Goals will shape your 2023-By Dr. Ted Msipa Ph.D.

It’s great to be back.

Well, it is great to be back after a brief sabbatical on my part. Season’s greetings and compliments of the New Season are in order to you my dear friend. I wish you the best of the year 2023 which in my world is the year of Complete Dominion and Recompense.?Well, it is good to be back, hopefully, I am back with a bang. I trust you are also well-rested and fully charged for the brand-new year.

Reflection is key to success

I trust you also took time out to do what most of us dread to do, which is sitting down and reflecting on the previous year. We would rather dance the night away than reflect. ?I believe that you can never get to the next level without really getting a brutal assessment of yourself. Trust me this is such a painful exercise because at times you score a zero in certain areas and yet you still need to pick up your broken pieces and begin again. After, all life is about beginning again. Those who are into sports love to say its back to the drawing board.?

The holiday dream

I remember a very interesting friend of mine who made a courtesy call to me during the holidays. The guy had a lot of dreams to share, I have no choice but to remember one of his various dreams. He shared with me a dream wherein he was driving a nice green car. He said the car kept moving up and about, as he pressed the gas pedal. The thrill of speed fulfilled him since the car was in immaculate condition. He really could not tell where it was going although it had a full tank. Eventually the inevitable happened, he saw the car coming to a halting stop without getting anywhere. So, he got out of the car and started pacing about in a frustrated manner. He was really frustrated and wanted to do something about his car dilemma. Sadly before he could deal with the car issue the dream came to an abrupt end.?The other sad reality is that my friend drives in the dream and not in the physical domain.

Dreams can be prophetic

As I thought deeply about this I realized that the man’s dream was so relevant to most of us. We wake up every day and we do not even have a plan on how to go to the next level. Yet we are so pumped up that our time has come. ?We are clueless about what we need to do in order to go to the next level. So, we hang in there just like my friend who drives the green car in the dream. He hangs in the car going anywhere and everywhere. So by the time we wake up, we are old and we are frustrated. We start pacing around our (car) destiny swearing and insulting. We find fault with everyone who ever came into our lives. We wish we were young and we even withdraw into a cocoon of rage and rancor. Our problem really is not the car in the end. It is the car at the beginning. This also explains a lot of our typical year. It starts with a lot of hope and optimism that we are going to be better and this is going to be a better year. The question we should be asking ourselves is, what we should do differently this year in order to get better results than last year. So senseless optimism is criminal because it gets us hoping but never gets us anywhere. Life is neither optimistic nor pessimistic, it is practical.

Life needs a strategy

The greatest Rabbi who ever lived had seamless wisdom. He once asked, ‘"Suppose one of you wants to build a tower. Will he not first sit down and estimate the cost to see if he has enough money to complete it?” He gave us some amazing wisdom for life in that single sentence. We ought to live our lives by design, intentionally, and not by default. He was submitting that you and I ought to have blueprints for our lives. We all ought to have goals for the year, as well as long-term goals. However, the truth about goals is that until you have a strategy they are not any different from wishes. Someone once said wishes were not horses, otherwise, beggars would ride. ?Goals have to be backed with practical or tangible strategies. Pessimism won’t cut it, and neither will optimism crack it because the truth of the matter is that you must have a sensible strategy to work this life.

Let’s do it together folks

I am fully sold out about awesome goal setting. My desire is to pass the fire in my heart to the next person. I have devised an amazing goal-setting approach that guarantees results for any disciplined implementer. I am therefore calling you out as my leader to put together twenty people and I will run the seminar for you and your friends for free. That is part of my giving back to the community. We can do it in person or via zoom.

You will never walk alone

May the leader in you rise to conquer? May a better version of you come to the party this season? May you dominate all your past failures? May your bitterness turn to your betterness? May the grace of Yahweh move you from grass to grace? Jesus Christ remains the ultimate leader walk by his side and you will never walk alone. I have seen him heal, save and touch many lives. He is God’s salvation to humanity. Learn to trust him with your broken heart and you will never be disappointed. ?Those who trust in him are like Mount Thaba Bosiu which can never be moved. This year make it a point for Christ to be the solid rock upon which you stand.?