Overambitious goals

We hear so much about the benefits of setting goals which will motivate us to be productive and achieve. Deciding what you desire may be a task that enables you to focus. Yet, maybe you know someone who has set high standards and failed to reach them?Maybe this sounds like you?

It's common to feel discouraged when you don't satisfy a need or achieve a goal. What kinds of questions are you prompted to ask yourself? Didn't I work hard enough? Were my sights too high? Do my results mean people think I'm stupid or incapable? Why didn't I set the bar lower? Will I ever achieve anything worthwhile? It's useful to reflect on matters to help you sort all this out.

1) External perception is a distraction. What other people think of your choices and results is not as important as how you view yourself. You determine the nature of your own learning curve. You may grow to respect other people's opinions of your abilities and potential, but don't accept someone else's view of who you are without reviewing and respecting your own views.

2) Reprimand will get you nowhere faster.You only have a certain amount of energy. What energy you exert to criticize, doubt, whine, complain or discourage yourself actually reduces energy available to propel you forward. Ask yourself what benefits you gain from holding yourself back this way. Self-sabotage is not an effective strategy to refine or achieve goals.

3) Check your vibes. What you think, say and do sends vibrations to your core. You influence your energy patterns, what you interpret as encouraging or discouraging. Attitude is everything.

4) Re-evaluate your time frame. Just because you haven't yet achieved a particular goal, doesn't mean all hope is lost. Time is experienced differently and awareness evolves according to may variables. Remind yourself schedules are contractible and stretchable. Work with that.

5) The way you react to your circumstances determines where you go from here. Tell yourself it doesn't matter so much what you have or haven't done. Instead, turn to what you choose to learn and how you plan to benefit from past experiences. You control moving forward.

Picking fights or temporary amnesia?

You may get the impression that people you meet desire to pick fights or just make your life difficult. They may seem to aim to prevent you from doing what you wish to do. Perhaps they appear suspicious of your choices or strongly disagree with your ideas. Would they be forgetting you also have opinions? To you, these people may be illogical. They seem irrational or inflexible. Their opinions may seem clouded by closed-mindedness, prejudice, resentment, jealousy, ignorance or a lack of desire to understand you. When you judge other people you forget you also judge yourself.

Consider a cultural centre with an older generation of members who speak native languages and desire to preserve and share their national traditions. At the same time, the younger generation doesn't speak the native languages and feels left out or unwelcome at cultural events they don't understand. Imagine a council with mostly older members as well as a few younger members. Where the president and other older members fervently resist change, yet desire young people to be more active in the cultural centre, this may put you in a quandary about what to do.

If you choose to see life not as an endless battle for those unreachable final results, but as an endless series of experiences to learn, then you may ask yourself why people behave as they do.

If you choose to view contention as a teacher, then the reason for encountering disagreeable people becomes clear. A journey is a process to enable you to identify root causes of feelings.

If you choose to ask why people resist your agenda, and ideas you view as necessary and sensible, then you may grow to sense meaning in both individual and collective agendas, and how either one alone is seen as a threat.

If you choose to imagine yourself in the position of contentious people, raise your awareness to their full experience, then you may realize you may fear losing a concrete sense of who you are.

If you choose to empathize with hidden fears, and re-create or refine your vision, then you're more likely to arrive at an acceptable compromise and result in more people embracing change.

If you choose to recognize that a single agenda of self-definition can be served for all, then distinctly different yet, remarkably connected experiences of each person can be embraced.

If you choose to rise above your own temporary amnesia, not be provoked by rigid disagreement, then you will recognize that each position taken is simply an effort to reinforce who we really are.

If you choose to see a given situation from multiple points of view, and present strategies that would appeal widely, then you're likely to discuss possibilities considered meaningful to everyone.

Delay isn't denial

Remind yourself that just because events do not unfold when you want them to, this doesn't mean you will be denied what you hope to experience. What about the gift of anticipation? You may not yet have learned waiting can be good for you. Perceived delays can actually be desireable.  Tell yourself you're simply being prepared for what is to come.  You'll enjoy the future more  because you have occasion to savour how it evolves and get things out of each step. Recognize the benefits of what you gain from waiting will outweigh the things you don't like.   Short-term discomfort will help you appreciate the longer time gains. You can also reframe irritations. After all, your attitude determines if you choose to like or dislike what happens. What about you?

For example, if you get uptight waiting to hear whether or not you were chosen for a new job, you may be focusing on the wrong things.  Make allowances.  Put your expectations aside.  Do what you can and focus on 'the here and now'.  What about positive experiences right in front of you? Aren't you missing out on the pleasure you could be experiencing where you are today?

