Just a Girl Who Decided to Go For It | Student Blog

Short-term goals lead to long-term goals.

I find that writing down short-term goals is a very effective, healthy, and manageable way to reach long-term goals. For example, one of my long-term goals is to be a strong and independent woman who has got her shit together. It’s a pretty abstract goal and it’s hard to pinpoint when I’ve “arrived,” since one never really “arrives.” One is only always on a journey. However, I can create tangible tasks or patterns of behavior to align myself toward this direction. Short-term goals that have helped me move toward this “abstract” goal include:

1. Learn to cook (check)
2. Learn to budget my living expenses (check)
3. Do my own laundry (ongoing)
4. Get out of my terrible first New York apartment and move into a new, bigger apartment with responsible roommates (check!)
5. Decorate my new room! (check)
6. Gather all the clothes I no longer wear and sell them (check)

Short-term goals help me focus on tasks that are do-able from where I am at the present. Right now, one of my long-term goals is to become an actress with command of and facility with language and dialects. When I break that down into short-term goals, here is what I get:

1. Apply for a grant through the Juilliard Career Services Program to get funding for dialect sessions (check)
2. Contact dialect coaches whom I feel connected to (check)
3. Spend the summer doing an internship with a dialect coach (check)
4. Continue my weekly dialect sessions with my voice and speech teachers in the school (ongoing)
5. Do my speech exercises and read something out loud for at least 5 minutes every day (ongoing)

I don’t think it is possible for one to “drift” in life. Or maybe I think this way because ever since I discovered that I wanted to be an actress, the full measure of my time and energy has been devoted to honing my craft and building a career. We human beings have always been led and guided by our desires and fears. We always want something, even though what that might be may not always be clear to ourselves.

When I was a lot younger, I spent a lot of my time daydreaming and having these fantasies about what my life was going to be when I became an adult. It took a number of career disappointments and personal heartaches for me to realize that I indeed was "floating"—that I was working in the acting company but wasn’t clear on what I really wanted, and so my strategies were not focused enough. Writing down for myself what I really wanted helped ground me toward a goal. Afterward, I wrote down five short-term aspirations that will help me toward that goal. After writing those short-term aspirations, I came up with daily habits that were aligned with those aspirations. I stuck to them like a ritual, every day. It helped me to prioritize behavior that was aligned to my dreams and kept me away from behavior and thoughts that were distracting. All this ultimately led me to the execution of one of my scariest dreams, to apply to a graduate training program in another country. And here I am fulfilling my teenage fantasies.

As I’ve mentioned, there seems to be no “destination.” Once I arrived at Juilliard, a whole new set of journeys and dreams as well as challenges and fears welcomed me. Now, in my fourth year of training, I seem to be working on a whole new set of skill sets different from those that I faced in the first three years of my training. At 29 years old, I’m slowly letting go of an ideal “island” or destination—some people would call it Happy Ever After. I am slowly accepting that it is the basic principle of life to be ongoing and to see that the most important part of the journey is what is happening at the present.

Regina de Vera
Group 48
Quezon City, Philippines