Choosing Your Goals For The Present Moment and Beyond

by Michelle

Is 2008 the year? You know, the one where you quit smoking, get fit, kick-start your career, or de-clutter your house? The dawn of the New Year is traditionally a time to set goals for the year ahead, but why should we bother with making resolutions?

"If you aim at nothing, you'll hit it every time"
- Author Unknown

Sitting down and working out what your goals are is a practice in self-exploration that will help you understand yourself better. Having specific, meaningful goals for yourself will also help you focus your energy on working towards those goals, and will help you make decisions in your life that foster the achievement of those goals rather than letting yourself be subject to the whims of others or the unpredictable winds of chance. Setting and completing achievable goals is also a good way to build self-confidence. Achieving things that are personally meaningful and important to you provides a boost to your self-esteem and improves your self-image.

Since part of the key to using goals as useful tools in your life is choosing personal, appropriate and achievable goals, how do we go about choosing them? Goal setting is a very future-oriented activity, which means that it is easy to find that there is a disconnect between your goals and your daily life. You may have a goal to quit smoking, but when you come back to the present moment after thinking about your future non-smoking self, your current identity as a smoker takes over again and urges you to have another cigarette.

According to motivational blogger Steve Pavlina, the key to setting goals that are realistic and meaningful to you in the present moment is to ask yourself how working towards this goal will change your current existence. The past and the future really only exist in our imagination, but the present moment is all we ever really have. When our goals improve the quality of our life in the present moment, it doesn't matter whether the goal is even achievable in our lifetime or not, because it is worth working towards for the benefits we gain right now. The goals of cleaning up our greenhouse gas emissions and living more simply may seem so huge they are unachievable, but when we can see tangible benefits in our lives from making small changes we are more motivated to keep working towards our goals.

| 12/30/07 | Lessons