Are Your Goals Too Far Out?

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Whenever you want to do something, there are always two main motivating reasons.

Either to move away from pain, or toward pleasure.

Usually it's a combination of the two.

Not understanding which is which can kill any progress, and it's one main reason for what many people call "self sabotage."

It works like this. 

Somebody has a goal, maybe to lose weight or make money or something.

Some "thing" motivates them. They imagine what it will be like when they get there (skinnier, wealthier etc.) and assume that is their MAIN motivation.

The problem comes when we don't take the time to examine the "negatives." 

The "bad" thing we are trying to move away from.

For one, most of us don't like to acknowledge bad things.

It also feels better, even to our secret selves, that we are motivated toward "big positive things" out in our future.

Not a lot of us would want to admit that our main goal is to not suck so much.

But it IS something painful (on some level) that motivates us to START.

That positive thing out in the future has always been there.

But without acknowledging the pain we are moving away from, guess what?

As soon as we move a little bit away, it loses it's motivating power.

And there we are, a couple weeks or months out, and we start to trip over our own feet.

Because we didn't fully acknowledge the "pain" that motivated us in the first place, we might think we're doing something wrong, or are broken.

The truth is that there is a LOT going on between where we start, and where we want to be.

If we start out haphazardly (like most people do) then we'll run out of steam in a week or two.

What's the answer?

One technique is to always keep a clear focus on your present, plus or minus a couple weeks.

Meaning you know where you've been the past week. You know where you're going the next week, and that's it.

What about far out? Aren't we "supposed" to have clear goals for our future?

That's the common idea. 

But since few people can predict the future, and the FURTHER out we get, the LESS LIKELY we'll have ANY IDEA what we or the future will be like, maybe there's another way.

Maybe we ONLY need to know what DIRECTION we're going in.

That way, wherever we end up, we'll be in a pretty good place.

And we can let the future take care of itself, while we focus on the "now" (or a week or so out).

And so long is our NEXT WEEK is a little better than our LAST WEEK, we'll always be getting better.

How do YOU want to get better?

Get Started:

Stop Self Sabotage