How to Know if Your Goals Are Good for You – Anna Quindlen
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing,” says Quindlen, “is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of being yourself.”
Giving up on certain goals for your own good involves:
- looking at your goals
- determining if they’re achievable and healthy
- either re-evaluating them or giving them up entirely
Giving up for your own good is about learning how to let go of your goals without feeling like a failure. It’s about seeing success and opportunity in quitting — and about quitting one goal to make room for another. For help setting and achieving your intentions in life, read What Are Your Goals: Powerful Questions to Discover What You Want Out of Life. And, here are two ways to know if your goals are good for you…
How to Know if Your Goals Are Good for You
Before you think about letting go of certain goals, consider these two guidelines:
1. Does your goal represent who you are? “If you’re pursuing something that doesn’t honor who you are, it’ll make you sick,” says Sandra Anne Taylor, co-author of Secrets of Success: The Science and Spirit of Real Prosperity
2. Surrender the outcome of your dreams. “Surrender the outcome so that you don’t move into urgency and desperation,” says Taylor. “Take action towards your goals, and periodically stop to reevaluate if the action is working. Be flexible with that action, and move in a different direction if necessary.”
This doesn’t mean that you stop caring about the outcome of your efforts – or achieving your goals. Surrendering the outcome means you’re open to anything. You can flow into new experiences and re-evaluate what’s not working. You still hope and dream, but you’re not clinging to one particular outcome.
Some goals you’ll want to give up on because the time has passed and it’s not healthy for you to continue. Other goals just require that you stay focused, determined, and resilient! The trick is knowing when to keep trying, and when to move on — which is why creating a life plan is important.
Setting new intentions and goals in life is a process. Being a successful, strong, empowered woman doesn’t happen overnight. For instance, I’m slowly beginning to realize that getting pregnant and having my own biological children may something I need to let go of. I think the gradual process of accepting that it’s time to let go of certain life dreams and hopes makes it much easier to move towards something new and different.
Also – learning how to fail and bounce back (resiliency) is an important component of being an authentic, strong, successful woman.
Are you determined to achieve goals that aren’t good for you, or that are even impossible? I welcome your thoughts and questions below…
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Lovely topic, Laurie. Surrending in every area of my life is my focus lately, but particularly with goals. I’ve discovered over the years that the more ‘effort’ I put into my goals, the slower they manifest – like walking through mud. Yet, when I become trusting and surrender the outcome (and sometimes even the ‘how’) things move more easily and quickly. I’m amazed at how many times when my clients let go and surrender the dreams they’ve been ‘trying’ to ‘make’ happen, how things suddenly fall into place or something new and better opens up for them.
Our analytical minds, which do most of the planning, only see a small portion of what’s possible, whereas when we surrender, we open up to our higher spiritual selves which sees the whole bigger picture and all the possibilities for its manifestation.
Thanks for the reminder,
Gini