Goals – How Do They Link To Our Stress?

A Goal is personal aim or objective we wish to attain or achieve.

It is not the actual Goal itself that can cause us Stress. It is our Beliefs about the purpose of the Goal.

The MISCONCEPTIONS we have about the purpose of Goals are:

That achieving them will make us happy.
That they have to be big.
That we have to achieve them or we have failed.
The little ones don’t count.
That they give us Self Worth.

We came to this MISCONCEPTION because:

When we are very young, we are taught ‘if you are good you will get.’

GOOD > REWARDED

BAD > PUNISHED

From this it became obvious that it isn’t okay to just be who we are. We have to do something to be worthy and accepted and to gain the love and appreciation we need.

This is the beginning of our own personal list of Goals. On this list, we put:

Things we need to achieve to prove that we are worthy and valuable to others and life itself.
Things we want to have (house), roles we want to play (good girl), emotions we want to feel (loved) and experiences we want to have (travel).
We choose goals that are moving away from one thing (the bad thing) and towards another (the good thing).

We then believe that we must achieve our goals for Self Worth. This leads to the belief that we can fail and that there is a perfect right path. In other words;

“If I don’t achieve my goal, I am a failure and I have now gone wrong.”

So we start to ignore all the little goals we achieve each day and only count the BIG ones on our list, because the BIG goals give us our Self Worth.

The REAL purposes of Goals are:

To give us direction.
To motivate us into action, so we experience, learn and grow from life and then pass this information onto the next generation.
To propel us into motion. If the brain didn’t set a Goal, we wouldn’t move.

The TRUTH about Goals:

Goals are great, as long as you have an accurate understanding that you will not always achieve all of them.
We are achieving lots of little Goals, as we move towards the BIG Goal.
These little Goals are the Journey we talk about. They do not become obsolete because we don’t achieve the BIG Goal.
We are setting ourselves up to fail if we believe we have to achieve all our Goals.
We don’t have to achieve Goals to gain Self Worth. Worth is a given. Gaining Goals doesn’t equal more Self Worth. Not gaining Goals doesn’t equal less Self Worth.
We never set a Goal to feel less Self Worth.
We can have fun and brainstorm absolutely any Goal, once we know that we cannot fail.
We can change our BIG Goal at anytime.

This is what we call a WIN/WIN situation. If you achieve the Goal, Great!! If you don’t, you achieved lots of little Goals along the way and you learnt and grew as a person.

That is what Life is about!!

Try The Exercise Below.

If you are feeling Depressed, ask yourself, “what Goal am I not achieving right now?” Then list the small Goals you have achieved along the way. This is the Journey! This is what counts!
Write down your Goals for Health, Finances, Family etc?
Ask yourself, “How will I feel if I don’t achieve that Goal?”
Be very honest with yourself.
If you will feel less or down, you have your Self Worth riding on attaining this Goal and that is something you cannot afford to do.
Write down the small Goals you have achieved along the way and remind yourself of the REAL PURPOSE OF GOALS.
Change you Goal, or make a new plan of action.