Do you have dreams that you are trying to make come true? Do you have a goal that you are trying to crush? Success doesn’t happen by chance. You don’t have to get lucky or win the lottery to live the life of your dreams.
Success is a choice; really, a series of choices.
By making the right daily choices, adopting good habits and behaviors, and approaching life with the right mindset, you can make your own dreams come true. You will be unstoppable!
Goal Success by Choice helps you make the choices that will move you closer to your goals and keep you from holding yourself back.
I hope this post helps you get a little closer to crushing your goals.
Amuse Bouche
Before we get to today’s post, I offer you this light “amuse-bouche” to entertain your mind before we get down to business. Like any other amuse-bouche, you may hate my “dad joke,” but it is worth every penny that you paid for it, right?
A good friend of mine was recently diagnosed with a chronic fear of giants. Here’s wishing her a speedy recovery from her Feefiphobia!
Feeling Left Out?
Unhappiness is not knowing what we want and killing ourselves to get it.
Don Herold
If you are like me, you hate feeling left out.
It all started when I was a kid; I was different. I was a fat kid with poor social skills. My family was poor, and I didn’t have the same clothes, toys, and experiences as the other kids. As a kid, being different often means being excluded from the group. In my case, it meant having few friends, getting picked on and never really finding my “tribe” as a child.
Children can be so cruel, right? But they aren’t one ounce as cruel as adults can be.
As we grow older, people find different and more nuanced ways to exclude people from the group. Unlike the kids, they usually know better and have to be more devious to hide it. As adults, the exclusion is still generally about being different. Maybe a different skin color or gender. Possibly a different standard of living based on a lower income. And, sometimes, there are people like me who are just a little weird.
Everybody has felt the sting of being left out, and it never feels good.
It’s in Your DNA
It would be easy to dismiss our distaste for being excluded as ego-driven. I hate feeling left out because I have an excessively high opinion of myself and believe others should share that opinion. While that is sometimes the case, our fear of being excluded is really in our DNA.
At our very core, we each still have the million-year-old lizard brains and monkey brains from which we evolved. They are still hanging out there under the surface and fuel some of our most primitive urges, including our distaste for being left out.
A million years ago, there was a word for somebody excluded from the pack – lunch!
Being separated from the tribe put people at extreme risk without the strength in numbers. Though the reality is far different today, that memory lingers in our irrational brains and fuels our fear of exclusion.
Even further, love and belonging are one of our fundamental human needs, as depicted in Maslow’s hierarchy. Once we have fulfilled our physiological needs (food & water) and our safety needs, we strive to be part of the group.
In her best-selling book, The High 5 Habit, Mel Robbins takes this need a bit further. After extensive neuroscience research, she shares the three deepest needs that we all share:
- To be seen
- To be heard
- To be celebrated
In short, the DNA in our brains doesn’t want us to be excluded and feel left out. Your best efforts to compensate for those feelings will always be an ineffective cover-up.
New You, New You
Have you taken a look at social media over the past week? What do you see?
It seems like everyone is sharing their resolutions and New Year, New You expectations for the year ahead.
- I am going to lose weight
- I am going to run a marathon
- I’m going to get that new job
- I am going to start that business
The list goes on and on. People share grandiose goals (or near-goals) for the year and expect major personal transformations.
Creating goals, writing them down and sharing them with others isn’t a bad strategy per se. But, there are two issues commonly experienced in this strategy.
New Years Resolutions don’t work. Approximately 93% of New Years Resolutions fail, an abysmal success rate. Nearly 70% of these failed resolutions don’t reach February before they fail. There is no shortage of causes for these failures; refer back to Happy New Year!? for more details and an alternative strategy.
The second major issue with these New Year, New You goals is that they might trigger you to feel left out and make rash decisions.
No Goals for You
What if you don’t have a big goal to share, pursue and brag about on social media?
Not everybody has defined a big goal. A large percentage of the population doesn’t make New Year’s resolutions. That’s not necessarily bad; as I said, resolutions don’t work. But, the situation is a bit more dire than that. Approximately 80% of people never set goals for themselves at all.
I was a part of this 80% at one point in my life. I spent ten years telling people that I had no goals. I had set a big goal when I graduated college at age 22. Having grown up very poor, I had decided I was never going to live poor again. I set a goal to achieve a specific salary level by the time I was 30, which was my focus.
A few months before I turned 29, I changed jobs and achieved the salary goal that I focused on for seven years.
