Live Your Legend Local: Goal-Setting With Group Support

"Tomorrow, I'm going to live my legend."

The first Live Your Legend Local (LYLL) meeting I attended took place on February 3rd. The event description said: 

Come prepared to answer our three big questions.

1. What are you building?

2. What's your next step?

3. How can we help you?

I commented on the event page, "Is it okay if I have a really hard time answering those questions?" 

The host responded, "Absolutely!" When I got there, I'd had a can't-get-out-of-bed-I'm-so-depressed day. I showed up half an hour late wearing mismatched clothes. What I found was authentic people with admirable goals like:

-Become an advocate for environmental sustainability.

-Become an advocate for early childhood education.

-Start a family and market organizational tools for working parents.

I said, "Look, my mom is having spinal surgery in a week and I'm going back to Seattle for the month to take care of her. Can my goal be to be okay, like to stay sane?"

Based on the values and attitudes of most people I'd met in L.A., I expected, "No, you must lose thirty pounds, start a nonprofit, and write two novels!" 

But what I got was, "That's a huge goal, Sarah. That's a great one."

I returned to L.A. the night before the March meeting. The surgeon had successfully removed the cluster of tumors from C1 and C2 of Mom's spine. Each family member had had some kind of freak-out over the course of the month, but for the most part, we held it together. So I was surprised when I couldn't find the energy to unpack, get groceries, make plans with friends, and I never made it to that March meeting. I retroactively list that month's goal as "Recover Sanity."

I'll save the details for another story, but ultimately I did get through that depression, and I showed up at the April meeting ready with the concrete goal to "Write 30 Poems in 30 Days for National Poetry Month." AND I DID IT! Half of them were too rough to post on my creative writing site (www.sweetlovetruly.com), but I did it; I wrote them!

At the May meeting, I declared, "I'm ready to call myself a writer." The host repeated my statement back to me to celebrate the gravity of it. I majored in Creative Writing. Like, it was probably pretty obvious all along that I wanted to build a life around writing. Oh well.

I call this month's goal "Spring Cleaning." I have a to-do list, at the end of which the surface layers of my life will be totally organized, like a blank slate. (You're allowed to use cliches in goal-setting. I'm confident about that.) I also made a goal to write two blog posts. Ta-da!

I haven't explored all of the resources on LiveYourLegend.net. Except for Creator Scott Dinsmore's TED Talk, all of my directon has come from having a monthly group meeting to give me something to work toward, and those three big questions.

1. What are you building?

2. What's your next step?

3. How can we help you?