Throughout my whole life goals have been a very important part of how I operate. Without goal setting it is very hard to create a path to success. While they can be simple and not overly complex, they are an important part of growing. Setting goals and not achieving them provides you with new information to realign and reset your goals to achievable levels. Setting goals and achieving them helps build the self confidence you need to create even stronger goals that help guide you through life.

Goals are also an important part of my work and definitely a part of the Bring Smiles to Seniors Program. Our first year in operation we delivered 7,719 cards. In 2017 that number grew to 18,810. In 2018 we set a goal to break 20,000 and here at the end of May we are over 14,000. In our logo the tag line is “one smile, one card at a time”. While we have a big number to hit, we do it one card at a time and thereby celebrating our successes along the way to go bigger and better than we ever have before. Liane, who runs our special mailing program, always says that goals are made to be broken. It is that kind of attitude and will power that all our volunteers possess that drive us to exceed even our own expectations.

In line with goal setting, we are announcing a new campaign today called “Smiling 50”. During the course of this program we have provided cards to senior communities in 15 different states and continue to deliver to 11 continuously. Our goal now is to deliver to at least one senior community in all 50 states. We kicked the campaign off yesterday with cards sent to non-profit senior communities in Alabama and Alaska. We will continue through the alphabet until we get to Wyoming. Our success depends on a lot. We need to receive enough cards to be able to meet our current delivery obligations and this expansion. We need enough connections to get the cards decorated so they can be prepped for delivery. Finally, we need to continue to collect the rare donations that we receive to cover our postage costs, which are the main expense in our program. Because we don’t set goals we can’t achieve, we believe all of this is possible, but also the reason I am not setting a time frame for it to happen. However, knowing the power of what we do, I suspect this will happen much sooner than we think and we will celebrate success one state at a time. We will create a section on our webpage at bringsmilestoseniors.com to track our progress.

As you look at your own lives, examine the things that you want to accomplish. Pick just one thing, set an achievable goal and avoid setting yourself up for failure before you even begin. When you have mastered that goal, or even exceeded it, move on to the next one. Most importantly, celebrate your successes along the way. Celebrating is an important ingredient to building the self confidence you need to create future success. We will be rooting for you and look forward to hearing about your endeavors.

Have a great weekend, see you on Monday and remember to be the reason someone smiles today.

Ron