[quote style=”boxed”]If you want to become something, learn to live the life of the person you wish to become.[/quote]
When i look back at my youth as a teenager, it becomes crystal clear that i have achieved quite a lot in my life. Yet for some reason or another, i have often overlooked and undermined them and have never defined it as the reason for why i should feel self-confident.
In reality, we are all capable of achieving goals and getting things done, but what often strikes a chord whenever i think about it all is that achievement holds no bearing if there’s no meaning behind what you do.
Let me repeat that again:
Achievement holds no bearing if there’s no meaning behind what you do
Once i started to make sense of the above statement. It had given me a big light bulb moment in that moving forward to attain goals isn’t really that difficult. We all prove it to ourselves on a daily basis yet somehow seem to mask it as a daily chore. Surely going to the groceries to buy food or figuring a way out of traffic is an achievement. I’m pretty sure you can list a few examples in your life. Yet the reason why it fails to get recognized is due to it holding no bearing on the whole grande scheme of how you want your life to be defined.
So why are these things so easy to achieve yet so difficult the minute we create a big label for it?
I firmly believe that goal achievement comes down to one thing… Your state of mind and how you live your life.
This belief isn’t something new and is very cliche and mentioned by many others in the course of history. Yet i can’t give a better illustration to help what i mean than by what i explained above.
Having understood this, it becomes increasingly evident that in order to help make goal achievement easier, we must simply change our perspective.
What is the simplest way to do this?
In my experience, i believe that the best way to change perspective is to do the following 2 things:
1) Make your activities that take you to your goal, a daily habit.
If you want to make your tasks a chore and part of your life. Then there’s no better way than to actually spend a bit of time every single day doing what you need to be doing in order to lead you to your goals. The beauty of all of this is that it no longer becomes a grande activity which we often build up in our heads and instead, force ourselves to recognize that like every activity we do, no activity is different in importance. It is simply an activity.
This is something i discovered by accident when first establishing the goal to become a competent Salsa dancer. The minute i disconnected from the goal and turned my attendance to classes as a weekly activity and a schedule, that’s when things started to change. Before i knew it, i was able to dance, have fun and enjoy myself more. What naturally happened after that was the inevitable. I achieved my goals without realizing.
This leads me onto the second step.
2) Make your goal part of your lifestyle
The biggest mistake all of us make when pursuing goals is the idea that we should separate it from our daily lives. So often i hear friends talk about joining the gym, yet when it comes to the activity, few of them actually show up. The reason is simple. It is not a part of your life and therefore, difficult to undertake and sustain.
I honestly believe that if you want to achieve whatever goal you desire, it’s crucial that you don’t look at it as a monumental thing which you must aspire to achieve.
The best thing you can do is to simply live it.
This is key to developing self-confidence and the secret to lasting happiness.
Happiness and self-confidence is never brought to us by achieving goals, but by simply living the life we want to live by going the direction we want to go.
If you want to be a professional poker player as an example. Then the best thing you can possibly do is to simply show up at a Poker table and start playing. Surround yourself with friends who play poker, have friendly poker games, watch movies on it, read books. Live the life as a poker player. Before you know it, your skills will have improved and have achieved your goals.
The same is true for anything you wish to become good at.
There really is no such thing as doing, being or attaining. There is only living, and that’s what makes the biggest difference.
Photo Credit: tochis
