This is what you should do when your goals feel overwhelming
For the days life feels overwhelming/how to make life feel less overwhelming
I’m willing to bet you’ve had moments when you can’t possibly imagine how you’re going to put in the work necessary to achieve the plans you’ve made for yourself. Moments when it seems like the only person who can possibly rise to the tall order you’ve asked of yourself, is Superman. And of course, being human, your default response is to worry yourself into a state of energy drain, lose all motivation, and then label yourself a failure for not being able to live up to your ideals.
We all have these moments, however, there’s good news, we can eliminate them.
Life is strange, stranger than we know, and as I’m sure you’ve read from one of the hundreds of self-help blogs out there, reality is flexible. We all know this, we just don’t know we know it. If we didn’t know it, we wouldn’t bother trying to be better, we wouldn’t try to get the girl, and life will truly be tragic. However, our understanding of this principle is unconscious and rudimentary at best; we understand that reality can be changed, but what we don’t understand is that from the human perspective, much of what is called reality is actually perception.
Perception is all we have as humans, it’s our window to the world out there, in fact it can be argued that it is our world. Your senses, both internal and external create the world you experience, and your cultural background, your personality, and your genetics determine the interpretation you give these experiences. The combination of all these factors gives rise to perception, and because of its all-encompassing nature, it appears to us as a fixed reality.
On a side note, I’d like to emphasize that I’m not advocating solipsism, your perception is not the only thing that exists, what I’m saying is that your mind, along with your senses are the sole medium through which you can know anything.
You’re probably wondering how this relates to goals and feeling overwhelmed. Well, here’s the thing, the reason you feel so overwhelmed is not because your goals are hard to achieve, but because your perception of the effort required is distorted. That is not to say your goals are easy, but if you tweaked your perspective and started seeing the journey ahead of you in a more optimal manner, you’d be a lot more motivated to start and persevere to finish.
To demonstrate how to go about this shift, I’m going to steal advice from Zdravko and the GTD principle of “next actions”.
- From Zdravko’s article: Think only in 24-hour frames.
This bit deals with our habit of constantly focusing on all the effort required to take our goals from ideas to finished products. It usually manifests as a tendency to fantasize about our end goals right from the onset.
It’s good to have a realistic picture of what our goals will require and fantasizing about our end results can be very motivating, however, these two tendencies can also cause us to get very impatient, cause us to lose focus, and drain our motivation.
Thus, it is best practice, to learn to control your attention, and focus on the presently required activity, or as Nicolas Cole said in this article: “It’s ironic then, […] the people who live in the future and wish that they would get there faster, actually end up slowing themselves down. Meanwhile, the people who are entirely present and ‘in the moment,’ end up getting to their future goal faster.
Focus on what you need to do now, today is the bridge to tomorrow, treat the present right and the future will reward you.
2. Break your goals into smaller chains of “next actions”
Another factor that demoralizes us is a lack of direction. Most of the time, the reason goals can feel overwhelming is because we have no idea how to go about them. We usually set goals, that are conceptually specific but procedurally lacking, leaving us clueless as to where to start from.
The principle of next actions tackles this issue effectively, in that it forces us to break any goal we have into its constituent actions, and always have a plan. For example, if I broke my article writing procedure into a chain of next actions, it will look like this:
First action: Open laptop
Next action: Do some stream of consciousness writing/journaling
Next action: look for recurring concepts
Next action: pick one of these concepts as topic to write about
Next action: Plan outline
And so on.
The above example is a little rudimentary, but you get the point, break the activity down into bits, so that you always have a next action. Even if you appear to get stuck, having a next action is a boon, because taking action forces you to change position (figuratively speaking), and it usually happens that new positions lead to new perspectives and new options.
I hope I’ve been able to leave you with thoughts to turn to, when it seems that you’ll never get around to finishing that project or achieving that long-term goal you have in sight. Remember to think in 24-hour frames and break the project into smaller chains of next action plans.
NOTE: While these techniques can work for anyone, it is only the people who are clear about their desires and hopes that will see real benefit. There is nothing that can motivate you to persevere, if your reason for your goals is not strong enough, or if your goals aren’t actually your goals. So, it is necessary to know yourself before taking advice from a random stranger on the internet. Peace.
