General

SMART Goals and Setting Them This New Year
Smart goals means setting an attainable goals and telling yourself "I can do it".

In order to set smart goals for yourself, you need to get rid of the negativity in your life.

There is a difference between “Goals” and “Smart Goals”. It’s that time of year when everyone sets new goals for the new year. Most people think of January 1 as a clean slate. It’s a day to make changes toward what we want in life. Often, we make such grandiose plans that we’re unable to carry them through. Our expectations are unrealistic. When we forget the resolutions we so carefully crafted, it’s easy to get discouraged and not make any changes at all in your life. This year, take a different approach to the resolutions you set for 2017.

How to Make Smart Goals for Yourself

Businesses have a lot of experience in setting goals. We can look to how businesses approach goal-setting to learn how to better set goals for our personal lives. SMART is an acronym that outlines a basic plan for developing goals that lead to success.

  • Specific – Your goals should be well defined.
  • Measurable – You should have a way to know when the goal is reached.
  • Attainable – The goal should be achievable.
  • Relevant – The goal should pertain to your overall goals.
  • Time-based – You should have a time frame to meet the goal.

Goals vs Smart Goals

Here’s an example of what a lot of people say: “I want to get healthier next year.” Although this is a good notion, it’s not exactly a SMART goal, because it’s very general in nature. How can this idea be changed into a smarter goal that can be reached? First, what aspect of getting healthy do you want to accomplish? Specifically, “I want to eat healthier.” Now, we need to add a number to our goal to make it measurable. “I want to pack my lunch four days a week instead of choosing fast food.”

While this goal sounds attainable, you should check it against your calendar. Are you traveling two or three days a week? Maybe you don’t have a way to keep your lunch at safe temperatures. If you have to take kids to soccer, boy scouts and dance every night, it might be difficult to pack a lunch for yourself every morning. Can you manage this goal based on your current lifestyle? Maybe you should start by saying “In January, I plan to pack a healthy lunch two days a week and make healthier choices when I do go out for lunch,” or “I will replace chips and cookies in my diet with fruit and yogurt.”

The relevancy of the goal is fairly obvious. If you want to get healthy, then eating healthier is probably important to you. But you have to look at where you are in life right now. If you’re being pressured into setting a goal that doesn’t mean anything for you, it’s time to go back and set a better goal. To make a goal more relevant, you might want to attach it to another goal. If you want to lose weight, then making healthier food choices would mean even more to you.

You Can Reach Your Goals

With a time-bound goal, you have an endpoint. With our goal above, the endpoint would be January. One month of eating healthier is much more doable than just getting healthy. At the endpoint, you can then examine the goal and the outcomes to decide if you want to try again next month or if you need to adapt the goal to make it “smarter.” Instead of setting one big goal that you never reach, set smaller goals that are reasonable. When you make your goals reasonable and attainable, you’re more likely to carry through. 

Göran Persson, former Prime Minister of Sweden, once said, “Let our New Year’s resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.” Let the new year serve as a catalyst for change, but make your resolutions realistic.

Advocates for Marriage Equality in the Anglican Church
Advocates for Marriage Equality in the Anglican Church

Advocates for Marriage Equality in the Anglican Church

In 1976, the Episcopal Church (the branch of the Anglican church in the United States) took steps toward marriage equality when it recognized that “homosexual persons are children of God who have a full and equal claim with all other persons upon the love, acceptance, and pastoral concern and care of the Church.” In 2015, the General Convention made changes to church canon and liturgy for marriage equality. Months later, at the Anglican Communion’s Primates’ Meeting, the primates, who are the head bishops of the church, voted to suspend the right of the Episcopal Church to be represented at international meetings. This summer, the Canadian Anglican Church is expected to vote on same-sex marriage equality for its membership. The debate has been going on for months, and it’s not looking positive, but there are people who are pushing forward.

Same-Sex Marriages and the Anglican Church

The General Synod, which is the body responsible for church canon, has been trying to find agreement over same-sex marriages in the church since 2004 when they deferred the vote over blessing the union or not. This would have given each church the authority to bless unions. One of the bishops had already given permission for some of the priests in his district to bless same-sex unions as early as 2003. Currently, there are many parishes that are authorized to bless all marriages, but the church itself has not approved the change to the marriage canon.

This July, the General Synod is voting on a change to the canon at its triennial meeting. According to the final report presented to the Commission on the Marriage Canon,

“In 2013 the General Synod passed a resolution (C003, which is included as an appendix to this report) directing the drafting of a motion ‘to change Canon XXI on marriage to allow the marriage of same-sex couples in the same way as opposite-sex couples, and that this motion should include a conscience clause so that no member of the clergy, bishop, congregation or diocese should be constrained to participate in or authorize such marriages against the dictates of their conscience.’ Such a motion will be considered by the General Synod in 2016.”

After a special meeting early in February, the House of Bishops announced that the resolution would probably not pass because it would not get the support it needed to pass. It takes a two-thirds majority to pass, and according to an article in the Anglican Journal, one-third of the bishops are in favor of the change. Another third of the bishops are opposed. The remaining third are those bishops who are still wrestling with the issue. There is another meeting in April to provide more thought and alternatives to the resolution before the final vote in July.

Social Media Comes to the Rescue

Just a few days following the statement from the Bishops, advocates of the resolution came together and formed a Facebook group, Advocates for Changing the Marriage Canon. It started out with 25 members in March, and it has grown to almost 1400. Both clergy and laypeople are in the group. Administrators must approve the request to join, or you must be invited by another member. The rules are clear that the group is not there to debate the issue. It is strictly for those who are in support of the resolution. Members have reached out to the leaders in the church, expressing their views about why this resolution is so important to the church and to their faith. The group is actively reaching out to the House of Bishops, but it also is serving a purpose of unity among Anglicans who feel marginalized because their marriages are not recognized by church canon. We’ll be watching this issue to see how it turns out when the Bishops vote in July.