These Goals Are For You
Has anyone ever asked you what you really want to do in life? Probably, but your answer may have been to say what you think you should do or what your parents told you to do, instead of what you really want to do. If you answered that question honestly it would be like no one knew who you were. The reality is they don’t know who you are if you don’t even know who you are.
I want you to accept the fact that everything you have in life is exactly what you want because you continue to choose it. This is not to blame you for events that happened in your life that got you here, they happened. We simply want to recognize you may have been living life based on those events vs. a life you created. Do not beat yourself up over it. Recognize you are not a victim of those events and you have a choice. You can remove all the expectations others have had of you and simply focus on what you expect from yourself.
Make sure your goals are something you really want and not just something you think will sound good or impress others. When you are pursuing your goals make sure they are to better yourself. When we try to prove ourselves to others through goals, we are looking for validation and acceptance. By setting your goals to get better at what you are doing, the only person you should be concerned with is yourself.
If you set a goal at work to be a better employee to impress the boss, inevitably you will hit a roadblock or fail at something and believe you have disappointed the boss. When we disappoint someone we were trying to impress it is embarrassing and discouraging vs. being a learning opportunity which comes with bettering ourselves.
If you want to be a better employee, master any skills that make you a better employee. If you want to be a better spouse, don’t just buy more flowers or do the dishes more; become a master at listening and communicating with your spouse. When we try to impress our spouses, we are usually choosing the things they don’t really care about.
You are doing the dishes and your wife just wants to have a foot rub, which she told you, but in your head you believe it will impress her to do the dishes. When you focus on what you have to learn and not what you have to prove, you will be a lot happier and achieve the success you are looking for.
If you are setting goals based on the comparison of yourself to others, it will kill your chances of success. Only compare yourself to yourself and strive to create a better you. Comparison is much different than mentorship. If you are comparing yourself to someone it is usually saying they have something that you don’t, and therefore you are not as good as them. Seeing someone as your mentor is recognizing they have created something you want, and you aspire to do what they have done without feelings of inadequacy.
The last point I need to make about why you are setting goals for you and only you is something psychologists call intrinsic motivation. Basically what it means is that our greatest motivation comes from the pursuit of our own desires, following our own interests and not the interests of others. We enjoy the journey and want to succeed at the goal because it is what we have chosen for ourselves based on what we want.
When you feel a goal is your goal because you chose it then you will relentlessly pursue it with passion and persistence. The way to discover your intrinsic motivation is to take note of what it is you love to do every day, and what you almost long for it when you know you can’t.
Intrinsic motivation is so powerful it can explain why you stopped doing activities years ago that you loved to do. Upon reflection, you may discover you used to have passion for an interest like reading or a specific sport. That passion may have eventually disappeared and you most likely cannot explain why. Take exercising for instance: As a kid you would run until it felt like your heart would explode and you loved it. You just did it because you loved to do it. Then you started to get older and exercising started to be something you had to do. We mentally lost the freedom to choose to do it or not do it based on how we felt. Once that internal motivation was replaced with the pressures of ‘have to’ and ‘should do,’ the passion ceased to exist.
Goals set by you will be the ones that create the greatest motivational momentum to achieve success.
“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who are alive.” - Howard Thurman
Take Action Request:
Identify any goals or passions you know you have held back on pursuing. What has been holding you back? What goals have you accomplished that you can identify as “others’” goals for you, and how did it feel when you succeeded? How did that feeling differ from the feeling you get when you accomplish goals you set for yourself?