In life, you might have all sorts of different goals ranging from those focused on your career, to personal aspirations about the kind of life you want to live, with regards to things like days spent on the beach, and your intimate relationships with others.
Ultimately, though, while there are many different practical steps that exist that might help you to pursue various goals of yours, ranging from things like services that allow you to effectively compare credit options when planning big expenses, to task management apps that can help to make you more productive and efficient on a daily basis, many people struggle with goal setting because they find it a stressful experience in and of itself.
Here are a few tips for making goal setting a more motivational and positive experience in your life.
Use your goals more as waypoints than as specific future targets you are yearning for
One of the major issues that can arise with goal setting, is that when you set yourself highly specific and focused goals for things that you are yearning for at some point in the future, you can end up becoming totally fixated on those goals, and can end up not feeling at all satisfied in the present moment.
When this situation occurs, you can easily end up spending most of your time feeling frustrated and like a failure, until such a point as you’ve managed to achieve your goal. But then, you may find that actually achieving your goal feels underwhelming.
By using your goals more as waypoints that can help to give you a clear sense of the direction you want to head in, rather than as clear future targets, you can benefit from goal setting without finding the process quite as stressful.
Set goals where the process itself is its own reward
Ideally, the goals you set for yourself will help to initiate a process that makes your life more positive and uplifting on an everyday basis.
In order to achieve this, however, you should aim to set goals where the process of pursuing those goals is, itself, its own reward.
If you have a particular fitness goal, for example, then you should make sure that the steps that you take each day – in the form of your daily fitness practices and habits – are things that you really enjoy.
In this way, the goal process can be highly life affirming.
Set goals where there is lots of positive incremental achievement along the way
In order to stay motivated to follow a goal, and to enjoy the process as a whole, it’s very important to pick goals where there is lots of positive incremental achievement along the way, to enjoy.
For this reason, make sure that any big goal that you set for yourself contains plenty of opportunities for “small victories” so that you can keep having your motivation renewed as you progress.
If, for example, you had a goal of running a marathon, then you should have certain incremental goals leading up to that point – such as successfully running a 5K race. If your only sense of achievement comes from “ticking off” the main goal itself, you’re not likely to stay motivated or positive over the long-term.
