Why We Need Goals

(My Original Blog Post: http://timemyself.com/time/mind/time-evolution/time-management-time-evolution-mind/goals/)
We all need goals.  Goals pull us towards the end result along the way.  If we don’t establish goals, we will be left just floating, living life day by day, only living in the moment, with a lack of direction.   When you create goals for your future, adding mental pictures to your end goal, you force yourself to create a movie with those mental pictures, within your mind, visualizing what that goal will look like someday.  By doing this, you learn to subconsciously fill in the gaps a long the way.  What I mean by using the word subconsciously; up to 24 hours per day, while daydreaming, or when you are sleeping, your mind is subconsciously thinking of ideas and solutions to get you to your end goal. Please understand that the majority of the work is creating the goal to begin with.  Your goals can be hourly goals, daily goals, annual goals and lifetime goals.  For your lifetime goals you may want to look into creating a mission statement, or a personal motto that represents who you are, and continue to follow that path.  I’ve listened to a lot of audio, attended a lot of seminars and read a lot of books that discuss making goals, and I have found myself, at times skeptical, when it comes to writing down goals, or making a big effort to create them.  It really wasn’t until years later that, within one particular week, about five popular audio sets all were explaining these ideas, in a very similar way, and it was then, that it started to sink in.

 

          The part that sunk in with me, is the idea that you’re suppose to visually imagine your goals, as vividly as possible.  For lifetime goals you may find this to be difficult to achieve as you may get a vague picture at first, but that’s ok, it’s the fact that you did the exercise to begin with.   For accomplishing your lifetime goals, by being certain about which path you are taking, you will find yourself subconsciously thinking of solutions and creative ideas on how to get you closer to your goal.  The end goal will become less vague and more vivid as the years go on, and that goal will pull you towards it with less effort as time goes on, it will become more clear to you in the process.  You should believe in your goals and be very certain about accomplishing them.  Because if you don’t believe in your goals and aren’t 100% certain of them, then who is?

 

         Goals have a way of making us be more certain of whom we are and what it is that we want in life.   Reaching our goals is like a series of mini accomplishments that propels us forward to keep creating more goals and accomplishing more.  One misconception that people have about goals is that, if they create a big goal, and find that they don’t accomplish it, then in their mind they have failed and will likely shy away from creating more future goals.  The answer to that is to ask yourself who determined that you failed?  Why did you decide that almost reaching your goal equals failure?  You should make a decision that reaching your goal is always the ultimate plan, but to fall just short of your goal, would still be ok, it’s forward progress.

     Let’s go over an example: if your goal was to raise $100,000 for your favorite charity this year, and you ended up at the end of the year raising only $80,000, you didn’t fail. You did two things: You did an amazing thing by raising $80,000, that’s $80,000 more than you would have had, had you not put the goal out there, allowing yourself to work towards it.  It’s likely that your goal is still $100,000, but your initial timeline was a little off, so you should continue to complete the $100,000 goal that you have for yourself, after all, you are already 80% of the way there, most of the work as been done already, thus there is no such thing as failing, just a more delayed result.  This leads me into another idea where people believe that some obstacles, such as bad credit stop them from starting other goals. Understand that working on improving your credit, or paying off bills one step at a time, is still working towards your overall goal, to buy a house, or get a loan, you just have to add some steps in between, more goals in between, like improving your credit, with your bigger goal in mind, results all start with those simple small steps.

          You may find yourself adjusting your goals often, to better move you towards your focus of what you are trying to accomplish.  Your timelines may change and you may create bigger goals or more realistic smaller goals along the way, the most important point though is that you are moving towards the goals all of the time, making forward movement.  Goals give you better control of your life and a reason and purpose for life.