You’re reading Forget SMART Goals and Try This Instead, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

For four years, I struggled using SMART Goals that got me nowhere. I experienced psychological pressure and pain from always feeling like I would never be enough until I reached some magically self-created utopia through achieving my goals.

I never ended up accomplishing most of them.

I remember desperately working to be fit for a fitness test; training so hard that I ended up giving myself a chronic heel injury that I still have to this day. In reaching for my goals like they’d somehow make me complete, I pushed myself past my limit. With every goal I had, this theme would repeat itself.

I went after each goal like it’d make me or break me.

Eventually, after nearly half a decade, I realized that goals aren’t about belonging, or reaching a safe place. They’re not there so that I can prove myself to anyone. They’re just there to help me move forward, to grow, and become a better person, however simplistic that may sound.

Compass Goals Changed Everything For Me

Over the course of 2016, I managed to achieve several different goals. They include reading over seventy books, improving my income, traveling to various countries, and reaching something that’s a lot closer to my dream body.

But more importantly, I achieved my goals in a far more grounded way. Compared to previous years, I felt more excited throughout my journey. I didn’t feel like I was grasping and yearning helplessly, with flailing arms, for my goals. The beautiful side effect of that was that I was less wrapped up in my own bubble,

I share all of this to show you that positive internal change is more than possible, even with the deepest experiences of disappointment—year after year. No matter how many times you’ve felt like a failure before. No matter how many times you haven’t stuck to your goals.

Compass Goals vs. SMART Goals

A goal becomes a compass goal when it improves your present in a meaningful, exciting way. It’s there to teach you something about yourself and the world, but you’re not too attached to the outcome you’re going after.

With a series of compass goals, life becomes a mixture of interconnecting wormholes that move you toward greater growth and fulfilment.

Pursuing goals is a lot like riding a bicycle toward different destinations. You need to know when to speed up, based on the terrain that’s in front of you. You need to know when to slow down, based on the obstacles you eventually come to face. And you have to make those decisions while remembering that you want to get to those various places on time—while maintaining your sanity throughout the journey.

Even more importantly, you need to know if a goal or destination is even worth going for in the first place. You can’t take a trip to a planned destination lightly, and some goals will take longer to reach. The exploration we’re about to delve into will show you exactly how to decide which of your goals are worth going for, and how to go about pursuing them.

But first, let’s make something clear.

Your Life Will Always Be About the Climb

There’s this idea in our culture that suggests that we’ll magically “make it” once we achieve a certain milestone. It could be anything from releasing a viral video, winning American Idol, or joining an NBA Team.

Through the slipstream of celebrity culture, with rap songs with lyrics “mummy, I made it,” we’ve been subtly co-opted into this idea that our very sense of self-worth, is dependent on reaching some magical dreamland.

But this is merely an illusion. One that, I regret to say, I succumbed to for over four years. But while reaching a goal can radically improve the quality of your life, it’s not the end-all and be-all.

Let me use three big goals to show you why you will never “make it” and why you should be thankful:

• After reading x amount of books in a year, it will be your job to internalize the lessons from what you read so that they lead to an improvement in your character.
• You’ve gained ten pounds of muscle and feel great. Now you need to make sure you maintain your muscle mass, which means you’ll have to continue training at the gym, in some form, for the rest of your life.
• Now that you’ve doubled your income, you’ll have to keep working at the same level to maintain your salary.

Life keeps moving forward, regardless of which destination you reach. Once you understand this, you can take goals off the pedestal.

Qualify your Goal to see if it’s a Compass Goal

Whenever you set yourself a goal, imagine you’re about to jump on a bike to set off to a new destination and ask yourself these four questions, before kicking your foot on the pedal:

The Compass Goals Checklist:

1. Is this goal something I can see myself pursuing with excitement, despite its difficulty – does it give me rewards along the way?
2. Can I write a set of daily or weekly actions that I’ll stick to consistently, adjusting them when necessary until I reach my goal?
3. Do I have a way of measuring my progress (a compass)?
4. Will I be okay with not getting the outcome I want because I recognize how much value this journey will provide me with regardless?

The last question (being okay with not reaching the result) helps you relieve an enormous amount of pressure. If you’re okay with not getting the result you want in advance, you don’t live in a make-it-or-break-it paradigm. Instead, you live in a playground that leaves you free to achieve something if you’re willing to do what it takes.

