We hear about the importance of setting goals all the time. What are our life goals? What are our goals for the new year? What is our 5 year and 10 year goals? We absolutely benefit from having goals out in front of us that we can look to as some point in space and time that we hope to get to one day. Things that we know will take effort and sacrifice and, well, time. Most goals that we speak about have some time table that we arbitrarily attach to it to give us parameters and guide rials to run in. Those self-imposed constraints are what focus our minds to get a thing completed.
The most important goals however, are the ones that we are committed to meeting every day. Those tasks we give ourselves that require discipline and determination. Those goals out in the future don’t offer us immediate feedback. They can’t let us know each day that we are making progress. Lets say you want to go to college and graduate with a degree in Nursing. Well, when you wake up tomorrow you won’t have a degree in nursing. What you can do tomorrow is go to class and work diligently on your assignments. You can make sure you are giving the effort those daily task deserve. At the end of that day you can lay your head down and say you are one step closer to that larger goal because you focused on today.
Having this mindset will allow you to gain momentum. Without those daily tasks to complete we are left looking around for the end goal with no reinforcement that we are getting closer. I heard someone compare it to beginning to exercise again and you go to the gym and workout, you come home look in the mirror and nothing has changed. You do that for a week and nothing has changed. What you are doing must not be working, right? We know that isn’t true. We know that to get to the goal, to look in the mirror and see our bodies changing we need to just keep going. One day we will look up and see that things have changed. It is the momentum that we gain from those daily efforts that eventually leads to results.
There will be days that the effort we gave didn’t move us forward. There will be days that we slide backwards. The next day has to start the same as all the others. It has to begin with a focus on taking that one step towards the goal. To winning that one day. Reminding ourselves that the road to our goals requires us to fight through and overcome bad days.
Holding ourselves responsible for those daily tasks and efforts is more important then setting and staring at some future goal. That future goal is needed, but we should set it, then immediately focus on the stairs we have to climb to get there. Know what daily tasks are needed to move you toward your goals. When we break it down into daily decisions it makes it feel like a more manageable mountain to climb. Build healthy and consistent daily habits that lead you to the castle you want.