Change your thoughts, not your goals.
You’ve got big goals. You’re working full time, but your dreams are much bigger than 40 hours a week, and you’re trying really hard to bring them to life. But. You’re also getting a little bit tired. You’ve been hustling. You’ve been focusing. And you’re just not where you want to be yet. You used to feel so hopeful, but now, you just want a nap. You’re wondering if it’s worth it. If all the effort and self improvement and extra practice is really going to get you where you want to go. In your darkest moments, you wonder if you’re actually cut out for your goals.
But what if that’s the wrong question?
What if the question isn’t am I cut out for this? What if the better question is how do I need to do this work in order to be able to show up and keep showing up for as long as it takes?
You don’t have to keep working on your same goals and there’s nothing wrong with pivoting if you want to. But, if you want to keep working on your current goals and you just need a better way of doing it, then I have a solution for you.
The solution is: make the journey towards your goal feel as good as you think hitting the goal will feel. How do you do that? You practice feeling happy (or proud or satisfied) about your achievement before you have achieved it. Practice appreciating it. Practice appreciating yourself for having gotten there. Think about what you’ll believe about yourself once you arrive at your goal, and practice those thoughts and the feelings that go with them now. Why? Because what you practice along the way will be the difference between whether you give up or keep going. Guess what else? How you feel along the way also determines how you will feel when you achieve your goal.
The thoughts that we think as we work towards our goal are the thoughts that we’ll think when we have achieved that goal. Thoughts are habitual. If you keep thinking a thought over and over, you will often keep thinking that thought even when your circumstance changes. Whatever you want to be thinking when you achieve your goal, practice thinking those thoughts while working toward your goal.
Practicing the feeling of having achieved your goal does two things:
It feels great. When you create intentional feelings in this way, you can work really hard while still feeling really good. And using these enjoyable feelings as sustainable fuel will get you where you want to go without burning you out.
It builds your ability to enjoy your own accomplishments once you have achieved them. You would think we don’t need to practice enjoying our accomplishments, but we do. Otherwise, we either won’t make it to the accomplishment or by the time we get to it, our brain is on to the next goal without any delight or celebration at all.
And for all y’all who don’t care how you feel and just want to achieve, achieve, achieve, here’s one more thing: you’ll achieve more this way, too. The brain likes to do things that feel good. When you make the process of achieving your goal enjoyable and you celebrate achieving it, you teach your brain that achievement is fun. If you do this, your brain will notice, and it will begin to associate goals with feeling good, which also makes it easier to keep showing up and keep crushing those goals.
To recap: however you feel while you work on your goal is how you will feel when you achieve it. However you think you’ll feel when you get to your goal, practice feeling that way along the way and use it as sustainable fuel.
Want personalized support as you learn to create enjoyable journeys and crush all your goals? I’m currently accepting 1:1 coaching clients for August and September start dates. Learn more here.