Have you ever felt as if you were chasing someone else’s dreams?
I am a perfectionist and achiever. I am very organized, and I like to plan every hour of my day, week, and month to ensure that I didn’t “waste” it.
I create visual boards for my goals and break them down into (as I thought) more achievable steps. However, my excitement to work on them fades somewhere at the very beginning.
What’s even more dramatic is that I have been doing this repeatedly for many years. I visualize, set goals, spend hours breaking them down into weekly tasks, give up after a couple of weeks, look for excuses not to continue, and then seek new goals.
I have doubted whether planning is a waste of time because it never brought me closer to my goals (at least not as close as I expected). Yet, giving up on planning made me procrastinate. It’s a vicious circle, right?
I hadn’t thought about this issue for a while until by chance today (do you believe in signs? I recently started to). I listened to a podcast where the author discussed how we tend to limit the opportunities in our lives by the goals we set for ourselves, focusing solely on the outcomes we imagine we want to achieve. But what if the universe could give us something better? Something we are afraid to think of or imagine because we don’t believe it could come true?
I am a great example of this. I have numerous blocks and limiting beliefs driving some decisions in my life. For example, I don’t know what I like. Why? Because my mom always told me what to do; I never had the choice or time to be bored and explore things. So now, as an adult, I choose my goals based on what other people have and what I assume would make me happy. And what happens? I achieve those goals, but guess how happy they make me? 🙂 Not that much.
So what did the author propose? To surrender and live in the unknown, seeing where it leads you. To stop setting exact, specific goals and instead set goals based on how you want to feel. Not what you want to have, but how you want to feel in your life.
This approach was like a breath of fresh air to me, so I gave it a try!
Did I stop planning? No! I can’t change overnight what I have been doing for the past 20 years. But I spend less time planning by:
- Setting a timer. I limit myself to a maximum of 10 minutes to think the goal through and understand how to get there.
- Implementing compulsory emotional element. While reviewing the outcome of my 10-minute brainstorming exercise, I pause and think – what is the emotional outcome that I want to achieve here? How will I feel once I have it in my life?
- “Light surrender” mode on. Truly surrendering requires a lot of practice. Therefore, as I am just starting to practice it, I:
- take the emotional word into my day-to-day. I add it to the notes on my phone and check it as a reminder and motivation, focusing on what I am moving towards.
- let go off my plan. I don’t open it, don’t review it. I just take small steps toward achieving it when I have the time and wish to do so.
It’s been a short time since I started applying this approach, but I have already noticed that it gives me more peace and allows me to enjoy the process more rather than being a go-getter. You build the process based on how you feel at the moment and move towards feeling even better. This is different from what I have been applying before, and I know there are still many elements to making a bigger difference, but one step at a time already feels amazing!
I invite you to give this approach a try and share your experiences. Has it made a difference for you?