Be Patient to yourself

We will set different goals for ourselves at different stages of our life. My Form 6 students, I think most of you have set study goals already, and wanna get good results in public exams so that you can be admitted to the university that you like. And when setting goals, it’s important to have it in the SMART way, that the goal you set should be SMART, S-M-A-R-T. Let’s see if you still remember the following:

S for “specific” , that you know clearly what you wanna achieve,

M for “measurable” , that there are indicators for whether the goals are literally achieved,

A for “attainable” , that the goals are really possible for you to achieve after putting effort,

R for “relevant” , that the goals are being actually meaningful to you, and

T for “time-based” , that the goals could be achieved in a certain time scale.

Apart from this “SMART goal setting”, let’s also proceed to “SMARTER goal setting”. Can you guess the meaning of the letters E and R in the word SMARTER?

E stands for “Evaluate” . You should evaluate at different stages that how you have done for achieving the goal you set before. R for “Refine” , that depending on the progress you made, and how you approached to your own goal successfully or unsuccessfully, you can improve and adjust your goal setting based on the experience you earned.

Many times, we are just not patient enough to ourselves, that once we face undesirable outcome, we may have negative feelings on ourselves and would stop trying anymore. Sometimes we haven’t spent enough time to listen to our hearts, haven’t examined our own thoughts and feelings.

Let’s try to be patient and give more time to ourselves: It’s not that the goal is impossible for you to achieve, but you just need to spend time to do some reflection, understand your own values and abilities, so that you can refine your goal and continue to proceed. Try to be patient and understand yourself better, instead of jumping to conclusions and judging yourself too quickly.

Love is patient. Now, let’s ask God to continue to guide us to love and be patient to ourselves, as well as to others.

Ms Wong S.M.
6 September 2022