Developing Our Philosophy and Setting Goals!

We are so glad we finally had to sit down and write our philosophy and goals! We believe in practicing what we preach so we want to keep our ePortfolio alive. We often talk about our philosophy and vaguely of our goals but we have never written them down. It was a powerful experience finally getting our philosophy on paper. It took a lot of talking and reflecting to dig down to the truth of what we believe. Once we got them down on paper, then video taped (with the help of the fabulous Karen!) ourselves saying them, we knew we could own our philosophy. We truly believe each of our statements is true and we hold ourselves to them.
     Goal setting was much more difficult than we anticipated but we knew we needed to do it. We found an article discussing a Harvard Business School Study in which MBA students were asked if they set goals. Only 3% had written goals and 18% had goals but not in writing. The remaining 84% had no specific goals. When the students were interviewed again 10 years later the 18% who had goals was making twice as much as the 84% who didn't and the 3% who had written goals was earning 10 times as much as the rest of the class combined! We want to be in the 3%! If having clear, written goals will get us there we are all for it.
     We started writing our goals and got confused again. We knew we wanted to write SMART goals because that is what we have been using in our virtual classes but we had the hardest time with the "R" of SMART. "R" stands for realistic. Does realistic mean we have to be sure we can do it? We try a lot of things without being sure of the outcome but that's part of what keeps us engaged in our work too. Does realistic mean we can't aim over our heads? We're frequently over our heads and figure out how to get to the surface. We like the challenge. We decided realistic means we think we can do it. Believing in our ability and our participants ability to step up to the plate every time we approach an unknown is realistic. It has worked for us so far and we plan to move forward with the same momentum that has kept us going and growing.