Redo Your New Year's Goals
Redo Your
New Year's Goals
If you choose an authentic goal for the new year, you will be tested in a way you never contemplated. How so? Your goal, assuming it’s substantial enough, merely elucidates the sacrifice(s) you’ve yet to make in your life, of which you weren’t formerly aware. The sacrifice is that which your identity has yet to shift—yes to shift for the the stated goal, but the sacrifice is much more than that: it’s for the liberation of your soul.
The reason you haven’t already achieved the goal has less to do with the goal than you think. Your goal is less about cigarettes, squatting, and promotions. If you’ve been meaning to get out of a lifeless career path for the past five years, and—here’s a curveball—you have an enmeshed relationship with your mom where each day you talk on the phone about your problems, your sacrifice is less about finding the gall to branch into new employment opportunities.
Your true sacrifice is to create healthy boundaries with your mom, perhaps even cutting off the connection for a season. Talking about your problems to someone who is not helping you make headway is the real problem. If you spoke to a network of people who were spurring you on towards greater things, you wouldn’t be in a lifeless career path the past decade.
Obviously you know that most people are making the same New Year’s goals, year-after-year. They fall short as a dozen of credible reasons and excuses emerge. But it’s the reason behind the excuses that is the gold; that is the true pain point, the real sacrifice that must be made!
If Jared’s goal is to run a marathon and on week three, after logging a total of fifty miles, he get tendinitis in his left knee, everyone feels for him. In fact, the tendinitis indicates Jared has been running a lot. Good job Jared! —However, that’s not Jared’s real pain point. If you go a layer deeper, Jared got tendinitis because for the past five years, he’s been using the same half-size too small New Balance shoes with stock insoles. He was too cheap to go to a running store and have an expert analyze the imbalances in his gait, as well as to spring for new shoes and insoles.
Jared’s injury pointed to the real problem: frugality. Further, Jared’s frugality has created issues in all areas of life: in his marriage, business, friendships, etc. I’m going to make another jump for Jared (and this is why the true test isn’t really about your goal). Jared unconsciously chose running a marathon as his New Year’s goal because it was the least expensive exercise pursuit he could find. If you asked Jared what he’d rather do instead of running, what would he say? “Golf. I’ve always wanted to play golf.” However, the financial investment with purchasing clubs, balls, and green fees was too much for him to fathom.
Therefore, if you’re finding resistance towards either setting or executing on goals for this year, perhaps it’s time to rethink everything. And don’t get me wrong, goals are good! Goals indicate the exact pain point you’ve always encountered. Your execution of goals has less to do with a lack of willpower and more the sacrifices you didn’t know you needed to make.
Lastly, if you’re facing resistance with a goal, often there is an unconscious dynamic that you’ve experienced in childhood and is playing itself out in adulthood. In the above example, it’d be common that Jared either experienced his parents modeling a frugal lifestyle so he believes that’s what is ‘right’ or ‘moral,’ or he witnessed the complete opposite; maybe his parents went bankrupt and his family was on welfare so Jared carries and inherent belief that if he spends money, that’s a step closer to experiencing homelessness. Either way, when you can gain awareness over the childhood component that is recreating the pain point, it’s easier to know what you need to work on.