How to Reclaim your Life and Set Goals you are Actually Motivated to Achieve

TOO MUCH PRESSURE

When we set goals for ourselves, we do so because we believe in them and desire the thing we’ve set as a goal. Maybe we’ve set a goal to accomplish a set of tasks by the end of the day or week. These tasks may pertain to putting away holiday decorations or meal prepping for the week. We feel the goals are realistic and yet, we cannot achieve them and certainly not in the time frame we’ve set. Then we sit stumped wondering why we cannot accomplish the simplest of tasks let alone the really big goals we would like to achieve like financial freedom. I’ll tell you a secret. The reason that we struggle with simple goals is because we have a belief that we SHOULD do the tasks we’ve set as goals, but we really have zero desire to do them. We are just fine with our holiday decorations. In fact, there’s something cozy about our fireplace all aglow. And it’s far easier to grab drive thru for lunch than to spend hours in our kitchen meal prepping. The problem is that we are trying to live a life of someone else and putting all this pressure on ourselves to be this person. Step one in reclaiming your life and setting goals you actually feel motivated to achieve is to recognize the pressure and then to let go of those goals and instead discover one goal that you truly want to achieve, set that goal and focus on achieving it. 

FEAR

Fear is the silent killer. So many of us are drowning in fear without even realizing it. Fear disguises itself as worry, nerves, anxiety, anxiousness, pacing, fidgeting, nervous energy, avoidance, impulse shopping, survival shopping, obsessive cleaning and organizing, etc. We likely spend half of all of our available time and energy immersed in some kind of fear-induced behavior without even realizing it. Maybe we vent for hours to a friend about our stress. Maybe we scroll on our phone for 4 hours at a time. Maybe we go on a shopping trip for essential groceries and return with three bags of miscellaneous items we have no real use for? Whatever it is, when we pause and take on the role of watcher of ourselves, we can begin to see these behaviors in ourselves and quickly realize that the behaviors are rooted in fear. It is fear that is keeping us from the life we desire more than anything else. Our behaviors are the effect of our fear, but fear itself is the cause. Step two in reclaiming your life and setting goals you actually feel motivated to achieve is making a list of everything that you are afraid of and then making a conscious effort to face one fear every week. If we commit to this goal, we will face 52 fears by the end of the year! 

THINK FOR YOURSELF

The only goals worth achieving are the goals that we ourselves actually care about! Some people truly do care about nutrition and exercise. They value a fit, lean body and magazine worthy appearance, but some of us, at this stage in our lives, are more interested in a peaceful house or financial security. While it is true that we can live a life of having it all–health, wealth and happiness–we cannot get everything in one clean sweep. It’s a process and we must decide for ourselves the GPS path we will take–no highways, tolls, no tolls, fastest route, etc. Sometimes the scenic route is worth it because we experience less stress while other times, a direct, fastest route is a necessity to reach our destination. Only we know what is best for us which means only we can decide the best path to take and the right goals to set first. How we determine what is best for us is by tuning into ourselves and asking ourselves what we need first. Maybe we need to gain emotional stability first? Maybe we need to generate cash flow first? Maybe we need to create order in our lives first? Whatever it is, know that it is best for you and once you set that goal, watch how much easier it is for you to achieve that goal because it matters to YOU!

THE HURDLES of OTHER PEOPLE

Many personal development teachers fail to account for the influence of others. And when speaking of influence, the finger pointing is usually at us because we are “allowing” others to influence us. The truth is our lives are like a big yarn ball. Have you ever tried to find the end of a yarn ball string when the end piece is pushed into the ball? There are hundreds of yarn strings all going in different directions and we need to pull each one until we find the one that will release the end. And even once we find the end, oftentimes the end piece is tangled with other strings so once we find the end, we then have to untangle the strings so that we have a freed yarn string we can actually use. This is what it is like in unconscious relationships. It’s not so easy to just set a goal and achieve it. There are many strings all tangled together and it’s a process to get to the starting line of a freed, untangled string (or goal) so that we can actually begin our project. That is why, understanding emotions and human behavior is SO essential to personal development and goal achievement. Only once we have consciousness over ourselves, our lives and the process of goal setting and achievement can we truly make real progress and manifest lasting results! Step three in reclaiming your life and setting goals you actually feel motivated to achieve is to find the end of your yarn ball’s string and then untangle it. Once we untangle ourselves from other people, we begin to understand self v. others and boundaries and self-care. We gain perspective on where we begin and end and where others begin and end. 

SELF-CARE is NOT SELFISH

When we begin to see goal setting and achieving as self-care, we begin to understand the importance of setting goals that are in alignment with our own personal goals and life desires. Yes, we all have people in our lives who are important to us and many of our goals will be in alignment with other people’s needs and goals. We may have a child who is very passionate about animals and aspires to become a veterinarian one day. One of our goals is saving for our child’s future so that we can send them to vet school and free them from the burden of financial aid debt. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this goal. But understanding that goals always need to be in alignment with our desires. If we genuinely desire to send our child to vet school, then the desire is in alignment with our life goals. Figuring out what is important to us is essential to self-care. If we are oblivious to what is important to us, it will be really difficult to know how to self-care. And this is why so many people end up following after other people’s goals and ideals. This is why so many of us are scrambling to get holiday decorations away and running to the gym even though we would rather be curled up on our couch reading a good book. There may come a time when running to the gym is important to you, but if you are only doing it to keep up with the Joneses, then it is a really good idea to about face and find a quiet place to sit with yourself and figure out what matters to you. Step four in reclaiming your life and setting goals you actually feel motivated to achieve is to begin the process of discovering yourself. Who are you? Where are you going? How are you going to get there? Goals and objectives are part of the third question–how are you going to get there?–so can you see why unlocking the answers to the first two questions is pretty important first? 

