Goals are all about giving your life a direction

It’s that time of the year when you will be high on the new year’s goals and lessons you learned in 2020. You might have a lot of ambitions and resolutions of what you want to achieve this year. If you are in a corporate job, you will have your year-end goal assessments on the line. If you are a student, you might want to increase the number of study hours or score higher marks this year. If you are a homemaker, you might want to give one more shot on those unfulfilled dreams you have been pursuing very long. Irrespective of our work’s nature, we all want to accomplish more than what we haven’t been able to achieve in the past.

While a whole lot of us want to achieve more than what we have done in the past, only a few of us take the process of determining what we want to achieve (i.e., our goals) diligently. And still, a few of us have a plan of how we want to achieve our goals. Mostly we are influenced by somebody else’s goals and missions. Setting up goals and creating a plan of achieving them require effort and persistence, which we all know, but unfortunately, we are not good at it.

The question is, why we are not good at it. Not that we don’t want to or we don’t realize the importance of it. Well, many don’t believe in the goal-setting process itself. And many do this for the sake of doing it without even realizing that they are jeopardizing their career. I have seen a lot many people in my company being casual about setting their year-long goals. Honestly, it’s not just about a career; it’s about the entire life. Let me tell you why.

Imagine you have 100 USD in your wallet, and there are two ways you can spend that money. First, give a penalty to the traffic police, and second by spending 100 USD on drinks with your friends. Which spend you will be pleased with, paying the fine or paying for the drinks? Given a choice, no one wants to pay their hard-earned money as a fine. You ensure that you spend your money to maximize the pleasure it can buy for you.

The same is true for our time because our lives are just a combination of a limited amount of time and energy. The way you are clear about what you want your money to buy, the same should be true to what and how you want your time and energy to be spent. They both should work for you without being influenced by any external factors.

Creating a goal is not enough. You need to ensure that those goals are about you. Not about your company, not about your children, not about your spouse, not about your society or anything else. Goals which are not aligned to enhance our life are misdirected. We find it challenging to achieve them, and we burn ourselves out in the process.

This doesn’t mean you need to be oblivious of your company, spouse, children, etc. Of course, all of them do matter to you because they are a part of your ecosystem. We can’t survive without them, and to remain a part of this ecosystem, you need to do your bit through our contribution. All I am saying is your goals can’t exclude you and be just about everything else.

Why do we find setting up goals difficult?

Why are we so careless when it comes to investing our time o life? One of the reasons can be attributed to Emotional Labor. Emotional labor is the process of managing feelings and expressions to fulfill the emotional requirement of a job. We find ourselves trapped in a complex web of emotions like enthusiasm, boredom, excitement, despondency, etc. Setting goals require processing data, which is facilitated by memory and imagination. This complicates the task because it’s too easy to get swayed by the vacillation happening between two extreme opposite emotions — optimism & pessimism, hopefulness & hopelessness, and many others. You attempt to find a balance, and this quest for balance requires a lot of effort, which is tiring. It’s this management of emotions or feelings which is debilitating, and you tend to avoid this effort.

The second reason can be attributed to the lack of clarity, or I should say little clarity. Because you are swinging between the extreme opposite emotions, there is a lack of clarity. The clarity to figure out, what truly matters to you, what is your potential, whether you are adding value to your larger ecosystem, whether you are just a cog in the wheel fulfilling someone else’s desire, and many more. Trust me, you get bogged down, and between fight and flight, flight becomes the easiest option to choose.

And last is self-doubt. You doubt whether you will be able to stick to what you have decided for long. Accept it; you are scared of handling uncertainties that could be related to the work, the world you are living in, your relationships, even your emotional swings. It’s hard to handle all the uncertainties and easy to get disappointed with them.

The consequence of all the above reasons is you stop believing in Goals, and your ability to give direction to your life is crippled. That’s s the reason people say it’s not the destination that matters, but the small steps in the direction towards your destination which matters. But inevitably, we all want to reach the destination we want in the end.

Is making Goals so important?

Now that we have seen how difficult creating a goal is let’s see if it’s really important. Making a goal is not something that you do once in a while. You do it all the time. When you leave for the office from home, your goal is to reach the office on time. Similarly, you may have other goals of getting a promotion, going on vacation, making that expensive purchase, etc. So making a goal is neither a once in a while phenomenon nor you are inadept in this.

