How can the right goals change your life? Well let me tell you from experience, it’s gonna be awesome, and you’re totally not prepared at all.
Right now I’m in a freezer – a giant room kept at a solid 33 degrees.
It’s a huge room designed to keep beer cold.
Actually, this is a memory I’m describing to you. Right now I’m sitting in my garden on a laptop.
Anyway – picking kegs was a super fun job, but eventually I just snapped out of my frozen tundra induced haze and thought, “Am I gonna be picking kegs forever?”.
I always wanted to be like Indiana Jones, traveling the world, going to ancient dig sites and finding lost treasure…
I also had dreams of being a writer.
There’s nothing wrong with working at a warehouse, and I loved the physical work, the smell of concrete and pallets, but I knew that if I continued working 50+ hours a week here, that’s all my life would ever be.
And that just wasn’t a cool feeling.
I didn’t want that for myself.
Goals aren’t only for situations like that, but there comes a point in everyone’s life when we ask ourselves…how can goals change my life?
- Maybe chugging a liter of Mountain Dew every day isn’t so good for me…maybe I should start being concerned about my health.
- Maybe $1750 a month isn’t all I’m capable of…maybe I could start one of those online businesses I keep hearing about.
- Maybe I could become so great in life, that the society I live in pays me simply to be great.
What would a life like that even be like?
Well let’s bite off one at a time, for right now, let’s just discuss a few points about how goals can change your life…permanently, if you let them.
How can goals change your life? They force you to think about what you truly want in life – which exposes the program you’ve been running up ‘til now. They allow you to make a decision to pursue your aspirations & change. Goals have you create a master plan that ensures results. After some time pursuing a goal, you realize it was time for you to grow, and now you’re closer to the progress you knew internally you needed to make.
Why does my life even need to change?
It might not.
Sounds weird right?
Not everyone needs change in their life – or maybe it’s better to say that we don’t all need change right now, or at the same pace.
- To get to work on changing your life right now – take the 7 Day Change your Life Challenge
You ever notice how older people seem to grow out of things. They’re not interested in partying anymore, they don’t get into silly arguments or petty fights with people. They have a real sense of whether or not something is worth the time.
Older people have lived their lives, grown out of and into things, and are in a completely different space at 75 than they were at 25.
We grow as we learn, and that growth takes two shapes: internal growth and external growth.
We grow internally when we feel like certain people, places, and things just aren’t for us anymore. We know, somehow, that it’s time for us to move on from something and into something new.
- READ: How Making life changes can Free you from Boredom, Transform you into who you’re Destined to be & Save your Life!
- READ: “What changes should I make in my life?”
That internal growth is on a timer. It’s always moving forward, and cannot be stopped.
When we grow internally, we desire our external growth to match that internal change, because if not, we become unhappy.
Take for example someone who’s ready to look, feel and be fit, energetic and healthy. They must move away from their old eating and poor health habits, otherwise their life won’t match their aspirations.
The issue we run into is that external growth and change is a bit slower than internal change. It requires effort, and normally that effort goes against the very inertia we created with our previous habits.
I call it a program. Your life has a certain program that runs:
- We wake up
- Do the same thing
- Think the same thing
- Feel the same thing
- Bad habits good habits
- Belief systems. Etc.
Some, or all, of those might need changed in order for your outside to match your inside.
Making these two spaces congruent with one another can be a huge pain in the ass, and it’s the reason why we’re all concerned about how to form good habits, how to break bad habits, how to employ more self discipline in our lives – we are always trying to make our external reality match our internal growth.
Internal growth happens automatically and constantly, while external growth requires serious effort because the changes we made for the last phase of our life have weight to them. Get it?
If you feel you’re at a point where you feel like your aspirations aren’t represented in your external reality (your life) you’re in the perfect position to effect change.
Why should the change be made? Because, if you don’t make the change, your life will become dull, gray, lacklust and you’ll become depressed, bitter and sullen.
In other words, when you have an aspiration (like getting fit or making more money) that change must occur or you’re dooming yourself to increasing amounts of dissatisfaction with your life.
According to the CDC, there are 123 suicides per day – being dissatisfied with your life is not a good thing.
You deserve to live a nice happy life, fully of challenge, accomplishment, adventure and satisfaction (all the things humans yearn for).
What is a life change?
A life change is the process of making the external congruent with the internal.
A human being has an external reality (your life outside yourself) and an internal landscape.
- To get to work on changing your life right now – take the 7 Day Change your Life Challenge
When the internal landscape transforms (which occurs simply by living and learning) the external must match it in order for life to remain satisfying to us.
