A lot of the time we are all conducting our lives at such a fast pace that there doesn’t seem to be enough time to do anything else except survive each day. Many of us will have been in a position where we go to work each day, come home, spend some time with the family, go to bed, wake up and do it all over again day after day and we’ll sometimes stop and wonder why. We’ll question the purpose of our actions and quite often we’ll not be able to come up with any constructive answers. Yet, somehow we’ll not feel completely fulfilled without really knowing the reasons why.
When we stop and consider what we really want out of life, we are making a conscious decision to question our existence and to try to establish what’s missing from our lives. This leads us on a path to self discovery and, ultimately, should enable us to lead the kind of life we want.
What Do I Want and Why Do I Want it?
These are the first questions you need to ask yourself. The answers will vary from person to person but it’s important that you identify things which, in your opinion, would make your life better and to also ask why you think your life would be better because of it.
Common issues include things like your job or career. What do you want to get out of work? Is it to pursue a lifelong ambition or cause or to feel passionate about the work that you’re doing? Are you motivated by money and feel that you don’t earn enough and want to do something about it?
What about relationships? Are you in one? If not, would it make you feel more complete if you were in a loving relationship? If you are in a relationship is it fulfilling your needs or is it, perhaps, causing you a lot of stress and you’re starting to feel that it’s not working out and that this particular relationship isn’t right for you?
Work and personal relationships are just two examples chosen here as they are often common areas of all of our lives which we might question from time to time but feeling that something isn’t quite right with ‘your world’ could be to do with anything in life – perhaps you don’t like your appearance or you feel as though you need to take more exercise. It could literally be anything.
Quite often, it’s our understanding of what we DON’T want in life that begins the process in us coming to the realisation of what we DO want and why we want it.
So, How Do We Get What We Want?
Like anything in life, our road from discovering something is missing to finding the missing piece of the jigsaw is all about focus and planning and goal setting is at the forefront of that.
By setting clearly defined and realistic goals and setting a reasonable time by which we want to achieve them enables us to know precisely what we want to achieve, where we need to concentrate our efforts and enables us to identify and eliminate any potential distractions to our goals that may cause us to deviate off course.
Without adopting these strategies, it’s very easy to see that, in our busy lives without a plan, it’s easy to get sidetracked so it’s important that we set goals and stay focused towards achieving them.
Goals can be set on both a short and long-term basis but they should all be measurable. If you’re able to see the progress you are making, it will motivate you to keep on working towards getting what you want.
You need to be sure that your goal setting is realistic. If it isn’t, you’ll soon get frustrated at your inability to attain your goals, will probably give up trying and, therefore, you will never get what you want. Of course, some of your goals might be very ambitious. There’s nothing wrong with that as long as they are still realistic and achievable but it’s useful to have a mixture of goals of things that you want to get, have or do, some of which are easier to achieve than others because as you attain the easier ones one by one, it will give you an increased self-confidence, more motivation and a burning desire to keep going until you conquer all the others on your list.
Dividing up what is important and what is fairly irrelevant in your life can also free up more time for you to focus on the things that have extra meaning for you and this will also be beneficial to you in the pursuit of your goals.
By following these strategies, you may not end up getting everything in life that you want, but you’ll certainly be in a far better position to achieve those aims than by simply wishing for your life to be different. Getting what you want isn’t impossible but you do have to work at it and have a plan to follow. It’s not about closing your eyes and praying.