This weekend, my husband, Stuart, and I will be continuing a longstanding holiday tradition. Every year, for one weekend in December, we leave our children in the trusted care of a nanny, and we leave Austin for somewhere not too far from home where we can completely separate ourselves from life's day-to-day demands. Contrary to what you might be thinking, we're not seeking a romantic getaway or a chance to blow off some holiday steam. No, on this weekend we work, though this work has little to do with the office. Instead, we take this time as an opportunity to reflect on our personal and professional achievements in the past year and make a list of goals for the next. It's a tradition that never ceases to reveal its value to us.

So often in our lives we let things just take their course, and to a certain extent we should; no one needs to be in control of everything, though it's sometimes tempting to try! But when you find yourself always reacting to situations, the opposite extreme can become the rule: You feel like you're completely out of control. Stuart and I are committed to living our lives with clear intentions, and these yearly meetings play a big part in helping us do that. In them we talk about all the areas of our lives: marriage, finances, family, parenting, spiritual aspirations, even our exercise routines. We look at our goals from the past year, seeing all the things we've accomplished and, of course, the things we didn't get to. If those unaccomplished goals are still things we'd still like to see happen, we roll them over to the next year. And then we come up with new goals in all of the different areas of our lives for the coming year. This gives us a lot to talk about! But there's something to be said for writing down your goals and seeing them through. It's gratifying to look back and see everything you've been able to achieve, and of course it's exciting to look ahead at all the things you're going to accomplish very soon! Putting these goals down on paper allows me to feel a much greater sense of accomplishment and a clearer sense of personal mission as I move ahead in life.

Stuart and I use these goals throughout the year. We create a list of goals for each of our children and these help guide our one-on-ones with our nanny. They become benchmarks in our kids' development which all of us, Stuart, their nanny, their teachers and I, share and partner together to achieve. I have encouraged my staff to join in yearly goal-setting as well. Sometimes they choose to share their personal goals with me, and I have been surprised at what I have discovered! When I have heard from staff members that they would like to go back to school or fix their schedule so they can spend more time with their children, I have learned something personal about them I may not have otherwise known. I have found things that I, as their employer, can help them with by working together with them to create a more manageable schedule or otherwise assist in the realization of their dreams. We all get so busy, and we may begin to see all the different areas of our lives as compartmentalized, full of contradictory and irreconcilable demands, and it can be tough to communicate our frustrations to the folks who can help us. It's comforting to step back and look at the full 40-foot view (a favorite phrase of our Special Projects Manager, Lisa Vines) and share this view with those closest to us at work and at home. We begin to see that our lives aren't so neatly divided up, and those seemingly impossible wishes are possible after all.

Labels: goal-setting, planning for the new year