How Forgiving Your Failures Can Help You Reach Your Goals Faster
How to avoid your own pity party.
I’ve called myself an over-achiever…and maybe sometimes that’s true. I set really high standards for myself. I desire to be an expert on the topics I’m interested in. In the past year, I have become more interested in my personal tendencies and habits, and have worked to become an expert of my own life.
Lately, I’ve discovered that I’m not really an over-achiever, I’m more of an over-goaler.
I am a personal growth junkie, so I have a habit of setting a ton of goals all at once and getting really excited about them. Inevitably, it doesn’t take too long before I get wore down from changing too many things at the same time and end up I giving up (a.k.a. fail).
Then, I get really down on myself. I feel like a loser and wallow in self-pity for a little while. (My husband is not a fan of this phase…)
Eventually, I get tired of attending the pity party. I start thinking about my goals, set a bunch of them again, and start all over.
This cycle has perpetuated in my life over and over again. In fact, I just did it again recently. At the beginning of October, I set a bunch of goals, worked really hard for a while, and then became exhausted.
But this time, I broke the typical cycle. I’ve decided to skip the part where I feel terrible about myself.
So, as I started feeling the exhaustion set in, I started dropping the goals that were making me feel the most tired and stressed out. I didn’t drop everything (which I would’ve done previously), but instead modified them to fit my current circumstances better.
The most important thing I’ve done in this process is to forgive myself. Forgive my so-called failures, because I now understand they aren’t really failures. They are simple adjustments, until I’m ready to try again.
The goals I dropped right now are important to me, and I will come back to them, but I need to create habits with some smaller ones first. I need to work on my small victories and focus on one step at a time. Without the pity party, I am able to bounce back much faster to keep working on my growth and learning.
If this story resonates with you, I suggest you take these same steps. Really think about what goals are most important- and prioritize as necessary.
Realize that you can’t take on everything at once, but small steps will get you to where you want to be over time.
Forgive your failures and you will be much more likely to find the energy to keep going when you may have given up in the past.
Originally published at https://www.jillvh.com on December 12, 2019.
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