Almost every personal development and self-improvement blogger, writer, and coach out there will tell you the same thing:

If you want to be successful at reinventing your world, your life, yourself - you must, must, must tackle only one goal at a time.

This - pardon me, goddesses - seems like crap to me. Although I’ll entertain the possibility that it’s just my inner Type A perfectionist goddess talking.

Here’s my reasoning: Approaching a goal list as a to-do list, or a task list, means one thing at least — it means you have limited yourself, right off the bat. Thinking of your reinvention plan as a task list means taking a mortal’s approach. Since we’re all goddesses here, we can dispense with the self-limiting talk, and embrace the truth, which is quite simply this: successful reinvention is nothing more than a series of right decisions at the right time.

Since none of us, no matter how divine we might be, can operate outside the laws of time and physics (at least not yet, though I refuse to discount the notion — think of what we could save on airfare alone), we can only live each moment as it comes - not all at once. Because we can only live one moment at a time, we can only make one decision at a time. Ergo - it doesn’t matter how many different kinds of decisions you need to make. You can only make one at a time.

Does that process with you? If I’m right, then there’s no reason you can’t decide to lose weight, improve your career, heat up your sex life, and be a better parent at the same point in your life. Because in each moment, you can only make one decision - do I eat the cookie or do I go exercise? Do I yell at my kid or keep my temper? Do I take on this project or do I skip out of here at 5 on the dot? - it doesn’t matter what the next moment’s decision will be. One thing at a time - only one thing at a time - doesn’t mean one thing at this time in your life.

All that’s true. The problem comes when you’re juggling more than one reinvention project and one of those projects conflicts with another. Say, you want to be more present with your kid. But you also want to lose weight. And kid wants to go out for ice cream. (A simplistic example, to be sure! Bear with me here.) What do you do, hot shot?

A. Decide to go out for ice cream. The kid’s more important.

B. Decide not to go out for ice cream. Without your health, you’re no good to the kid.

C. …?

Can you identify a third option? Go on - give it some thought. I’ll wait. …

It doesn’t matter what you thought of - but if you thought of a third option, any third option, then you get it, for real. One project may appear to conflict with another, but if we give it some thought - if, in short, we use our goddess-powers of creativity - we can usually come up with lots of ideas about how to advance both causes. (Go out for ice cream but suggest frozen yogurt instead? Take the kid to a park after the ice cream shop to work off some calories shooting hoops? The possibilities are endless.)

Dean Ornish, the doc/author who created and advocated for a radically different lifestyle approach to heal and head off heart disease, agrees, by the way. His plan represented massive change in the way most US citizens eat, exercise (or don’t), and live. I recall reading in one of his first books a passage that echoed what I’m talking about. Paraphrased, highly:

If this is overwhelming to you, and you’re tempted to tackle one small change then another, consider a different approach. Sometimes, mastering many small changes sequentially is actually more difficult than making a clean sweep. Sometimes, wholesale change is actually easier.

So I’m jamming my planner full. However, I want to make sure that they meet what I’ll call Four Goddess Guidelines for determining when a project is worthy of my divine attention and effort:

1. The project’s outcome can be clearly defined and somewhat qualitatively measured. In short, I’ll know when I’ve arrived at the endgame, and what the final score is.
2. The project gets my heart racing a little; it excites me to think about it. It’s something I feel passionately about.
3. It feels right to me. (In other words: trust your intuition.)
4. Finally, it’s a “want to” as opposed to a “should do” (note: not necessarily a must-do, ’cause sometimes, a goddess has to do what a goddess has to do.)

So, if you, like me, have about a gazillion improvements you want to make in your life, and you don’t want to wait, why should you have to? Give it a try. Maybe you can make those right decisions, one at a time, in sequence, and learn how to make it look effortless. Maybe we both can.

What are my gazillion improvements? Ah … that’s for another post.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I will start strong and flame out spectacularly. I dunno. I guess we’ll all find out together!