Finding Balance when Setting Goals

Every new year, we set goals to improve our lives. And every year, we struggle to achieve those goals. What if the key to achieving our goals is about balance and pacing ourselves intentionally?

Over the years, I’ve had many conversations about balance and wellness: what it looks like, how to achieve it, and why it often feels so difficult. A turning point in my own journey came in 2020, when I was introduced to the eight dimensions of wellness during a class in my coaching certification program.

One of our teachers, Leslie Avant-Brown, introduced this concept when she discussed self-care and how to integrate it into our coaching.

Caption: Picture shows 8 circles overlapping with the word ‘Wellness’ in the middle. around the image it lists the 8 dimensions of wellness with a short description: Emotional, Financial, Social, Spiritual, Environmental, Intellectual, Physical. Credit: M. Swarback from the article A Wellness Approach.

Immediately, something about this model stood out to me. As Leslie continued explaining these dimensions, I felt connected to them in many ways. That feeling was trying to tell me that there was a lot of truth to this.

Over time, I would sit with it to assess how to ensure I tended to all parts of my health. I made charts to outline everything I was doing and what I wanted to do in these areas, but I never got to. At first, mapping everything out felt incredibly affirming. It reminded me of all the ways I was already caring for myself and ways I could continue to care for myself.

At the same time, it made me feel stuck. How can I manage all the activities I want to do, considering the type of lifestyle we have? We have work and family obligations, distractions of the world, hobbies, social commitments, and so on. We all carry a lot. I know this is something many of you have thought about or talked about with your friends already.

I was determined to find the answer to my question of how to juggle it all. I wanted to incorporate goals from all eight dimensions of wellness for my own self-care.

So, I returned to my lists and thought about how else I could approach this. I then tried outlining an ‘ideal day’ for myself that touched upon all eight dimensions of health. I tried different variations of my ideal day and moved forward with it.

After some time, I found that my days were overpacked and left room for any flexibility. Sure, the days felt fulfilling because I was focusing on different dimensions of wellness in ways that felt good to me. The problem was that the rhythm didn’t feel good. I knew I couldn’t sustain having full days day in and day out. I found myself constantly doing something and craving more time to respond to needs that would arise at the moment; the type of needs you cannot plan for. For example, having an impromptu hang out with a friend, responding to a request to help a friend, having more time to read the Qur’an, or wanting more rest.

I needed to rethink my approach. I challenged myself with the question: What kind of pace do I want to maintain, and how can I fit my goals in each dimension at that pace?

As I continued experimenting with this and reflecting on it, I found myself reorganizing my list of goals and activities and decided to schedule my activities with different cadences, whether daily, weekly, or monthly.

Let’s look at the spiritual dimension of wellness as an example. Some goals fit into my daily routine, like praying, reading the Qur’an, and reciting dhikr (a form of worship of saying a phrase remembering God repeatedly). Other goals required more time, like reading a detailed tafsir of a juz (part) of the Qur’an. If I wanted to take notes, watch supplemental videos, and discuss with a friend, that was about a two-week process. To ensure I had enough time for this goal, I planned for two weeks of the month to focus on this. And I left the other two weeks open for other larger goals.

Let’s go over one more example by looking at the social dimension, particularly meeting up with friends. I am not an extrovert, so I do not need daily or weekly social activity. Having only one or two weekends full of social activities in the month was sufficient for me, and it left room for other dimensions of my wellness on the free weekends.

Hopefully, you get the picture now. I tended to the buckets of wellness by spacing out the goals within each dimension in a way that felt good.

To get to this realization, I needed to shift my perspective from an all-or-nothing mindset and embrace the reality that you cannot accomplish everything at once. Finding a way to space out goals requires understanding how much time each goal needs and being intentional about when I plan to carry out those goals. After trying this method for a while, I discovered it was important to have grace for yourself when unexpected things happen and accept that some goals will get completed at a different schedule than intended.

Does any of this resonate with you? If this is something you want to consider testing out as you do your yearly planning, here are some reflection questions to help you get started:

• What type of pace of life do you want?
• How are your goals meeting these eight dimensions of wellness?
• What dimension of wellness may need more attention?
• How are you spacing the goals out to match the pace you want in life?

I encourage you to try this framing with your own goals. If you do, let me know, what worked for you? What challenges did you face? What adjustments did you have to make?

Also, I encourage you to stay tuned for my next post, in which I discuss how I think Muslims have a ninth dimension of wellness.