4 Tips To Make Goal Setting a Less Frustrating Process
Life has the potential to be a truly amazing and rewarding journey. It can be full of magic, excitement, great experiences, and rich memories. Of course, it’s not always easy. One way of bypassing this issue is by successfully goal setting.
But there are plenty of potential obstacles and setbacks that we are all prone to experiencing. This can cause us to become jaded and frustrated. The kinds of goals that you might be interested in pursuing, on an individual basis, can vary. From things like having enough disposable income at hand to buying custom Number Plates for your vehicle.
Goal setting can play a major role in attempts to live life in the most meaningful and dynamic way. However, goal setting can also be a highly stressful and frustrating process depending on how you approach it. And that’s before you are actually striving to consistently make headway towards achieving the goals you’ve set.
Ahead are a handful of tips and suggestions that might help to make goal-setting a less frustrating experience for you!
Use Goals To Shape Desired Habits
Goal setting can have the potential to be stressful and frustrating. This is because setting goals immediately puts you in a mindset of what you are “lacking”. You may find yourself feeling as though something is missing from your life. You may even feel like a failure until and unless you achieve that goal.
This can be a real issue especially for larger scale and more ambitious goals. Mostly because those goals might take years to achieve. There may also be different variables influencing those goals.
So, what should you do? Give up on setting any goals at all?
Use goals as a way of structuring and managing your daily habits. Instead of treating the goals themselves as an objective that you are straining to achieve at all costs. This way, you can plan habits into your daily routine that you would then strive to be consistent with.
Roll With The Punches
The conventional wisdom is that the best way of setting goals is to set “SMART” goals. The acronym stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-based. In other words, you should be highly precise about what you want to achieve when setting your goals. You should also set very specific and tight deadlines for when you want to achieve those goals.
While there are certainly benefits associated with doing things this way, “SMART” goals can also be overly rigid and can put you in a state of anxiety, while simultaneously making it difficult to stay motivated about the goal in and of itself. Instead of rigidly pursuing SMART goals, pursue your goals but do so with an awareness that your circumstances are always liable to change along the way — and that it’s important to roll with the punches, adjust course, and take advantage of other opportunities that arise along the way.
Create Meaningful Goals
One potential source of stress that often arises with regards to goals is the stress of grinding away day in and day out at an activity that you simply don’t find genuinely meaningful or motivating, but are simply trying to stick with out of dogged determination.
Many of the goals that people end up setting for themselves end up just being things that seem like they could be potentially lucrative, as opposed to being things that are actually genuinely meaningful to the individuals in question.
But when you’re striving towards a goal that fundamentally doesn’t appeal to you on a deeper level, purely because you want the “payout” associated with that goal, it’s all but inevitable that you will find the journey significantly unpleasant.
Immerse Yourself
One of the fundamental risks associated with ambitious goal setting is always that the goals you’re looking to achieve will draw your attention too much away from the present moment, and will get you overly fixated on the future.
When all is said and done, though, life is something that only actually unfolds and plays out in the present moment — and constantly looking over the horizon can rob you of the ability to notice and experience the magic, power, and beauty of the here and now.
By developing your ability to be present and to immerse yourself in the process of whatever it is you are doing — such as by taking up a meditation practice — you can experience the benefits of moving towards your goal step by step, without being overly impacted by the drawbacks.
