How to measure ourselves: part 2

I explored some ways not to measure ourselves in part one of this two-part series on how to measure ourselves.  I will now share two ways that I believe can help us weigh our progress and remain aligned with the dreams that we have for our lives.  Sometimes we find that our dreams become completely stagnant, I recently wrote about this in my blog post Why are we not living the dream?  When this happens, perhaps it’s a good time to take a step back and measure ourselves, to consider where it is we would like to be going and where it is we have come from.

So here you go, two do’s when it comes to how to measure ourselves.

Do measure yourself against your vision and not your goals

I love to set goals.  I write them down and refer to them regularly to keep me on track with my projects and plans.  Goals are perfect for measuring progress, but can fail us when we use them to measure ourselves.  The thing about a goal is that it needs to exist within a certain timeframe.  A goal is a beacon to set our sites to in order to direct our actions towards achieving something.  But sometimes life throws a curve ball and we don’t get there in time, we lose site of our beacon and then we feel like we have failed. 

I believe that life should be an exercise in rhythm and not balance (read my blog post on this here).  Balance says everything at once.  Rhythm says that the natural seasons of life will determine our priorities.  Sometimes a goal will have to be set aside for the sake of an unexpected turn of events, or an expected one that’s unexpectedly consuming.  That’s why goals aren’t worth measuring OURSELVES against.  We set them for a purpose, but that purpose might need to shift for a season, and we might need to shift our measure of success in order to avoid a sense of failure.

Also, some goals are set too high, or set when we didn’t see the entire picture.  Goals need to be fluid so that they can adjust to changing circumstances.  For this reason, they are no good for measuring ourselves against. 

But vision, vision is something different.  Vision exists, I believe, to guide our decision making and to help as know which goals to lose and which to keep in order to remain aligned with our life’s dreams.  Let’s then measure ourselves against our visions.  Let’s do this so that we don’t stray away from making our dreams a reality.  Let’s ask ourselves how our current choices and circumstances measure up and if there is anything that we should be doing to initiate change in order to better direct our course towards our ultimate dream for our lives.  It’s not the timeframe that matters but the substance of what we choose to include and exclude along the way.

Perhaps I should provide a practical example.  I set a goal this week to write seven blog posts in seven days.  This is day number six and so I have nearly achieved my goal.  I might have bowed out if the week had been any more demanding than it was.  I have a vision to be a writer, that somehow, someday, I will be able to use my writing to make an impact, that writing will be a big part of who I am.  That’s why I set myself the writing goal this week.  Not achieving my goal would not have been a measure of how I am doing as an aspiring writer. However, I do constantly refer to my vision and dream of becoming a writer in order to measure myself against it and ensure that the choices I am making now are aligned with the hope of realising my dreams.

What if we don’t have a vision?  Well then we have no measure.  Do take time to dream, to set and write down your vision for your life and then do measure yourself against your vision.

Do measure yourself backwards

Let’s not become discouraged when we measure our lives and find them lacking. Perhaps we are determining a measurement without including all of the information.  We should measure ourself backwards, turning ourselves towards the facts of where we used to be and then use these to measure where we are now.

A good way to do this is to keep a journal.  A journal will help us record these facts.  It will record the little thoughts and desires that were real during a season but are so easily forgotten in the next season.  We are prone to forgetting that what we have is what we used to hope for.  Let’s measure ourselves backwards so that we can celebrate the breakthroughs that have already occurred.  Let’s measure our lives and find that lives don’t stand still, lives don’t get stuck, lives do change and we change.  Looking backwards is the best way to do this.