However, when it comes to creating goals, which is for you to give a direction to your life, and which is timebound, we find it difficult. As long as goals are related to your survival, you do it effortlessly. But human life is not just about survival. It’s more than that. This quest to find and become something more than we are right now can be more efficient if we have a fixed goal.

A goal is just about determining whether we are heading in a certain direction and making it a choice. Because if you don’t make a choice, someone else will. If you don’t make goals for yourself, you will become a part of someone else’s goal. Your time and effort will be consumed by someone else to fulfill their own goals.

How to stick to your goals?

1. Make goals that are about YOU: Quite often, we make goals that are influenced by the time and society we are living in. While we can’t get away from the influences, we must understand influences change with society and time. Such goals are never indeed about us. If you have been living in a street of bikers and many have Harley Davidson, then in all possibilities, your goals will also be about buying a Harley. You change the society where people mostly have BMW, and now you want a BMW. Essentially such goals are never truly about us. Goals that take us to the next level in our lives are enhancing our skills, strengthening relationships, influencing family and society, signing up for certifications, improving qualification, etc., are few examples of our enrichment. We need to be conscious of who we are making the goals for and whether they are aligned to what we want to become in life
2. Create a system to breathe your goals all the time: Life is full of distractions. We are inundated with lots of tasks, notifications, responsibilities, media, information, etc. It’s hard to remember things that are very important to us as our brains can hold only four tasks at any point in time. Therefore it’s important to create a system that constantly reminds you about your goals, puts you back on track regularly, and helps you by showing you the progress you have made. What are the constituents of this system? In this mobile application age, you have a lot of options. Some of the best applications which I would suggest are:
   Trello — This is my brain for scheduling my day, planning my goals, and keeping track of the milestones. I recommend this template as a starting point.
   To-Do Applications — I rely on Microsoft ToDo, ToDOist, and Reminders from Apple to track my daily and most important tasks. While Trello is great at handling To-Dos, I want to keep separate lists on different applications to reduce the clutter.
   Journalling Applications: Evernote, DayOne, and Microsoft OneNote. Journalling is a habit that you must develop. Your journals are the place where you empty your mind and give yourself the necessary feedback and suggestions. My personal choice is DayOne because of the features of this application. It does not just help you to develop the journaling practice. It also helps automate many tasks by syncing to the calendar, GPS, Social Media sites like Instagram, etc. These features come in handy when you want to rewind your life and want to glance at why you set a goal and the thought process behind setting the goal.
3. Raise the stakes — All you lose is your trust in yourself. Fear is a big motivator. Fear is not a bad thing at all. Until the time there is no fear, we tend to become a little precarious in life. But that fear shouldn’t breed demotivation in us. When we fail to achieve our goals, there could be many implications, which we may deal with easily. But there is one thing which causes unrepairable damage to us- that is — trust in ourselves. Losing self-trust is the biggest stake we have when we fail to achieve the goals we have set. At the same time, we need to be rational enough to evaluate why we failed properly. We don’t need to be a success; we need to ensure that we understand every goal is a promise we make to ourselves. And that promise the biggest stake in addition to everything else that we fail to achieve when we don’t achieve a goal.
4. Imagine the end in mind: Over time, not just we lose the vision of our goal, but also the incentives associated with it. We all make goals with good intentions in mind and a state of where we want to be. It’s just that we lose sight of that state. One this is for sure, everything is created twice. First, in our mind, and then it manifests itself in reality. While reality may take time to become true, imagining ourselves, achieving our goals is completely up to us. Removing our self-doubts and having faith increases the possibility of getting what we want in our lives, and you will one day end up achieving your goal.

One of your awesome work’s essential ingredients is to have all your energies focused in one direction. Having goals do just that for you. It takes away all kinds of distractions and gives you direction. Time is scarce and what we make out of it is all that matters to live a wonderful life. So instead of becoming a means of someone else’s goal, becoming a wandering directionless soul, take the small steps in building your own goals and live your life the way you want to live.

One of the goals that I have set up for myself is to write 52 editions of this newsletter this year. I would like to know if you find goal-setting a difficult process. Do you think setting up goals is important? Or you think it is an exercise that doesn’t make any sense?