Consider you may dwell on ways people irritate you.  When you magnify what you dislike, you focus on faults and will find it difficult to strengthen meaningful, successful relationships.  If you desire relationships, realize you have idiosynchrosies and weaknesses just like other people. Rather than be a complainer or a nag, highlight the good qualities. When to talk negatively about other people, this reflects back on yourself.  It detracts from your sense of success. 

Negative thinking causes you to second guess your choces. We all have good qualities inside.  Encourage, appreciate and praise friends and situations.  Remind yourself you shape yourself based on what you choose to experience.  The passage of time is required for relationships and situations to develop depth and longevity. Rather than focus on what is missing, why not be grateful for what success you already have or have had on the road to new kinds of success?

Success in any area of your life is accessible as you believe in yourself and your potential. How you feel about yourself comes across in what you do, how you think, behave and treat people. What goes around comes around and expecting success will contribute to experiencing it. Define what this concept means in your mind.  Your life will evolve as you attract your imagined views.  Remind yourself you do not only work on your timeline. Variables outside your control influence the where, when and how you will experience success. Hold on and believe.

Realize contentment

Success is embodied in feelings of contentment.  Peace arises when you aren't comparing who has more or less than you. Being yourself and accepting all that you are brings you a sense of success. What makes you believe a sense of success evolves from external things or action? 

True success is felt as you are deeply grounded in being yourself, when you're not searching for consolation or hoping to do what you have not yet done.  Drop comparisons.  To see yourself as neither higher nor lower, in terms of where you are, this is success.  You can become intuitive and sense life offers more possibilities than your senses have the capacity to realize.

Success is more than a state of mind.  Its a state of being.  Rather than think about what you must do to understand and achieve, why not experience success without thinking?  Be happy without a cause.  Attract and create the feelings you envision.  Success is sensing the possible and being it.

Imagine success regardless of your external situation. Anything with a cause is never permanent, but time dependent and predictably disappear. Feelings and circumstances that have no cause will last forever.  Become successful through your own inner transformation.  Look inside yourself for the truly impersonal experience.

Setbacks are worth it

It's not unusual to feel as though you may come face to face with a prospective disaster. What is it about people, opportunities and events that seem to arrive just in the nick of time? It may not be easy to understand why we seem to be held back from what we desire to do, and then, you realize that maybe something beyond you has good reason to intervene. Consider this story:

Early Monday morning, Mary was in a hurry to get to the office. She had scheduled new client appointments and felt they would lead to a bonus she needed to move to a better neighborhood.  As she rushed around her apartment finishing last minute preparations, the phone rang. her babysitter was sick. Understanding as Mary was, this left her in a bind. Her trusted neighbour was away.  She thought of taking her baby to the office.  Her secretary might understand? Maybe not! Mary thought twice and decided to contact a friend who agreed to look after her baby. In order to get baby to her friend's home, Mary had to take a different route to work. In doing so, she encountered unexpected traffic hold ups in construction. As time passed, her stress level rose. 

After she dropped her baby off with her friend, she headed back toward the city and the office. Just as she thought she was getting ahead, she encountered a minor road accident which set her back again.  When the ambulance had a hard time getting though to the handful of victims, the car in front accidentally backed into hers.  There was more damage than a broken tail-light. Mary was forced to call her office to cancel those anticipated appointments.  She felt devastated. After all, those leads had taken a year to become real prospects.   At that point, she felt that everything was against her. Something about Murphy's Law, you know, when anything and everything can go wrong, then it will? She tried to stop her mind from thinking that way.

Once in the garage where the mechanic was looking at Mary's car, she sat down and sipped a coffee.  The radio was blaring and just after 8:45, the station cut programs to a news bulletin. 

"Flight 11 crashed at roughly 490 mph (790 km/h or 425 knots) into the north side of the North Tower of the World Trade Centre, between floors 94 and 98."  Mary was clearly astonished. The mechanic came running into the waiting area to listen to the rest of the broadcast.

"Do you believe that?" he asked, scratching his head. "That can't really be! It's crazy!"

"Oh my gracious!" replied Mary, covering her mouth with her hand.  "My office is on that block."

"You're darn lucky, lady!" cried the mechanic. "Good thing you weren't there on time today!" He went back to work but left the radio on. He wanted to do things to take his mind of the news. 

Just after 9am, the radio station cut to another bulletin: "Flight 175 crashes at about 590 mph (950 km/h) into the south side of the South Tower, banked between floors 78 and 84." (More gasps)

As she sat back in disbelief to make some phone calls, all Mary could think was how thankful she was for her sick babysitter, for the road construction and accidents that had held her up, for the cut on her hand that had required time to retrieve a band-aid, her for her dear old friend who lived in suburbs, for things that had set her behind that morning.  Setbacks were worth it.