A friend of mine is a consultant helping businesses develop their annual strategic plans. She uses the same process of 10 reflective questions to help individuals create their own personal strategic plan asking what must I do to make this my Best Year Yet? Last year she helped me create my own plan—but of course, being me, well let’s just say it wasn’t exactly my best year yet. I didn’t keep up with the monthly online goal tracker, my 10 goals were far from being met, and I felt more like a failure for once again not achieving what I pledged to do last January. I rationalized a few of the goals away: It wasn’t my fault I didn’t become fluent in Spanish because the language school was lame; I could cheat and say I really had become a more attentive spouse (just don’t ask my husband!). But regardless of the reason, the truth was I hadn’t done what I had said I needed to do to have my Best Year Yet. So when she enthusiastically wanted to get together to develop my plan for this year it felt more like my tax attorney excitedly wanting to get going on that audit!
As I reflected in prayer on both the questions she had asked of me and my awkwardness with trying to project my path forward this year, I recognized her business planning tool was practically “Ignatian Spirituality Lite.” Right from the start, the coach states her job is to hold you accountable to what you say you are going to do, that honest accountability being one of the most powerful indicators of plan success. If only my spiritual director realized how much her “accountability services” were worth in the secular business world! Like Ignatius’ directive in the Spiritual Exercises, my personal strategic plan is to begin with gratitude and finding the good in what has been and what IS rather than our tendency to focus on our trouble spots (hmmm… now what Spirit might those be coming from?) In creating a plan one must answer questions (phrased in more secular terms) about consolations and desolations and discern the message of them. I am encouraged to articulate “my limiting paradigm” which ironically sounds a lot like the ‘three types of persons’ discussion I had with my spiritual director. Do I say I believe but really don’t? Do I give all but that one thing which I hold in reserve for myself? In place of that constricting thought churning in my head, I name a new paradigm. Following Ignatian Spirituality, that for me would be the directive of the First Principle and Foundation: I want and choose what better leads to God’s deepening life within me. But am I really prepared to live by that? Do I really want that?
While many people would frame such reflection tools as “self-help”, doing so in the context of prayer clarifies easily that my “self” tends to be more the problem and the “help” is definitely from One greater than I. If what propels my growth this year is anything other than the God my heart seeks, be it money, vanity, or personal ambition, I will be less than I was created to be.
Ultimately, I must identify my roles and goals for each role. These are winnowed down to my top 10 goals for the year, and each month I define my tactics for advancing that goal. Implicitly, if I achieve my top 10 goals I will have my Best Year Yet. Here is where I made my crucial mistake last year. I listed the typical roles: wife, mother, employee, community member, best friend, and …believer. I noted my monthly mini-goals for growth in each role. And, thinking I was following Ignatius’ directive, planned all the proper tactics right down to the daily prayer time. But to segment my faith life from those other roles is precisely what Ignatian Spirituality fights against. If being faithful or growing in my relationship to Christ is one of many other goals I am trying to achieve, right up there with learning Spanish and reading novels, it too easily gets lost in the daily to do list and denies the greatest resource I have—the grace of God—to be actively engaged in achieving those other goals. What if instead, I saw that daily prayer time as a tactic to achieving the other goals on my list, every goal on my list? What if my service projects or learning Spanish were not an end in themselves, but a means to my life’s calling to praise, honor, and serve God?
Perhaps this year I will have just one goal in my personal strategic plan: Live love in each moment.
If I could do that, it would be my best year yet for sure.
Photo: “Letterpress 2010” by Sarah Parrott from Flickr (Used under Creative Commons license)
