be clean in a week. Setting a date for when you want to expect to have your goals accomplished is important. At home, I like to put reminders around the house to keep my family motivated.   I put the date when the task needs to be completed and some encouraging words (I know you can do this!!) to motivate all of us to keep going!

Revisit The Goals

As the “enthusiasm” wears out in the months to come and we get busy with the business of life keep in mind that you are only human.  Revisit your goals to make sure you have not set the bar unrealistically high and set goals and intentions that are impossible to reach.  This is a great opportunity to teach our kids (and ourselves) the value of discipline and perseverance but also flexibility. Sometimes you need to revisit your goals with your family. It’s important to be aware that sometimes, things don’t go the way we want them to.  But you already know that. You are a mom!

Sandra is the “soul” and “coach” behind the Soulful Parent. She has worked in Early Intervention, Special Education and has supported many families in the road to successful parenting. She became a PCI Certified Parent Coach® because she’s deeply passionate about changing the world, one family at a time. Sandra believes that life becomes a more enjoyable journey when you lead from your strengths! She can be contacted Sandra {at} thesoulfulparent(.)com and www.thesoulfulparent.com for more information about seminars, presentations and individual coaching services.

Planning Your Family Vacation

Families with purpose are families who dream together and work together to make their dreams and goals a reality.

I spent hours and hours planning our family vacation to Disney world.  I read the right books, visited and subscribed to all the popular websites, made reservations in advance, and when all of it was done I had detailed plans day by day of how we would spend our days at Disney World.  My carefully crafted plans minimized wait times, allowed for rest times in the afternoon, and had us blissfully enjoying our 7 day stay at a comfortable pace.  Though my plans were extremely thorough they didn’t take into account my husband’s theme park strategies.  Strategies he had developed over the years of standing in long lines and having limited funds.  A strategy that was a combination of engineering ingenuity and a Superman like pace that no human (including me and the girls) could keep up with.  Don’t get me wrong, his strategy had some great points and if we had talked about his strategies BEFORE the trip and BEFORE I had spent hours and hours of planning things would have gone a lot smoother.            

Avoiding arguments is just one reason why it is helpful for families to spend some time prior to their family vacations planning them together rather than leaving the planning up to the parents or in our case just one parent.  Planning family vacations together makes kids feel involved, gives them a voice, and teaches them how to plan.  Planning family vacations together also helps build cohesiveness and closeness in a family by allowing families to share excitement and a sense of fulfillment after the vacation is over and all has gone well. 

So to get your family vacation off to a great start this summer try these family planning suggestions: 

To get things rolling, start by scheduling a couple of times on your family calendar or in your planner when you and the family can sit down together to discuss the vacation.  The bigger and longer the trip the more time you will need.  Also, take into account the ages of your kids.  A general rule of thumb is the younger the kids the shorter the meeting.  It is better to hold several short family meetings rather than a couple longs one if your children are young.  Make sure everyone knows about the family meetings.

If married, talk with your spouse beforehand about any specific parental decisions that need to be made.  Things like budget, activities that are off limits, sleeping arrangements, and means of transportation (car or plane).  Parents should be united before the meeting on the big things so that it doesn’t distract from the other decisions that the kids can help make.

If your children are small (ages 3-7), print off pictures or have brochures handy to show them what the vacation spot will look like and what their choices of activities will be.  Don’t overwhelm them with a lot of choices.  Pick some of the more interesting ones, and let them choose a few.  If your children are older (ages 8 and up) get them involved by asking them to do some research on the computer before the meeting.  Let them look up possible activities and outings and interesting places to stay and have them come prepared to the family meeting with their findings.

Negotiate the differences of opinions by taking votes and possibly splitting into two separate groups for a while.  For example if your son absolutely loves alligators, but your daughter would prefer to skip them, make plans for one parent to take your son to see the alligator exhibit and another parent to either stay behind with your daughter or to do something she enjoys.  Just be careful to not let your FAMILY vacation become a fragmented vacation.  It is okay to split up for some things, but try and make sure that the majority of the vacation is spent together.  Another option is to just compromise and spend time at exhibits and activities that everyone enjoys.

If your children are old enough, give them responsibility to pack their things by giving them their own travel packing checklist.  If they can’t read yet, but are anxious to pack their things, make them their own packing list using pictures rather than words.

Use your family journal to help keep notes of your discussions and decisions.  Put one of the older children in charge of keeping the notes.

If you feel comfortable telling them, share the vacation budget with the kids and let them help you keep track of how much everything is going to cost.  This is a great way of teaching the kids the value of money and how to budget. 

Let the kids help plan the travel games or car activities and get them packed for the trip.  Using a DVD player to help pass the time?  Let the kids each choose a couple of movies and give them responsibility for getting them packed.

Once all the plans have been finalized, ask one of the kids to update your travel organizer with the itinerary and important contact information.  While on vacation, let the kids get involved by entering in the vacation expenses. 

Lastly, document your memories.  Give each of your kids a disposable camera and let them take pictures and write about their vacation in either your family journal or a travel journal. 

Though our family vacation to Disney World was a great time and is the source of some wonderful memories for all of us, it did result in some stress along the way; stress and arguments that could have been avoided if we had just taken some time to plan the vacation together rather than separately.  So give yourself and your family the gift of a wonderfully pleasant vacation by planning it together!

Family Fitness Challenge

Exercise has never been at the top of my list of fun things to do and I do whatever I can to not fit it into my schedule.  My husband has a slightly more positive outlook and manages to fit in weekly volleyball games, bike rides in warm weather, and an occasional workout on our home exercise equipment.   And if it weren’t for the really comfortable overstuffed chair that always seems to call his name, he would be more active as well.  If we didn’t have kids we would maybe be more accepting of our sedentary lifestyle and feel a lot less pressure to exercise and stay fit, but because we believe in walking the talk with our kids we are forced into making honest attempts at exercise and eating healthy. 

So to give ourselves a boost of enthusiasm, we have implemented the Family Fitness Challenge this spring.  It is our simple little way of teaching the kids about eating healthy and exercising as well as fitting in some fun quality family time as well. 

Simply stated, a Family Fitness Challenge is an exercise and healthy habit plan we came up with together to try and make healthier choices.  We have established a few goals and will track our progress over the spring and summer months with occasional rewards thrown in along the way.  Here is our fitness challenge for this spring:

Eat 3 healthy meals 6 days a week

Exercise 3 times a week one of which has to be as a family

Eat only 2 junky snacks a day

Eat only 1 sugary cereal 1 day a week

So if you are like us and are looking for some creative ways to get your family moving here are some tips and suggestions to help you get your Family Fitness Challenge going:

Make your goals as a family, asking one of the older children to write them down.

Make your fitness goals realistic.  It is better to start small and then build up rather than set them too high and fail.  Be mindful of your family’s schedule, routines, and personality while writing your fitness goals.  Make your fitness goals fit your family rather than forcing your family to fit your goals.

If your family fitness goals include cutting back on junk food, you may have to consider thinking through and defining as a family what is and isn’t junk food as well as appropriate serving sizes. 

Use a fitness chart to track your progress and let your kids take turns handing out the gold stars.  You can create your own or use our template.

                Family Fitness Challenge Progress Chart – PDF Version

Build in rewards along the way.  For example, a possible reward may be a night at the movies after 4 weeks of consistently meeting your goals.

Don’t set weight goals for your kids.  Keep the goals focused on fun, eating healthy, and exercise.

For more complex goals, consider using a fitness notebook to help keep track of your progress.

Good luck!

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