By Meg Schlabs – 4 Minute Read
It is laughable that my sisters decided to give me this post to write. GOALS? I got them. In droves. I have house goals, body goals, work goals, mommy goals, friend goals. I have spreadsheets and spreadsheets with tiny checkboxes in ombre color coding. Digital task calendars, paper calendars, and a marker set (off-limits from my kids so the tips don’t get fuzzy and I can make those tiny checks even better.) You get the point. But, open handed goals? LOL. I don’t have that kind of chill.
90% of my therapy sessions are spent talking about how I expected something to happen, and I worked hard for it to happen, and it did not happen precisely as I planned it to, and now I’m sad. I used to wake my mom up every day and ask her what the plan was for the day. THAT’S ME.
Open handed goals may seem like a mirage to me, but I really like the idea. So I’m gonna talk about what that could look like for someone like me to be more open handed while planning out my yearly goals. This year, one of the goals I have for my goals (hee hee) is to stay away from binary thinking. Right/Wrong. Yes/No. Dirty/Clean. This type of thinking is too simplistic and constrained for the complex and dynamic thing that is MY LIFE.
Last year one of my goals was to cook more. And given my personality, what I really wanted was for Chef to be my only role from 5-6pm every day. Binary thinking. And I really dominated that goal… I was stress texting my husband about being late, I was stress yelling at my kids for grabbing more snacks, I was stress chopping veggies, which is honestly just dangerous. The goal of cooking can’t erase all the other things I am from 5-6pm. So my goal this year will be to cook and enjoy my family. Do those two things go together? Nope! Don’t matter because it keeps me from getting locked in as Chef Meg. It may look like this:
Get take-and-bake meals from the grocery store.
Plan a deli style meal once a week.Turn the burner off the stove when a kid needs you.
Stop planning on everything to be on the table by 6pm. (Just stop, Meg. Let it be ready when it’s ready.)
Save the real cooking for the weekend nights when you can ask for help from your partner.
Parents are a lot of different things all at once. So, I encourage you to allow your goals to become more holistic this year. More non-binary.
You know yourself and all that you are. Bring the entirety of that person into the picture when goal setting. A goal in one area of your life will need to include all of you.
What’s one of your 2021 goals? How can you let it be more open handed? Could you wake up every day and remind yourself that the day might not go as planned? Or you could think on the problem areas your goals might have and include a way around those in the goal?
Write it down and drop it in our comments!
Sincerely,
Meg Schlabs
Eldest Sister, Owner of Wizardly, and Co-Founder of MotherLift
