A Life Full of Glitter by Anna O'Brien

Author:Anna O'Brien [O’Brien, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781633538153
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2018-08-07T01:55:46+00:00

How to Set Goals

I am going to start this section saying something totally crazy, but probably true. You have too many goals.

I bet you have goals you want to achieve at work. There’s probably some goals you have for your future. Maybe you have some goals for your love life. Oh, I bet you also have goals for personal development. You might have goals for your neighborhood. Goals for your dog. Goals on goals on goals. In fact, I am going to guess that the biggest thing getting in the way of you achieving any of these goals is that you simply have too many of them. Your goals are getting in the way of you achieving your goals. It sounds ridiculous, but it’s the truth.

Let’s say you’re in your car driving down a highway. On a fifteen-minute trip you’ll probably pass fifteen to fifty advertisements, depending on where you live. How many of them can you remember? One, maybe two—if any at all. This is how our brain reacts when we create too many goals. It begins to just ignore them altogether. Your mind simply can’t focus on one thing long enough to progress when it has eighty-five other things pulling at your focus on a daily basis. You might achieve something, but just which something is kind of left to chance. Worse, you might achieve nothing—other than detailing a lovely list of goals you’ll never achieve.

How many times have we heard phrases like this: “I was supposed to go to the gym today—I’m trying to go every other day, but it’s okay because I spent more time with Alex, which was another one of my goals.” Or: “I was totally supposed to work on that paper, but I was really focused on having a conversation with Sarah and I’m really trying to value my friendships more. So, even though I totally blew off that important paper, it’s ok.” Lots of goals also mean lots of reason to celebrate, and plenty of reasons sweep the things we aren’t progressing on under the table. We allow ourselves to take one step backward on one goal, in order to celebrate a small step forward on another. In this way, we stay stagnant because we never actually devote enough time to make real change in our life and just sort of ping-pong backward and forward based on what we choose to do daily. Candidly, with this behavior you’re not setting goals at all, you’re just giving yourself reason to feel better about the choices you make.

Like so many things in life, when it comes to setting real, achievable goals, less is more. Your brain is going to do everything it can to speed up processing and simplifying tasks, so it’s in your best interest to keep it simple. Reduce your goals to concentrate on specific areas of focus, and then actually give yourself the mental capacity to achieve them. As a bonus, by limiting your goals to a meaningful few, you also remove much of the unnecessary guilt that comes from rampant unfilled goal-collecting.

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