It’s okay to have burning desires, but they only help us if they’re tempered in the right way. Paradoxically, it’s only by letting go of the outcomes we seek (while working toward them) that we’re freer and likelier to achieve them.

If you answered yes to all these four questions, then you have successfully created a compass goal! Try to have between three to five per year at most!

What about deadlines?

With the common SMART goals approach, you’re told to set a deadline for each goal so that you’re stretched. But answering the four questions for each of your goals is more important than having a planned completion date.

Alas, use deadlines, but use them to fuel your goals rather than constrain you. Also, make sure you don’t give yourself too much time to achieve a goal in a year. The journey, similarly to riding a bike, is a lot more fun where you go faster—and that’s why deadlines are useful!

To Summarize the 4 Main Takeaways

1. Understand the value of your goals; while the achievement counts for something, who you become along the way is more important. Don’t let your goals run you, run your goals.
2. Realize there is no end-point; achieving goals doesn’t mean “you’ve made it.” You’ll always be striving for growth in different areas of your life.
3. Every goal achieved brings with it a set of new responsibilities, so be willing to take those responsibilities in advance. Don’t choose a goal lightly.
4. Qualify your goals with the four questions to determine if you have a traditional goal or a compass goal. A traditional goal will prod at your self-esteem and make you feel unfulfilled along the way. A compass goal is lighter and makes you enjoy the journey.

My Last Words

Over the last half a decade, I’ve come to learn that goals are only worth having if they can enrich our lives right now. Because how we consistently experience the present will always determine the beauty of what we reap.

If you work on a PC and you’re interested in learning how to improve the way you approach life, read my free book on Spiritual Productivity.

• You’ll learn about how to split up your day into four chunks, so you worry less about external influences.
• You’ll discover the small hacks that will take your productive work on the PC to the next level.
• And much more…

 Samy Felice is a writer who brings meaning to words. His Free Book explores how to make success easier. 

You’ve read Forget SMART Goals and Try This Instead, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

http://ift.tt/2u036Zz

You’re reading 6 Ways To Satisfy a Hungry Heart, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

“…emptiness can never be eliminated, although the experience of it can be transformed.”
-Mark Epstein

Ever feel out of control?

Ever feel so empty you can’t be satisfied?

A couple of weeks ago, that’s how I felt.

It was the wrong kind of emptiness, when you ARE filled, but you either don’t know it, or worse, don’t accept it.

Snoring Emotionally

I had talked with my long-time, wonderful therapist, someone I trust, about a series of very important things.

Yet, somehow, I didn’t feel the release I expected to feel, so I was psychologically “hungry”.

Because I was unconscious of the real problem, I was “sleeping” in an emotional sense, but noisily, as if I were snoring.

I walked away from the conversation feeling frustrated, as if I’d hit a wall. I wanted to wrestle with something or someone, but no partners were available.

1-Take an Emotional Inventory

The next day, in the car on a half-day trip, I still grappled unsuccessfully with my unsettled state.

Fortunately, since I’m a veteran of these kinds of feelings, I knew that, to feel better and more at peace, I had to be an observer
.
I listed the feelings I was experiencing. Anger. Loss. Resentment. Frustration.

2-Turn Down the Volume

Now that I’d slipped back into observer mode, I experienced more balance, more ability to manage stress, more peace.

I realized that I had to relax before anything else, otherwise I couldn’t return to the health and stress hardiness that I’d learned to experience and bring about over years of difficulty.

Now that I was a bit detached from the negativity, I could not be taken over by the power of that state.

I didn’t have to be a prisoner of the emotional volume of that negativity. I could turn that volume down and observe it, but not be subject to it any longer.

3-Surrender “The Demand”

As I drove those quiet roads, and my observer self began to assert itself, injecting more calm into the situation, I realized what the problem was.

For starters, when I’d gone to see my therapist that day, part of me demanded that she “take care of it”, that negativity, implying that I had no control over it.

But, that wasn’t my normal behavior, nor my normal mindset.

I’d accepted long ago (after long and difficulty years), that my therapist was only a surrogate for the strongest part of myself.

All she did was mediate and facilitate a conversation “between me and me”.

As anyone who has experienced therapy knows, when I say, “all she did”,

I’m really expressing an enormous service that this trained and caring practitioner provides, not so much by doing, but by being, and most of all, being present.

