Goals

[AinWLA]

Have you set yourself any goals - be it career goals or life goals, maybe cbt goal exercises etc? If so how do keep up the motivation and when you achieve them do you reward yourself or what happened next?

[Laura84]

I set myself a lot of shorter term goals. Simpler things like what I need to do in the coming week to keep myself productive when I'm at home. I try to be realistic and not push myself too much and it's got much easier to motivate myself to stick to my goals the more I've done it.

Makings lists and crossing things off has always brought me a weird sense of satisfaction too, so it helps me to write things down.

The reward I guess is feeling slightly better about my life than I would if I hadn't done anything. I have a need to feel like I'm doing something useful all of the time. The pressure I put on myself can be very tiring. I'm already making a rough plan of things I'm going to do over the Christmas break when I have 12 days in a row off. I really admire people without jobs who manage to keep themselves sane as I'm not sure I could do it.

I think I might make some CBT goals as I haven't done any in a long while now and it helps me a lot.

[BritishPeace]

My only goal at the minute is just to graduate with 60 per cent or above then I can leave behind this goddamn field which I have no interest in.

[onde]

My main goal in the next year is to get myself employed for the first time. A rather intimidating goal. I somehow expect that once I have achieved this goal, everything else will fall into place, which is probably unrealistic.

[Dandelion10]

My ultimate goal is to have the good life and be comfortably well off, I aim for this through creative ventures (poetry, art, novels and music) but in regular day-to-day work things like physically looking good can get you quite far. So surgery is a serious consideration for me also.

In the future I'd also like a baby and pets, in a nice house.

[newbs16]

Mine are a bit cheesy

Would like to be in love and loved
Be financially stable to stand on my own two feet
Stay in employment
Be happy, make others happy
Sort a certain medical condition out
Have a healthy family and hope they live in to old age!

[blancmange]

A few of my goals....

To move out.
Be able to get out the front door daily.
Speak on the phone.
Open the door.
Meet new people.

These are all pretty big deals to me.

[newbs16]

^ I'll met you dimples, get the carrot cake in

[blancmange]

^ ha yeah we need to make it happen.

[AinWLA]

So I was thinking about this because I have set myself some goals but was finding it hard to achieve some of them; so motivation dwindles. I also thinking about how I would feel after I achieved them, what next...more goals? Then funnily enough this topic came up in another thread - Ajaxs' one about ACT. Goals are all well and good - they can make you achieve things you didn't think you were capable of, and can bring you some sort of (temporary) happiness but if you become too focused on achieving all your goals or ideals that society in general holds then this could lead to depression/anxiety etc. The stuff on ACT is fairly new to me - I had heard of it but didn't know much about it - but the stuff on being a society driven by goals rather than values is very true and an interesting way to look at things. So will try to change my perspective!

[purplerose]

I need to set some new goals to make me feel I have more of a purpose in life but I don't really know where to start :/