ColdShower #71🥶🚿 Unboxing emotions and yearly planning

It's just wild that so many animals can fly. Like they can actually just fly. That's insane.

Feb 14, 2024

Shower thought via Reddit.

The ColdShower: Weekly thoughts for better health, habits, and happiness.

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Planning Funnel Part 2: Yearly Goal Setting

Recharge: 🧊🛀Cold Plunge🧊🛀

Cold Plunge- (noun), Life lessons. Experiencing a revelation akin to full-body submersion in freezing cold water

Why did I react that way?

“I don’t want that crap.” - I told Jordan as she showed me a CHD awareness sweater she was excited to buy.

(She looks good rocking her “Heart Mom” sweater… #HOTMomAlert).

My reaction was immediate and visceral. I wanted NOTHING to do it.

Here comes the unboxing📦

I sat on this feeling for a while… "Why did I react this way?”

In buying this sweater, Jordan is embracing the proud feeling of our son Mile’s CHD story and overcoming massive odds at birth.

I should be proud too. But instead, I felt angry. I compartmentalized our son’s traumatic birth. It was stored away neatly in a nice little corner of my mind.

Then a sweater with a catchy tagline threw it right up to the forefront. And it was clear this was a box I never unpacked.

Some apologies are in order

I give you this story in the hopes it will help your own unboxing of tough emotions. I realized I need help, and I’m exploring this through mental health therapy for the first time (after a lifelong stigma… that’s another box to unpack🥡).

Compartmentalization is a wonderful tool, but I’m hoping to add a few more to my toolkit and get better at exploring the end-range of my emotions.

Does this resonate? Drop a comment below. I’d love to hear from you.

Refine: 🗓️🌪️“planning funnel”🗓️🌪️

High Five Kimmy Schmidt GIF by Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Need to catch up? (Part 1: Prioritization Filter)

Part 2: Yearly Goal Setting

“The trouble with not having a goal is that you can spend your life running up and down the field and never score.” — Bill Copeland.

Yearly goal setting is a chance to take a step back from our day-to-day and plot the course of our year. We all get the same 365 days (i.e. 52 weeks, 8760 hours).

This past January I did yearly goal-setting for my 5 top priorities. Keep reading for my process.

Goals, Sub-goals, and accountability teams

First I listed my 5 Yearly Priorities:

Grow Spiritually
Become a more present Father & Husband
Achieve 200% of sales quota
Finish LittleTrailRunner children’s poem book and launch website
Run a sub-19 minute 5k

Then, I broke down each of these priorities into main yearly goals, a list of sub-goals, and accountability teams.

Let’s use LittleTrailRunner as our example.

My yearly goal is two-fold, finish the poem book and start the business via a website people can order from.

To do that, I needed sub-goals, each with associated metrics and/or deadlines. i.e:

Complete 1 poem per week through March 1st.
Launch website with 5 products by September 13th, 2024

Finally, I’m leveraging an Accountability Team (See CS #66) as a feedback loop at weekly and monthly intervals.

That’s it. Easy enough right😎? Let me know in the comments if you have another way of yearly goal setting or plan to try my method.