7th
November
2008
by Aileen Journey
Success is different for everyone. Some people pin their feelings of success to money or job title or size of house or any number of other measures. Success needs to be something that a person strives for. People generally have something that gives them that feeling that they’ve made it.
I wasn’t quite sure what my measure of success would be. I thought that maybe I’d need a particular college degree or level of job or something. What I found, though, for me, is that success is being self-employed and still able to maintain my standard of living. The next level of success I want to achieve is to be a regularly published writer.
Thinking about your idea of success can help you focus your goals or even change them entirely. Think about your peers, perhaps those who you went to high school or college with. Which ones of them seems “successful” to you? What kinds of things that people talk about make you feel that they are successful people? Think then, about what about what they’re doing makes you feel that they’re successful. Is it their job, their lifestyle, their relationships, their living environment?
I have found, doing this activity, that even though, I felt that I need some particular degree or job to feel successful, I noticed that, for my friends, I didn’t consider someone successful by degree or job, but more by amount of flexibility and comfort they had in their lives. That helped me realize that flexibility of schedule, while meeting responsibilities, was more important to me than the other things. It helped me alter my goals somewhat to recognize that I wanted to maintain my level of freedom and flexibility more than I wanted a high paying, high status job title.
Take some time to consider what would make you a success. Does that align with your goals? Is there something you need to alter in your plans to get you on the path to achieving your own idea of success?
posted in Considering goals |
3rd
November
2008
by Aileen Journey
The trick to attaining any goal you set is to complete each task necessary to achieve the larger goal. On paper it seems easy, but in practice getting things done is not so easy. Many people find just attending to life’s daily activities such as getting to work dressed and cleaned appropriately, keeping the house clean and stocked with what it needs, and maintaining relationships difficult and time consuming. If you add children to the mix, many people find it hard to keep their heads above water at all. Adding even small tasks in order to achieve a goal may seem impossible.
There are ways, though, to make many tasks more efficient and easier to complete. I would like to collect here as many different ways that people have used to get more things done than they felt able to do.
One of the biggest contributors to feeling in control and completing the most things is to do things before they need to be done. I call this “pre-crastinating.” Pre-crastinating gives you early deadlines with the promise of relief afterwards. I have worked on my pre-crastinating skills for decades now. It involves deciding that I need to finish all odious, unpleasant, or undesirable tasks early, as soon as they can be done and before I do anything else that I might want to do more. I’ve sort of programmed myself to feel that all difficult tasks need to be done before enjoyable ones. I see it as a game somewhat. I play that the sooner I can finish the unpleasant tasks, the sooner I can do whatever I want. In the beginning it was just miserable. I had to drag myself into doing things when I wanted to do other things. After a while I liked “winning” the game. I would finish my work before it needed to be done and then when it needed to be done, I felt like it had been done for me. I had “won.” After enough positive feedback, it’s become second nature. Having required tasks done early, allowed me to do no- as-required tasks, that might be related to achieving goals, to be done when I should have been doing my required activities. Whether or not it’s reality, pre-crastinating makes me feel like I have created extra time for myself.
A second trick that I use is when I feel lousy I try to do an extra amount of unpleasant and particularly mindless activities at that time. For example, one thing I always hated was correcting my students’ work. I had a box where they’d hand in their work and in the first year I just let it pile up until I felt I had the time or interest to correct the work. I would then be facing huge piles and would just feel miserable. As the years went by I put “correct work” on my schedule every day so I wasn’t faced with a mountain. In addition, though, when I felt lousy I would do extra correcting. I figured that since I already felt lousy and correcting made me feel lousy, it couldn’t make me feel worse. Then when I felt better I’d feel even better than I would have because I had the miserable job done. Whenever I feel down or off (which I often feel if I eat food that I’m sensitive to) I look for the most mindless and unenjoyable tasks that I know I would like accomplished. I can muck around in my misery and wallow in even more misery by doing the boring activity. In this way I can get closets organized and papers corrected and bills paid and so on and so forth.
A third trick I use is routines. Setting up routines with just an extra little task can propel me to where I’m going just a bit. I discussed routines in a previous post. Adding just a 15 minute action to some routines can help you move ahead, whether it’s writing a hundred words a day or doing 5 push-ups or making one phone call or paying $5 extra on a debt. Consider your larger goal and think of which task might be able to be broken down into much smaller pieces than you thought possible. It may seem like it would take close to forever to pay off a car or a mortgage with just $5, but everything adds up over time and it’s not taking much away from your current life, so you might as well do it.
What tricks do you have that help you do things when you feel miserable and don’t want to do what you need to do?
posted in Achieving Goals |
