Brian Walch explains aspirations as the third element of a personal-development project plan. Unlike SMART goals, aspirations are action-oriented statements phrased as already achieved, like "I am a confident public speaker, comfortable speaking in front of a room of 100 people, and I'm starting to get paid for public speaking."
Chapters
Last week I talked about creating a project plan for your personal development initiative and I started going over the elements that you can include in your project plan. So we covered scope, which is generally what are you trying to accomplish or what area of your life are you working on? And then the second was time frame. And I recommended timeboxing your effort so you had a specific date where you started and stopped that would allow you to scroll, say when the project is done. And there's a lot of benefits to being done with something. So the next is aspirations. Now some people will tell you you need to set goals, and I'm a big fan of goal setting. But when you set a goal, you want to have some rigor around that. I like using the SMART framework. Specific, measurable, attainable, realistic time boundaries. But for a personal development project, goals aren't always realistic or aren't always the best thing to use. Often when you are working on personal development, you kind of have some ideas and maybe even dreams about what you're working on, but you don't know the steps to take. Goals are effective when you know the steps to take and you can set a goal and really drive toward that. But often in personal development projects, that's not the best way to proceed. So what I use is aspirations. And I describe aspirations as kind of between a goal and a dream. You know, we have to have dreams. If you want your dreams to come true, you gotta have a dream. And you need some way to move forward on that to take action. And that's what aspirations can do. Aspirations are action oriented, forward thinking statements. They should be inspirational and something that is kind of provocative and moves you forward. But they also need to be grounded. And then I always advise to state them in a format that is as if they had happened. So for example, I'm, you know, trying to improve public speaking and I want to be a public speaker. So I have an aspirational statement that says I am a confident public speaker, comfortable speaking in front of a room of 100 people. And I'm starting to get paid for public speaking. So that's an aspirational statement that is moving me toward my goals, but are moving me toward my dreams, but isn't necessarily a goal. So now we've got a scope kind of generally, what are we working on, a time frame that we're going to work on it and some aspirational statements that we're working toward. We've got two more elements that I'll be covering this week. Stay tuned.
