Navigating Stormy Seas by Setting Micro-Goals
Like setting a course with a compass, a single degree – a micro-goal – can greatly impact where you are headed.
Transitioning from the turbulent seas to stable land is a journey bound to have plenty of emotion. But what if I told you that you get to choose what you feel?
Sounds great, difficult, but great. It is hard, but anything easy is not usually worth fighting for.
The best way to launch yourself from the murky sea floor to the blue skies of self-sustainment is to choose what feeling you want to achieve.
Do you need to feel more in control, successful, adventurous, passionate, or just plain happy?
Any answer is the right answer as long as it’s what YOU want. Once you can identify how you want to feel, think of what you can do to make that emotion become a reality. The key here is to make it a small micro-goal. Something that won’t overwhelm you before you’ve even begun the full-on swim back to the mainland (aka. Your overarching, “I feel 100% fulfilled goal”).
One of my biggest challenges is time – the lack thereof.
It seemed like no matter how fast I tried to work, the clock stole seconds and minutes from me. It wasn’t long until whole hours were missing. I wanted to feel accomplished with less anxiety about the things I didn’t have enough time to do. My micro-goal was to start my day earlier. If I woke up even an hour earlier, it would add an hour of productivity to my day. And to ensure I still got a full eight hours, I set my next micro-goal to getting to bed earlier the night before. Working these adjustments into my life took time until they became habits. But no matter how much I didn’t want to get up or into bed in the evenings, I stuck with it for at least two weeks. If it hadn’t started clicking for me by then, I wasn’t going to get frustrated, I was just going to tweak the plan…come up with a new micro-goal as a possible solution to my time loss.
Make sure it serves YOU, regardless of the micro-goal or baby step. It could impact someone else positively in the end, but that’s not why you’re making the change. I made it so I could feel “more accomplished with less anxiety about the things I don’t have enough time to get to.” Remind yourself of your “why” emotion often – because YOU are enough of a reason to change!
