Travelling around the country, and the world, a lot of people tell me that they struggle to reach their goals. Here are my quick tips to help you achieve more in less time.
1. Don’t set goals to prove your self worth to others
Most people tell me that their goals are their own until I start digging deeper as to why their goals are important to them. In most cases it turns out that people set goals in order to improve their self worth to others or to prove a point that they are successful, smart, good enough or have their lives together. This is a sure fire way to fail in life and need consistent motivation to keep pushing forward with your goals.
When a person sets goals that aren’t true to them based on their life purpose, mission and unique set of values then they will need consistent motivation in order to keep taking action. This will then be followed by self-sabotage, emotional depressions, frustrations, guilt and more. Once the pain becomes unbearable then stress builds until there is enough energy, anger, frustration, guilt, resentment etc to force a person into action. This can also be in the form of erratically rushing around with feelings of anxiety as a person tries to make up for lost time from their sabotaging patterns. It can also be in the hope that the faster they can achieve what they want, then the sooner they can be free from the trap they have created in their own mind by trying to please others at the expense of who they truly are.
2. Goals aren’t a celebration of giving up on what is most important in life.
Many people set goals then enter the depths of hell, suffering and struggling for weeks, months and even years to achieve a specific goal in the hope that one day they will eventually feel great about what they have achieved. This is a f#%king trap. If some a^$e hole tells you that you need to set goals and struggle in misery to achieve them, then offer them a kind throat punch and leave. Your goals are just a check in point to remind you that you are on track in life and that you are living your unique values, life purpose and mission. They are a reward for being on track, not a reward for punishing yourself.
A person will only feel they are giving something up or losing something if they can’t see how doing what they are doing is helping them live their values, mission and purpose in life.
3. Achieving goals won’t make you feel better about yourself if you don’t already feel good about yourself.
Goals can help to build self-belief and self-worth by backing yourself to take on challenges and stretch yourself but they can also destroy self-belief and self-worth if you are using goals as the only way to feel good about yourself. After years of working with body builders, sports models, athletes and high achievers I quickly discovered that many struggled mentally and emotionally on a day-to-day basis with their self-worth. Most of the time they hated themselves but at the same time were highly goal driven. Achieving goals gave them a quick hit of self-worth only when others told them how great they had done. This was short lived and often led the achiever to plunge into the deep darkness of self-hate once again as they quickly forgot about their recent achievement as external praise slowly faded along with their self-worth. This led the achiever to once again set a new goal in the hope that a greater achievement will make them feel good about themselves once again.
Summary
People who are truly fulfilled in life and have self belief, self-worth and self love along with a purpose and mission, while living their values daily, know that goals are a just a way of creating more of what they already have on the inside and that no achievement or failure can take that away. This is the reason why some of the greatest achievers in history keep achieving usually when others may have given up or when others retire. It’s because they love what they do each day and have an intrinsic sense of fulfillment already. They are not searching for something else outside of them to feel good, happy or worthy in life.
