Exciting Goals

Have you identified your true goals?  Your real goals?  The goals that excite you because you know your life and the lives of those you touch can be very different when you achieve them?

I wrote a few months ago about identifying goals.  This is such an important topic I make no apology for addressing it again now.

Unfortunately many of us seem to have lost the excitement we once had when we formulated our goals.  Many more never had that excitement right from the start.  And without excitement it is very unlikely you will achieve your goals.  Why?  Because day to day life will "get in your way".  There are too many distractions competing for your attention.  Without excitement driving you forward you will be sidetracked by those distractions.  In fact, hijacked by them.

If you don't believe this, look back to the last day you didn't have to go to work or study.  If you don't work or study, look back to yesterday.  If you do, then perhaps look back to last Sunday or Saturday.  What did you achieve?  Did you achieve anything at all?  If you did, congratulations - you are in a pretty small minority.  But if you achieved something, how much closer did it take you towards any of your goals?  Be really honest here.

I tried this exercise just before writing this blog, so let me give you my results.  I didn't actually achieve anything significant at all.  I have a good excuse for this.  I have been working hard, so my last weekend (actually, a long weekend as there were a couple of public holidays too) was simply a chance to relax, do nothing, and feel good about it.  A chance to rest before going back to the grind of day to day work.

There is nothing wrong in this per se.  In fact for many of us it can be an essential exercise.  And if you go back to work refreshed and energized then you have achieved something.  But if you are in a similar position to me and find that your last rest day was simply that, a day of rest, then how about going back a week before?  What did you achieve then on a rest day?  And how about the week before that?  Surely you made great progress towards one of your major, exciting goals then?  No?

Unfortunately this is a common story for most of us.  We spend all day working hard, in order to have enough money to pay for the house in which we spend so little time because we are away working hard.  To pay for the car that we mostly use to get to our place of work rather than to take us to somewhere we can enjoy life.  So, what are we actually working for?  What do we really want to achieve in life, and is what we are doing right now getting us any closer to it?

For most of us these are very uncomfortable questions.  So uncomfortable we may try to brush them aside as being silly or irrelevant.  But they are not silly, and they are not irrelevant.  They are very uncomforable, but they are also very important.

Take some time right now to look again at your goals.  If they don't excite you they are the wrong goals.  And if you are aiming for the wrong goals you will either never achieve them anyway because they do not excite you, or you will achieve them and then wonder why you bothered in the first place.

Are your goals exciting?  If so, great!  Keep pushing forwards and achieve those goals.  If not, be ruthless and change them!  Replace them with goals that truly excite you and then make sure that every day you take at least one step to get you closer to those exciting goals.