Every year we set many goals but we rarely achieve any of them. This year, I set some goals for myself, but I was worried that when the end of the year comes around I would be disappointed for not achieving any of them. To avoid this, I looked for answers inside myself by introspecting and being brutally honest with myself, and outside myself through reading books and studying other people’s experiences and insights. These are some of the insights I’ve gained that could help you break this curse:
It’s a Self Respect Problem
The reason we don’t follow up on our promises to ourselves is that we lack self-respect. Every year, you say I’ll do this thing and change my life but when the time comes you don’t show up for yourself. When your boss or friend asks you to show up you always do. You treat your promises to yourself less seriously than you treat your promises to total strangers. Your subconscious realizes this which leads you to lose trust in yourself on a subconscious level. This can get so bad that you sometimes would give up before you even start.
To stick to your goals you have to trust yourself but that’s not easy after breaking your promises to yourself many times. The only way to repair your self-trust is to rebuild it slowly. If you say you want to meditate for 10 minutes every day, show up and meditate every day. Take your goals as a matter of self-respect, every time you think about not showing up for yourself, think to yourself, would I do this if a stranger asked me to do it? Do I respect myself so little that I would break this promise to myself?
Your Identity matters
A lot of us don’t have the identity we want to have. For example, many of us have imposter syndrome or deep down we identify ourselves as unproductive. Our subconscious knows this making our negative identities a self-fulfilling prophecy. When trying to set goals we need to work on the identity level.
I first read about this in the book Atomic Habits by James Clear. He says, When setting a goal, focus on changing your identity instead of your actions. This means if you want to run, don’t say I’m trying to run every day, say I’m a runner. This subtle change in how you address yourself can have a great effect on your discipline and decision-making. Humans want to be self-consistent, so if you say you are a runner you are more likely to act in a way consistent with your identity. This will make you realize that every action you make casts a vote on the identity you want to have. The more votes you cast toward the person you want to be, the more you become that person.
Discipline is Freedom
I think a lot of people know that motivation is unreliable and that you need the discipline to achieve your goals but it took me a long time to internalize this. One key misconception I had is that Discipline is willpower, spoiler alert: it’s not. Willpower is finite and it will fail you if you rely on it, just like motivation. It’s good in small bursts but doesn’t work in the long term. What you really need are systems that make it easy to be disciplined when you don’t have motivation or willpower.
Physical and Digital Environment
This ties to systems, but it’s very important so I wanted it to have its own paragraph.
You need to focus on your environment and find ways to optimize it for your success. Where you put your attention directly influences your future outcomes. Our phones and the Internet are great assets but they are also a great curse. You need to be very honest about how these affect you and take serious steps into eliminating or reducing distractions from things like social media.
Some practical ways to do this is to use a tool like Cold Turkey to block certain websites like social media according to a schedule you set.
Removing what’s harmful to our progress from our environment is important. Conversely, we also need to augment our environment with things that help us stay motivated and disciplined. This includes finding the right communities, podcasts, youtube channels, etc. Those are part of our environment and can help us replenish our motivation and willpower. For example, reading a book or watching one inspiring youtube video a night could be all we need to maintain the positive mindset we need to stay disciplined and achieve our goals.
Failing is Inventible
Having a positive mindset around failing is important. We need to realize that the more we fail, the more likely success is around the corner. Failing in inventible, instead of worrying about it, we should focus on building systems that help us get back on track faster.
Look Inside not Outside
Finally, It’s very important to start looking inside yourself for answers instead of outside. Introspecting and being honest to ourselves aren’t easy tasks but they are necessary for finding the root causes of our failures and how to overcome them. We usually go around looking for answers outside of ourselves but self improvement, for the most, is about looking inside. My favorite introspection tools are meditation and journaling but even small daily walks can be revealing.
Hope this helps you stick to your goals!
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