Goals are like exercises for our souls!!

I've been writing a LDS non-fiction book about our bodies, and using our spirits to make changes that will help us grow. Here's a small snippet from that book that relates to writing, I thought I'd share it with you all:


Goals are exercises for our spirits. They cause our spirits to control our bodies and natural man tendencies, doing so causes our spirits to grow stronger and stronger. Imagine doing jumping jacks, how does your body feel? I’ll tell you what happens when I do jumping jacks, after just three of those things my lungs are burning. I start thinking of how to only do them half way because it’s just too hard. And let’s not even talk about the incontinence issue that arises when I’m jumping up and down after having four children.
How do jumping jacks relate to setting and reaching for goals? Setting and working towards goals are hard. They require the body and the spirit to work together. After awhile, you begin wondering how you can change your goal or work half way to achieve it. When you first begin a goal, your spirit sets it, then your body must perform the actions to achieve the goal. Our bodies sometimes reside in a permanent rebellious teenage state where complaints come immediately. Our minds begin telling our spirits that we can’t do it, we’re too weak, too young, too old, the excuses begin piling up. Our spirits that came from our Father in Heaven know these things aren’t true, but sometimes buckle under the pressure. When this happens, our bodies are training our spirits and not the other way around. Only then do we truly fail.
President Spencer W. Kimball at the Regional Representatives Seminar of April 3, 1975, said, “I believe in goals, but I believe that the individual should set his own. Goals should always be made to a point that will make us reach and strain. Success should not necessarily be gauged by always reaching the goal set, but by progress and attainment.”
Just like physical exercise, our success should not be gauged by the weight we lost but by the healthiness of our bodies. We must remember that setting goals are how we keep our spirits healthy. The Faith In God program starts us off learning to set goals and achieving them, then we go to the Young Women’s program that has even more ambitious goals to conquer. After we go to Relief Society it doesn’t mean we can stop being goal oriented, it only means that we should know how to set and work towards the goals that are right for us. We need goals that make us reach and strain as Pres. Kimball said.
We need to glory in working towards a goal and not just achieving them. All too often we don’t consider a goal successful unless we achieve it. This is not true. We must recognize our growth along the way and praise our spirits and our Heavenly Father for our progress. This will keep us energized to continue to the end. The success of some goals are out of our control, like my goal of publishing a book someday. All I can do is write the best book I can and hope that publishers are looking for what I wrote. Does this mean if I’m not successful that I have failed? No, it means I have learned so much about the craft of writing, it means I trained my body to sit for hours in front of a computer, it means I trained my spirit to listen to the promptings of the Lord as I wrote, it means my spirit exercised control over my body. How could we ever view these things as a failure?
“True happiness is not made in getting something. True happiness is becoming something. This can be done by being committed to lofty goals. We cannot become something without commitment.” (Elder Marvin J. Ashton, “The Word is Commitment” Ensign, Nov. 1983)