How Do We Achieve Everything We Want?

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

On the eve of the New Year, it is customary to make wishes and set new goals for yourself. We all do this - someone more consciously in the form of a specific, painted point by point, plan, and someone only in the form of a vague desire, not quite a clear dream.

And unfortunately, we all are faced with the fact that many of our goals and desires are not achieved or come true.

In this article, I would like to share my ideas and experience - why this is happening and what to do to make your plans and desires come true.

In addition to the well-known and often discussed facts that the goal should be formulated positively, broken down into several subgoals and written down as clearly and in detail as possible, I would like to draw your attention to a few more important points.

False "alien" goals

And this, I believe, is the main, most important reason why the goals are not being achieved. Unfortunately, we often do not even realize that the goals we set for ourselves are not real, not native, imposed on us from the outside - by society, mass culture, by our parents. Sometimes they "eat" into us so much that we are in no way able to understand that in fact we do not really want to. We are fighting hard, making incredible efforts to implement some plan, and our subconscious, our true personality sabotages these attempts. And then we sincerely wonder, "Why doesn't it work?"

For example, a very common female goal to lose weight and squeeze into the "ideal" parameters invented by someone and a firm conviction that success in a relationship depends on weight and waist size, although the opposite is proven over and over again. And men definitely don't pick girls with a centimeter. And very often, girls who torment themselves with diets and calorie counting are actually in a relationship, they have families and children - and men love them for who they are - their happiness does not exactly depend on the numbers in centimeters. And, then, the question arises - does she really need to lose weight? This is a clear example of the false goal promoted by popular culture. This also includes purchases of modern gadgets, clothes of fashion brands, a mandatory vacation in Egypt … Such false goals are easy enough to detect on your own, if you really listen to yourself and be honest with yourself.

But there is another category of "alien" goals, which are much more difficult to detect - these are goals instilled in us from childhood, as rules they are global, cover our whole life and seem natural to us, taken for granted … And when we do not achieve them, our disappointment is boundless … They can also be called a "life scenario". These are ideas about how to live life in general. For example: a woman must get married and have children under 30; a man should earn more than a woman and be the main breadwinner; the most important thing in life is family / career / children / righteousness or anything else - everyone is different. And it's good if your true desires coincide with the desires of your parents about you, but this is not always the case. A woman may well feel good without a family and not strive to have children. Some man is quite ready to give the primacy in making money to his wife, and he himself is perfectly realized, raising children and doing wine at home. But they may not admit this to themselves and not even be aware of their true desires, but set opposite goals - to get married and have children in the first case or make a career in the second. And it is natural not to achieve these goals or experience a lot of difficulties in achieving them and at the same time be angry with yourself, with the circumstances, feel guilty and deeply disappointed. Because in fact - you want something completely different.

Of course, it's not easy to figure out a life scenario yourself, and the help of a specialist - a psychotherapist - will help a lot.

If you have dropped false goals and are confident in what you want, but something still goes wrong, you need to pay attention to other reasons.

We set too many or too few goals

In both cases, there are risks that the goals will not be achieved. If there are too many of them, we get lost, we do not know what to undertake and where to direct our energy, we cannot determine the priorities, we cannot keep all the plans in our head and, as a result, we miss suitable opportunities for their implementation.

If there are very few goals, or even only one, it becomes a super goal for us, it is with its achievement that we begin to associate our happiness and evaluate ourselves depending on how far we have made in achieving it. It is a well-known fact that something that is overvalued and oversensitive causes a lot of anxiety, and if there is a lot of anxiety - we are more prone to make mistakes - we get a vicious circle. If this overarching goal is not achieved, this is a serious reason for worsening mood or even depression.

How many goals are optimal? There is hardly a definite answer - for someone 2-3, for someone 5-7. It seems to me that there should be 2-4 main goals, and the rest, if any, should be related to the main ones.

Targets not prioritized

This point follows from the previous one. If there are several goals, it is useful to rank them according to their importance. Then, in difficult situations, when it is impossible to implement all the goals or they begin to compete with each other, it is easier to make a choice - where to put your efforts now.

Hard or very blurry time frames

We are not gods, not everything in this life depends on us. Sometimes we cannot achieve what we want within the time frame that we have planned and we need to be able to wait, maybe at some point to postpone something and return to this later. And not in any way reproach yourself for this! But too vague terms or their absence will also not help in achieving the goal. Do you know why human life is finite? Because otherwise there would be no meaning, fullness and goals in it - everything could be endlessly postponed for later. If your goal has no deadline, you will always be tempted not to do something now, but to do it later.

Lack of flexibility in setting and implementing goals

Flexibility must be present in everything - we must always be ready to change if circumstances change. Sometimes you need to adjust the plan to achieve your goal, if we see that it will help us. It happens that the goal itself needs to be corrected - if necessary.

And it so happens that in general you have to abandon the goal and change it for another, if circumstances change very abruptly or we ourselves change. This is where flexibility is probably best manifested. Now we live in such a changeable world that it may suddenly happen that it becomes simply impossible to achieve something previously planned (Remember the collapse of the Soviet Union, when the rules of life changed so drastically that many have not yet settled in the new world, or the beginning war, when a border was formed in the middle of Ukraine, etc.) and then it is important to be able to give up something, not to panic, but to think about what will be useful and important in the new conditions.

And it happens that it is not the circumstances that change, but ourselves, and then we naturally abandon the previous goals and set new ones.

And for a snack, one more piece of advice that my clients really like

You have already done everything - you have chosen the goals, the plans have been drawn up, the tasks have been outlined…. And all the same, something doesn’t work, it’s impossible to get down to business, all the time something distracts … It also happens. Just pick the easiest of your tasks - and start there.

Good luck to everyone in achieving what you want!