Set Clear, Realistic Goals |
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Think about where you are right now in life and visualize what you want to become. Whether you’re a sixteen-year-old with your entire life ahead of you, a forty-five-year-old accountant bored to death, or a sixty-four-year-old with retirement staring you in the face, this is the first instant of the rest of your life. It is your starting place.
Unrealistic goals always create internal stress. A forty-five-year-old accountant who decides that he wants to be a rocket scientist is setting unrealistic goals. He has opportunities galore to become a part of the space program in other ways, however, ranging from working for NASA itself to being employed by the myriad contractors who serve NASA. (Relocation might be required, of course, which would impose another set of milestones and objectives to be considered and evaluated to avoid new stress.)
Realistic goal setting means being completely honest with yourself when determining what you can objectively expect. If you're a sixteen-year-old who wants to become a basketball star and you're a good but not excellent athlete, you're setting yourself up for the stress that comes from disappointment. At the same time, a good student athlete can enter an excellent university and find an exciting course of study and a career related to her interest, possibly in sports medicine or sports journalism.
A good exercise is to write down in a single sentence the "bare bones" of what you want from life. I’ll give you an example: Say that you're a parent, and your goal is to raise your child as well as possible. You’d write, "I want my child to be honest and moral and have integrity and as many options as possible." From that simple sentence you can evaluate many goals, both for you and for your child. It means you have to set an example of honesty, integrity, and strong moral character. It means you have to provide your child with options, meaning education: the basics, such as the three Rs, and skills that she can always use, such as craft work, sports that reflect her physical capacities, and so on. And it means you should encourage your child to set appropriate goals for herself as well.
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