I had never really considered what would be important to me once that goal had been achieved. So, I just kind of shifted into neutral for about ten years. I had a series of mini-goals, but they all related to having a bigger salary or a more impressive title.
Every January, I would see people talking about their New Year, New You goals, but I didn’t have my own big goal. So I was feeling left out.
Sound familiar?
Trigger Warning: Oh No, FOMO
If you are somebody who hasn’t set goals for the upcoming year while everybody else is bragging about their big goals, you may be feeling a little triggered right now. When it seems like everybody else is chasing a bigger and better version of themselves, you may feel like you are being left out.
Because FOMO is a very real thing, this situation can lead to bad decisions. Wanting to fit in with the goals crowd may cause you to quickly set a half-hearted goal because it is what everybody else is doing. These goals are destined to fail and will shake your self-confidence as a goal-crusher, further limiting your future commitment to goal-setting.
Want to feel like a successful goal-crusher? You have a choice.
Instead of jumping into half-hearted goals just to fit in, you can choose to explore why you don’t have goals. This often boils down to one or both of the following:
- You Don’t Know What You Want
- You Don’t Know How to Set Good Goals
For the next few weeks, I will share a few tools and techniques to help you overcome these obstacles. Using these tools to build solid and relevant goals will take the first steps to unleash your inner goal-crusher. Doing this will set you on a path to living your best life.
Spin the Wheel
If you aren’t sure what you want or what goals you should set, the first step is to look at the current realities of your life.
Is every part of your life as good as you would like it to be?
Are you already living your best life?
If you can’t answer these questions with a resounding “yes!” you definitely have some potential goals just waiting for a little bit of your love.
A simple exercise can help you uncover these areas of opportunity, the Wheel of Life.
Download a free Wheel of Life worksheet in the
Resources section of OperationMelt.com
Using the Wheel of Life exercise, you will create a visual representation of your current level of satisfaction with each major area of your life. Once complete, the wheel will help you target the areas of your life that could use a little work. This will help you focus your goal-setting energy.
This exercise begins with a circle divided into multiple slices (like a pie) representing the most important areas of your life.
The sections of the Wheel of Life represent the most important areas of your life. The specific areas that you include on the wheel are flexible and entirely up to you. Here are the 8 that I have seen used most often, but I have also seen wheels that include spirituality in place of one of the other categories:
- Family & Friends
- Romance / Partner
- Fun
- Health
- Money
- Physical Environment (e.g., home, etc.)
- Personal Growth
- Career
Next, it is time to score each area. The center of the wheel is a 1, and the outer edges a 10. Rank your level of satisfaction with each area by filling in that piece of the pie to that level. When scoring your wheel, just go with your gut feel. There are no specific rules about the difference between a one and a ten.
You know YOU better than anyone else!
What’s Your Wheel Telling You?
Once you have completed filling in the wheel, it is time to interpret what your wheel is telling you.
Picture this as an actual wheel; would your ride be smooth or bumpy? The ideal wheel would give you a smooth ride. This means that all sections would be scored approximately equally versus big highs and lows. Ideally, every section would be scored above 7 and as close to 10 as possible.
Any particularly low scores would be areas of your life where you may want to prioritize action.
Your results may not be that clear, and you may have some areas that interact with others. For example, money may depend on career, and fun may be related to money. So, you may need to do a little thinking about how best to prioritize which areas to tackle and how.
The main objective is to identify where a low score in one category results from other factors. This will help you identify areas where improvement in one category will also yield dividends in other categories.
What Comes Next?
Once you have completed your wheel and identified the areas of your life that could use a little work, it is time to start exploring some options. How are you going to get those 3s to 5s, those 5s to 7s and those 7s up to that elusive 10? You know, living your best life!
We will start diving into that topic next week.
So What?
It’s that time of the year. Everybody is bragging about “new year, new you” goals and all the progress they are already making. What if you don’t have a big goal that you are pursuing? You may be feeling a little left out, and your FOMO may be triggered.
Don’t just follow the crowd and set a half-hearted New Years Resolution that is destined to fail. The better choice for goal success is to figure out what you really want so you can set your own big, meaningful goals. One easy exercise will help you get started by targeting the areas of your life that are most ready for some goal-setting.
Need some help getting started with the Wheel of Life or interpreting your results? Let me help.
Click Here to learn more about my Operation Melt coaching services.
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