The Paradox of Goal-Setting

Do you ever get frustrated at not achieving your goals as quickly as you would like?

I know I have been guilty of this and then I have to remind myself that its not about the destination but it is about the journey.  The pure act of setting goals can make it easy to forget this and to continually focus on the future of where we want to be, but if we do this for too long we can lose touch with who we are and where we are now. This is important because happiness is in the NOW not in the future.

If we approach our goals in a way of being purely focused on getting there, then we lose all the joy of the journey and often make it harder for ourselves to get there as well. Relating this to exercise I always think of the famous Bruce Lee saying of ‘Dont think Feel.’ When you go in to the feeling place you become in the moment and one with that journey you are on. You are still growing and moving forward but you are enjoying it much more than if you are constantly thinking about what you are doing and where you are going. Perhaps why it is so much easier when we have an instructor there telling us what to do;)

But ultimately when you are only focused on the end result of your exercise effort or of any other goal you will not enjoy the journey.  The reason that happiness and success are about the journey and not the destination is because this is where the growth happens and where we learn the most, if we do not focus on the moment we are in, we miss out on all of this.

‘Be happy in the now but seek to grow as a person.’

Accept yourself as and where you are with love, but seek to grow out of self- love also as a desire to grow and give more. Self- love is an important factor, if you are rejecting who and where you are now, you are ultimately rejecting yourself, this is not good of course and not the idea of goal setting. Also we all need to love ourselves, in the healthy sense of course:)

Enjoy being who you are and the PROCESS of becoming who you want to be.

You will get there and you wont even notice because you’ll be too busy being yourself and enjoying the moment you are in and as a result of your journey of being and becoming, you can go far beyond the results of what you originally imagined.