4-Listening to the Parent INSIDE

Turning down the volume of the unhappy child allows the observer to manage what’s going on.

That fertile quiet and emptiness allows a renewed conversation between the inner parent who is always present, always available, but not always listened to and that child.

But, I already knew this. Why had my child turned up its volume angrily, sucking at the air to find a satisfaction beyond satisfying?

Because part of me was ready to relive an old trauma that I had been talking about, but not experienced.

In fact, I had to re-experience it, in all its ugliness and pain, in order to move past it.

5- The First Clue

One day before my session, I had brought out bag after bag of trash from my house to be picked up.

It was raining, and I felt dreadful, that somehow, I didn’t deserve to release these old things to the curb and the disposal they deserved.

I had thought I’d feel great about getting rid of the stuff.

After all, it was from a quarter century earlier, the unhappiest time of my life, when I’d moved near my parents after living away from them for over a decade.

They hadn’t been nourishing parents.

My father had treated me in all the ways that a kid could want.

Then, after working away from home for a couple of years, He’d come home,

He looked just the same, but now abused me every way he could, and my mother, for no apparent reason, encouraged his negative behavior.

This about face and my inability to 1) find a reason for it; and 2) let go thinking that I had to be to blame caused a lifetime of searching for answers and release through therapy.

While I lived away from them, in therapy, I not only figured things out, but I quickly accepted my own parenting role. I worked consistently to be the external parent I had known only too briefly.

But, when I moved up to be near them, the child inside me reared up, like a confused and agitated creature.

That creature, demanded that they fulfill what I expected of them.

6-Surrendering to the Pain of the Past

I’d worked through some of the earlier traumas over the past decade, and I knew that I had rounded several corners. But maybe this was the hardest challenge yet:

I had to overcome the pain of the move near my parents and the disillusionment that came with it.

This was the disillusionment of age eight, now repeated by someone over thirty with children of his own, and now experienced a quarter century later.

When my children left the house, and their voices no longer a familiar presence every day, I was free to take up the challenge again of parenting myself.

I simply needed to apply the same constant compassion and attention and selflessness to myself with which I had parented them.

As I drove over those quiet roads, I sighed with sudden understanding and release.

I finally experienced the emotions I’d hoped for a day earlier, but was incapable of achieving, because I expected someone else to give them to me.

Now, alone with the steering wheel, I found I could drive myself to this place of peace, re-accepting that ever-present parent inside.

Now, I knew that the pain of twenty-four hours earlier could subside.

Now, I knew that pain could be replaced by fertile emptiness and big thoughts and the skill to manage my psychic space.

Remember, some emptiness cannot and should not be “filled” or “satisfied”.

Sometimes it is simply necessary to accept that emptiness with the right inner parenting such that the emptiness becomes fertile.

Lars Nielsen has decades of experience helping individuals and businesses discover and share their core message. Whatever your message or audience, grab his “Make YOUR Message Matter Cheat Sheet” (http://ift.tt/2v5s0a2) and put his time-tested techniques to work immediately.

You’ve read 6 Ways To Satisfy a Hungry Heart, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

http://ift.tt/2uwx0I3

You’re reading 6 Ways To Satisfy a Hungry Heart, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’re enjoying this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

“…emptiness can never be eliminated, although the experience of it can be transformed.”
-Mark Epstein

Ever feel out of control?

Ever feel so empty you can’t be satisfied?

A couple of weeks ago, that’s how I felt.

It was the wrong kind of emptiness, when you ARE filled, but you either don’t know it, or worse, don’t accept it.

Snoring Emotionally

I had talked with my long-time, wonderful therapist, someone I trust, about a series of very important things.

Yet, somehow, I didn’t feel the release I expected to feel, so I was psychologically “hungry”.

Because I was unconscious of the real problem, I was “sleeping” in an emotional sense, but noisily, as if I were snoring.

I walked away from the conversation feeling frustrated, as if I’d hit a wall. I wanted to wrestle with something or someone, but no partners were available.

1-Take an Emotional Inventory

The next day, in the car on a half-day trip, I still grappled unsuccessfully with my unsettled state.

Fortunately, since I’m a veteran of these kinds of feelings, I knew that, to feel better and more at peace, I had to be an observer
.
I listed the feelings I was experiencing. Anger. Loss. Resentment. Frustration.

