image courtsy of : www. postfallsonthego.com/

image courtsy of : www.
postfallsonthego.com/

Breaking Up Our Goals:

When we set out to change our lives, we set large and impressive goals for ourselves, goals that will change the way we live our lives. This is exactly what we should be doing, but that can be rather daunting at times. For me, I find that there are many times along the road to my goals that it feels like I have made no progress, like I am not actually traveling the road at all. It even feels like I might be on the wrong road altogether as the results I want are not showing themselves. This is a very common thing to happen and something that we need address within ourselves so that we can keep reaching for those big goals. There are two skills that I develop to deal with this situation.

The first skill is to take the big and scary goal that I have and chop it up into little goals that need to be completed on the way to the big goals. These are goals that, when they are all done, will add up to the big and scary goal that I have, but they are smaller and more manageable so that I don’t get discouraged. The key here is to make the small goals something that either can be complete in relatively short order that we know will contribute to the larger goal, or something that can be tracked easily enough that I can see the progress on it. Through the progress I can see on the little goals that I create, I can see that I am progressing along my path, and since that little goal is an integral part of the large and scary goal, I can see that I am progressing along that path as well. These little goals are the mile markers along my path, showing me that I am headed down the road and not just sitting still and spinning my wheels.

The second skill I have taught myself is patience. This is the hardest thing in the world for me and for many people. We have been taught and breed to want to see immediate results on anything we do. This is a faulty way to look at the world. The immediate results that we see are nothing more than a reaction and are not representative of the sustainable change in our lives. It is because of this realization that I found that I had to create the ability to be patient in my life. I found that if I appreciate the immediate results, but wait and see what the sustained results are going to be, I can judge my success in that arena far better than I would have been able to going off the reaction results. This skill has also let me take the time and effort needed to see long term and large goals gaining ground even though, at the start, the motion along them is very minute. It has built a well of strength so that I can stay the course while there is little or no progress knowing that down the line, things will start to snowball.

The big and scary goals can be terrifying to create and even worse to look at every day, especially if it doesn’t look like there is any progress on them. It is time to take a step back and exercise some hard patience and let that the small tasks I am doing,  snowball and keep rolling instead  of getting in its way. Additionally, it is time to break that large goal into smaller steps where I can see the change and the progress that I am making. This gives me the sense of progress that helps to bolster the patience and lets me keep trudging along the rocky path to my bright future.