Whenever you take stock of what you really want for your life at this moment, see what parts of your life support that aspiration and which parts need to be tweaked a little, that is the process of making a life change.
Life changes can be huge transformations or subtle tweaks.
How can goals change your life?
So far, we’ve been talking about the difference between our inside life and our outside life.
The inside life grows on it’s own clock. When you grow, you’ve grown. When doing something loses its luster for us, it just does, there’s nothing we can do.
When the gum no longer has flavor, it’s time for new gum..end of story. You can put it underneath the desk and come back to it later with the hopes that, by some miracle, new flavor has been injected into it, but that’s never the case.
It’s AlreadyBeenChewed baller.
Once we realize the gum is spent, the time comes to seek out new gum, new flavor. This gives rise to an aspiration.
An aspiration is a desire, or an ambition for life to be a certain way. We say things like “Man it would really be nice if…” or “Wow, that would be cool if I could just…” and fill in the blanks with your dreams.
That aspiration then turns into an intention, a decision to bring that aspiration to fruition.
The intention then turns into a goal, which is the road map we will follow in order to achieve our aspiration.
Then, the change has been made.
A goal can change your life by allowing you to manifest into your life whatever it is you desire to have, experience and be – done properly of course, because a half-assed goal does nothing but waste time.
How do I know what change needs to be made?
Divide your life up into the key main areas:
- Health, wealth, money and finances
- Career, job and business
- Family, friends and relationships
- Marriage, spouse and romantic prospects
- Spirituality
- Personal growth
- General happiness
Give each of these areas a score (1-10) based on your overall happiness with them. 1 being about to off myself and 10 being couldn’t possibly be any more satisfied.
Based on your scores, rank each area from least satisfied to most satisfied, and you have a list of which areas need change.
Other than that, there’s always a small voice in us that nudges us towards making the changes we should make in life.
You know what changes need to be made. Any area of life where you feel uncomfortable, inadequate, un-challenged, or discontent is an area ripe for improvement.
How do I know what goal to set to make changes?
Take the “What should my goals even be?” quiz.
First you decide on an area of life where change is needed.
- Business + and Career
Then, you decide specifically the change that you need.
- How much free time i have. I’m constantly swamped with work
After that, you can decide what actions you could take, which goal could you set that will solve this problem you’re having. Pretend you’re your own superhero coming up with a solution to this issue.
- I must set a goal to become more productive, and get my work done faster so that I have more free time. I will do this by prioritizing only what is important, and leaving extraneous details for the end of the day.
Goal: to decrease the amount of time I spend on work each day by 2 hours, by increasing my focus on essential tasks.
What if I’m wrong about this change?
Being wrong about the changes you need to make can be catastrophic for one reason – you’ll end up wasting time.
Wasted time is really the one thing I worry about when setting goals because you never get that time back. It’s literally time off the clock that never returns to you.
When discovering the changes that need to be made in your life, it’s important to be accurate.
When it comes to being accurate, you really just need to be honest with yourself.
Don’t skim over, dilute, or ignore the change simply because you fear it.
Understand that these changes are better for you, because they lead to a new life that will make happiness & happiness come from growth, challenge, accomplishment and adventure.
Be honest with yourself, and take the time to know the change that needs to be made as much as possible. That being said, you know where you don’t wanna be anymore, and where you wanna go – it’s hard to make the “wrong” change.
How to Set a goal that can change your life
Goals force you to think about what you truly want in life. For some of us, we never think about consciously guiding the life we live. We may be playing out a program or routine we developed in childhood, inherited by our parents, environment, government, society, etc…
Which exposes the program you’ve been running up ‘til now. When this happens we can examine that program and decide whether or not is the destiny we want to live out. This life belongs to us and we live it as we choose to live it.
They allow you to make a decision to pursue your aspirations & change. When you realize you have desires for live to be a certain way, you can make a decision to pursue them, which is called an intention.
After you’ve set your intention (made your decision to change your life) you can set goals to help you achieve this desire you have for a better or different life.
You create a master plan that ensures results.
After some time pursuing a goal, you realize it was time for you to grow, and now you’re closer to the progress you knew internally you needed to make.
Once your goal has been achieved, or you’re close to having one goal transition to another goal, you examine your life and ask yourself thoughtful questions:
- How is your life different?
- Is it better or worse?
- How do you feel about yourself, your life and the world in general?
- Humans are meant to grow, what growth do you want to experience next?
These questions can be a starting point for another goal that, instead of leading you on an endless chain of setting goals for their own sake, guides you toward more of what you desire your life to transform into.
