Setting Goals Successfully

Raise your hand if you’ve ever set a goal for yourself to completely transform the way you live your life – if you’ve ever said something like, “I’m going to wake up tomorrow morning and start eating healthy and exercising regularly in order to lose weight.”

Many of us set goals like these according to the arbitrary demarcations we assign to the year.  Whenever the calendar year rolls around, we call them “New Year’s Resolutions.”  At other times of the year, we might create goals based on “swimsuit season” or an upcoming milestone birthday.

We feel that we need these goals to determine whether we’re moving forwards or backwards with our lives.  If we succeed in losing 20 pounds throughout the course of a weight loss goal, we can tell ourselves that we’re “better” than we were – even though, at a fundamental level, whether or not we’re better humans hasn’t changed.

The real key to effective goal setting lies in developing a vision of how we want our lives to be.  If we would tell ourselves, “My only goal is to live a happier, healthier, more joyful and more loving life” – and actually mean it – we’d find that realizing this goal is as simple as making it the defining vision that guides our lives.  We would no longer need to concern ourselves with incremental, New Year’s Resolution style goals that don’t address our true character.  Instead, we would see our lives naturally moving towards the direction of our visions.

However, too often, the opposite is true.  Instead of committing to a single, defining vision, we focus on what we don’t want or what we’d like to stay away from.  In other words, we spend more time thinking about what we don’t want, rather than what we DO want.

Everything that you see as human work on this planet was essentially, first created in our minds. It found expression in the mind and was then manifested in the world outside. Both the wonderful and the horrible things that we have done on this planet came from the magnificent mechanism a human mind is.

Today modern science has proved beyond any doubt that the whole existence is a vibration –reverberation of energy – that there is no such thing as matter. A thought is also a vibration on the level of your mind.

If you create a powerful thought and let it out, it will manifest. But if we dedicate too much time in thinking about what we don’t want: “I don’t want failure, I don’t want disease, I don’t want that,” we end up experiencing these negative situations in our lives – all because our innate confusion prevents us from realizing a life that’s more in line with our visions.

Sadhguru explains:

“If you have a vision of what you wish to do with yourself and the world around you, it is not beyond your capacity to create it. It is only because you are a bundle of confusion, most of the time seeking what you don’t want – that things that you really want never come to you. This lack of vision and will in your life is fundamentally because of a distorted understanding of the world around us.”

Now, this isn’t to say that setting an overarching, enduring vision is enough to magically manifest your desired reality on command.  Realistically – depending on the scope of your vision – a single lifetime alone may not be enough to realize all of the different things you envision.

But by focusing on the best possible vision for our lives, we automatically give ourselves the ability to create it.  It doesn’t matter how far from our current realities these visions are – simply accepting our visions as our highest priorities enables us to transcend concerns about what’s realistic or possible. What seemed impossible a few hundred years ago –flying for example, is now possible for everyone. So instead of chopping down potent and infinite possibilities, we can simply become that which we seek to bring into our lives.

If you’re currently struggling to build your life around the tiny, fractious goals you believe will make you a better person in some way, just stop.  Stop worrying about whether or not the future you want is attainable based on where you are today and instead, set a clear vision for what you’d like your life to be.  Dismiss all other thoughts of confusion or self-doubt from your mind and start living the amazing life that’s always been possible for you!