Couple Goals - Making Your Time Together Count

Happy, healthy couples strengthen their marriage bond through the pursuit of shared goals and by encouraging and supporting one another in accomplishing those and their individual goals. 

Goals harness and order the energy required to follow the associated structured activities that will result in achieving those goals. Sharing a goal with your mate can be a wonderful way to connect and invest in personal and couple growth and avoid the boredom and monotony of aimless efforts that can often result in fussing and disagreements.

Why not set aside some time or better yet, plan a weekend away when you and your spouse can dream and discuss goals that you would like to pursue together and individually. 

“Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”  Will Rogers.

1)    Be specific.  Instead of saying, “We will learn to play tennis, be specific and say: “We’ll spend 30 minutes a day hitting balls three times a week and take a tennis lesson on Sunday afternoons at the Tennis Club.” The goal now expresses not only a desire, but the means to accomplish it.

2)    Be realistic.  Consider your time and resources and set goals that you can accomplish and feel good about.  If you make them too easy, they will be meaningless and if you make them impossible to obtain, you will lose heart and become discouraged.  Strive to create positive versus negative energy!

3)    Include a way to measure your success.  A good goal will answer the questions of what, how, and when; it’s measurable.  Instead of saying, “We will learn new recipes and cook meals together, say:  we will research recipes online and find a mutually agreeable one, grocery shop together at Whole Foods and cook together on the first Saturday evening of each month.”

4)    Think short-term and long-term.  Short-term goals (cleaning one closet a week) allows us to experience success at smaller intervals while working toward long-term goals (de-cluttering an entire house.)

5)    Review periodically and be flexible.   Goals are the defined destination of a journey.  If you don’t know where you are going, guess what?  You are already there!  Remind yourself that life is a journey, and developing a passion for the process is the key to embracing and enjoying each day and learning to live in the moment.  Priorities arise that will take precedence over structure you have established to accomplish a goal, which may require taking a detour, adjusting expectations or putting a goal on hold for a while.  Utilize the power of prayer when setting daily priorities, which will result in PRAYORITIES, which will keep you in line with your dreams and the heart desires of God.

Got Happiness? (4)

Much research has been done to determine the causes of mental health issues such as depression, bi-polar disorder, mania, etc., but fewer studies have focused on what causes a person to be happy.  Henry Cloud authored The Laws of Happiness, which highlights the life principles of people who experience higher levels of well-being and happiness.  This article summarizes one law of happiness.

Happy people pursue goals.  Goals help order our time and energy, promote growth and the hope of things to come.  The way to accomplish a big goal is to break it down into little goals.  What small, specific and measurable thing or things do I need to accomplish today that will work toward my end desire?  Cloud encourages us to consider how we get to the end of a day able to know “today was a good day!” What needs to occur during the day to make that happen?

Getting in touch with our heart’s desires is key to setting goals.  Sometimes, like a child digging around in a toy box for a favorite toy, we have to rummage through our thoughts and life experiences to discover goals that when achieved will satisfy and fill our hearts with joy.

Got Happiness? (3)

Got Happiness?

Much research has been done to determine the causes of mental health issues such as depression, bi-polar disorder, mania, etc., but fewer studies have focused on what causes a person to be happy.  Henry Cloud authored The Laws of Happiness, which highlights the life principles of people who experience higher levels of well-being and happiness.  This article summarizes one of those laws.

Happy people don’t compare themselves.  Using another person’s performance to judge personal worth is unhealthy and sinful.  There is nothing wrong with observing a person and emulating their behavior for the purpose of learning and growing.  However, when we beat ourselves up because another person does something or has something that we want, we are wasting our precious time and energy.  Those types of comparisons and negative self-talk zap our energy and cause depression.  We will receive a performance review at the end of our lives and it is our gifts that will be evaluated to determine whether we embraced, developed and used them to make a difference in God’s Kingdom and in the lives of others.  Galations 6:4-5  -Pay careful attention to your own work, for then you will get the satisfaction of a job well done, and you won’t need to compare yourself to anyone else.  For we are each responsible for our own conduct.

Talk Love!

The Five Love Languages (click for website)

The 5 Love Languages® has helped countless couples identify practical and powerful ways to express love, simply by using the appropriate love language. Many husbands and wives who had spent years struggling through marriages they thought were loveless discovered one or both spouses had long been showing love through messages that weren’t getting through. By recognizing their different love languages, they witnessed the rebirth of the love they thought had been gone for good.

THE 12 TESTS OF TRUE LOVE! By Dr. Dave Currie and Christie Rayburn ® 
http://www.marriageuncensored.com/assets/ShowDocuments/612-%2012%20Traits%20of%20True%20Love.pdf

For those considering the lifetime commitment of marriage!

How to Forgive and Forget (click for website)

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