Common advice in the self-help world is to create goals to achieve and making those goals a reality on a daily basis. I agree with this mindest for the most part, however, achieving your goals is still long-term whereas happiness is mostly short-term. To me, there’s a disconnect between thinking in goals and achieving happiness.
Part of achieving goals is to be committed to the outcome and making decisions with those in mind. But if you’re not achieving everything on your goal checklist, the first thing to eliminate is being hard on yourself. Having an honest conversation with yourself is the better way in goal achievement strategy.
Instead of wondering why I didn’t achieve a goal I set for myself, I look into the factors in my life. Maybe I was traveling. Maybe I was committing myself to too many projects. Maybe my passion didn’t really follow the goals I had set for myself. Having an honest conversation of why I didn’t achieve goals that I set for myself is productive. Overthinking, and being g hard on myself, is the opposite.
Being hard on yourself about not achieving goals is teaching you to take on the victim mindset. You treat yourself as someone who could’ve achieved a goal had you done something different or if the circumstances differed. Instead of looking inward, you concot excuses for yourself.
My best way of staying out of the victim mindset is holding myself accountable for goals I want to achieve and having an internal dialouge about what’s working and what’s not and why. Although I set difficult goals for myself, I shouldn’t lose happiness when I come up short.