PROBLEM SOLVING USING CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS

Long ago, I began my own self-discovery journey. At the time I had no idea what self-discovery was. My goal at the time was to gain emotional stability. I had really bad depression and severe burnout. I had always been a self-improvement seeker and someone who read self-help books in high school! Looking back on my early years, I would have been labeled “the little psychologist” if I was in elementary school today. I always gravitated toward psychology and emotional intelligence subjects. Something about human nature and behavior fascinated me. Still, in spite of all of that passion and interest, I still found myself plagued with depression and burnout. As I dove deeper into emotionally rooted literature, I began to discover that what I was missing the most was self-love. I was very good at loving others, but terrible at self-caring. In order to become better at self-care, I first had to figure out what my needs were. This is what propelled my self-discovery journey–the journey to finding out who I was, where I was going and how I was going to get there. And so it was that every goal that I had set for myself became irrelevant. I had just earned my masters degree in education and simultaneously discovered that this achievement was not for me at all, but for my daughter so that we could have the same hours and she could have a “stay at home mom” that I believed she needed. It was for my parents who held a strong belief that the only success was in a college degree and a job that offered health insurance and a retirement plan. I was oblivious to things like financial freedom or time and energy. I had yet to realize that spending 60 hours a week at a full time job that paid me a set rate and then trying to pay off the debt of 4 years of college would leave me anywhere other than financially free. And so it was I awakened from the slumber of my life and radically accepted that I would now have to pay back a debt I would never use. It was at this moment that I understood the importance of self-discovery and self-care before big goal setting and achievement. Until we know ourselves, how can we know what goals are right for us? Critical thinking for me awakened after self-discovery. I suddenly understood all of Einstein’s theories. They were very basic and I found it eerie how I just saw them and understood them. What had happened was the part of me with its own intelligence had been awakened. That’s why Einstein said,”Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” and “you cannot solve a problem on the same level of consciousness that created it.” When we seek to solve a problem with the same skills and tools we’ve always had, we get the same results. We need new skills and tools to solve a problem. Step five in reclaiming your life and setting goals you actually feel motivated to achieve is to awaken your true intelligence and seek after your critical thinking skills. 

MEANWHILE

Meanwhile, you still have to live your life right? We cannot take a ten year hiatus from life to discover ourselves and go off grid while we do so. Life will continue to happen all around us. We’ll continue to have personal responsibilities and financial obligations. And likely even some goals we need to set and achieve in order to keep our ships afloat. I get it. This is where prioritization is so important. If we want to set out on a self-discovery or self-care journey so that we can figure out what goals we want to set separate from the herd, then we have to set aside some time to learn new things. To do that, we have to take some time to look at our lives and figure out what must stay on our plates and what can go. Maybe we watch our neighbor’s dogs every time they go away on vacation? Maybe we act as troop leader for our kid’s Girl Scouts? Maybe we make twenty dozen cookies every holiday to give to all our relatives? And maybe out of our priorities these three things are really far down on our priority list and we can let them go and use that time to learn new things? As we go through this process of sorting out what is essential and what we think is essential, but in fact is more social pressure, we can begin to gain insight into this process of figuring out what is important to us and what belongs on our goal list. What is essential to inform you of before you begin in reference to the yard ball string theory is that at first, choosing things to take off our plate should be things that will have the least push back from those around us. Maybe your child hates Girl Scouts and informing her that you will no longer be acting as troop leader will be a win for her and an easy way to take back some of your time and energy. But maybe, that choice leads to a heap of meltdowns that will only create more stress in your life. We must begin this journey with what is most obtainable at first. Save the harder emotional meandering for later in your journey once you’ve gained more emotional strength and understanding! Step six in reclaiming your life and setting goals you actually feel motivated to achieve is to identify everything that is currently on our plate and find 5 things we can take off our plate. Part of taking 5 things off may involve enlisting the help of someone else to take on one or more of those tasks. This activity is a great example of a goal you can set for yourself right now that is pretty easy to achieve relatively quickly! 

When I first began my journey, I used to have goals like making an extra $6k to take our annual trip to Disney world. At the time, that trip was my reward for selling my soul all year. It was the one thing I did for myself and I looked forward to it all year. Crazy to look back on that time and realize that I lived for one week of happiness. Ironically, Disney is not even a goal anymore. I haven’t been there in six years! And it’s not because I no longer like Disney. I still love it, it’s just become something that is not as important to me as other goals. I no longer need it to survive. As we discover ourselves and learn how to love ourselves, our priorities will change–our goals will change and those changed goals will eventually become a series of stepping stones on a journey toward our own life and financial freedom! 

I believe in you, Discoverlies! One foot in front of the other and I promise you that you will get where you want to go! 

Much Love!