If you have a long-term goal, how can you assess your progress at staying on track? There’s no point in setting a target if it means missing out on all the milestones along the way. With that being said, set no targets and you will get nowhere. You need to value the process itself and go for continuous achievement instead. If you stop to think about what you are giving up by not validating your progress towards your goals, then there’s simply no motivation in not reaching them. Self-validation is intrinsic and much more motivating than any external validation; think of yourself as unstoppable because you have already established positive momentum.
The only way to see this progression is to set targets and make sure they are specific. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are doing something well enough without any reward or recognition, because the only reward will be a feeling of emptiness. If you have no specific target, then you run the risk of reaching a lesser milestone than what you would have reached otherwise.
Sadly, we can’t always trust our eyes (or ears) when it comes to feedback; many times we can be too close to the source and our own biases influence us in ways that we cannot even imagine. With that being said, self-validation can be difficult to obtain because of the scope; you need a certain amount of success to validate your progress. For example, if you are trying to lose 10 pounds by working out and eating healthier and you don’t see any visible results, then you might end up questioning your approach. But, what if a month later the scales do go down but only by 1 pound? That’s not enough for the amount of effort that you have put in. You need to see tangible results; without them, it is hard to trust your body’s feedback on its own.
You must also understand that these are not concrete steps as they may seem. Setting no targets doesn’t mean that you don’t have any goals; what it does is that you need to go in with a sense of curiosity. The only way to be successful is to seek out opportunities; it’s like the old saying – “what gets measured gets managed.” What I mean by this is that if you want to break through a perceived barrier, then first you must realize what the barrier is so that you can move beyond it.
A lot of times, we can be too busy in life and forget about how often we can set big goals for ourselves. Once these goals are set, there needs to be something that triggers us towards achieving them. On the other hand, we can have goals without a negative consequence or without a reward. You might not find yourself motivated to achieve something if there’s no risk involved. Why do you think there are so many people who quit their jobs? It isn’t because they are lazy; it’s because they don’t want to face the consequences of being fired. If they are working somewhere where they get a paycheck, then they can be kept under some kind of authority; the risk is minimal, and the obsession over the goal becomes stronger because of this.
You need to know that you need goals to stay motivated. If no one told you to achieve something, then how would you even get there? Everyone needs a certain amount of encouragement in order to succeed. I am not suggesting that you should be chasing after some kind of reward for every single thing that you do, but it is important to have a strategy that will give out rewards when the time is right.
Knowing when the time is right can be difficult because we live in a society that has become disconnected from nature. As we move further and further away from our natural state, we get used to relying on technology and other tools instead of having a real connection with ourselves.
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