2-Turn Down the Volume

Now that I’d slipped back into observer mode, I experienced more balance, more ability to manage stress, more peace.

I realized that I had to relax before anything else, otherwise I couldn’t return to the health and stress hardiness that I’d learned to experience and bring about over years of difficulty.

Now that I was a bit detached from the negativity, I could not be taken over by the power of that state.

I didn’t have to be a prisoner of the emotional volume of that negativity. I could turn that volume down and observe it, but not be subject to it any longer.

3-Surrender “The Demand”

As I drove those quiet roads, and my observer self began to assert itself, injecting more calm into the situation, I realized what the problem was.

For starters, when I’d gone to see my therapist that day, part of me demanded that she “take care of it”, that negativity, implying that I had no control over it.

But, that wasn’t my normal behavior, nor my normal mindset.

I’d accepted long ago (after long and difficulty years), that my therapist was only a surrogate for the strongest part of myself.

All she did was mediate and facilitate a conversation “between me and me”.

As anyone who has experienced therapy knows, when I say, “all she did”,

I’m really expressing an enormous service that this trained and caring practitioner provides, not so much by doing, but by being, and most of all, being present.

4-Listening to the Parent INSIDE

Turning down the volume of the unhappy child allows the observer to manage what’s going on.

That fertile quiet and emptiness allows a renewed conversation between the inner parent who is always present, always available, but not always listened to and that child.

But, I already knew this. Why had my child turned up its volume angrily, sucking at the air to find a satisfaction beyond satisfying?

Because part of me was ready to relive an old trauma that I had been talking about, but not experienced.

In fact, I had to re-experience it, in all its ugliness and pain, in order to move past it.

5- The First Clue

One day before my session, I had brought out bag after bag of trash from my house to be picked up.

It was raining, and I felt dreadful, that somehow, I didn’t deserve to release these old things to the curb and the disposal they deserved.

I had thought I’d feel great about getting rid of the stuff.

After all, it was from a quarter century earlier, the unhappiest time of my life, when I’d moved near my parents after living away from them for over a decade.

They hadn’t been nourishing parents.

My father had treated me in all the ways that a kid could want.

Then, after working away from home for a couple of years, He’d come home,

He looked just the same, but now abused me every way he could, and my mother, for no apparent reason, encouraged his negative behavior.

This about face and my inability to 1) find a reason for it; and 2) let go thinking that I had to be to blame caused a lifetime of searching for answers and release through therapy.

While I lived away from them, in therapy, I not only figured things out, but I quickly accepted my own parenting role. I worked consistently to be the external parent I had known only too briefly.

But, when I moved up to be near them, the child inside me reared up, like a confused and agitated creature.

That creature, demanded that they fulfill what I expected of them.

6-Surrendering to the Pain of the Past

I’d worked through some of the earlier traumas over the past decade, and I knew that I had rounded several corners. But maybe this was the hardest challenge yet:

I had to overcome the pain of the move near my parents and the disillusionment that came with it.

This was the disillusionment of age eight, now repeated by someone over thirty with children of his own, and now experienced a quarter century later.

When my children left the house, and their voices no longer a familiar presence every day, I was free to take up the challenge again of parenting myself.

I simply needed to apply the same constant compassion and attention and selflessness to myself with which I had parented them.

As I drove over those quiet roads, I sighed with sudden understanding and release.

I finally experienced the emotions I’d hoped for a day earlier, but was incapable of achieving, because I expected someone else to give them to me.

Now, alone with the steering wheel, I found I could drive myself to this place of peace, re-accepting that ever-present parent inside.

Now, I knew that the pain of twenty-four hours earlier could subside.

Now, I knew that pain could be replaced by fertile emptiness and big thoughts and the skill to manage my psychic space.

Remember, some emptiness cannot and should not be “filled” or “satisfied”.

Sometimes it is simply necessary to accept that emptiness with the right inner parenting such that the emptiness becomes fertile.

Lars Nielsen has decades of experience helping individuals and businesses discover and share their core message. Whatever your message or audience, grab his “Make YOUR Message Matter Cheat Sheet” (http://ift.tt/2v5s0a2) and put his time-tested techniques to work immediately.

You’ve read 6 Ways To Satisfy a Hungry Heart, originally posted on Pick the Brain | Motivation and Self Improvement. If you’ve enjoyed this, please visit our site for more inspirational articles.

http://ift.tt/2uwx0I3