Realizing goals & believing in your plan

November 13, 2006 4:28 PM

How do you regain your sense of self and autonomy in personal decision-making?

Somehow I’ve lost touch with my ability to confidently preside over my own life and pursue personal goals, particularly the ones that require taking a big leap outside of my comfort zone. It’s a two part problem: (1) I’ve lost my self-assuredness. It’s like I need a trusted friend to validate my ideas and plans, since I’m just too timid to start anything without reassurance. (2) I’ve lost touch with my personal goals, the ones I had always vowed to achieve regardless of outside factors. I’m letting other people’s pessimism or doubts about my decisions influence my thinking.

I’ve tried keeping a journal to get in touch with what I want out of life. Unfortunately, this has been counter-productive since I begin to think about where I am now and where I had hoped to be, and it feels like there’s an impossibly long way to go. By the way, I’m not depressed, just eager to formulate a plan and take action.

So, how do you get back in touch with personal goals and start believing in your own decisions? Do you have a special thing you do or place you go to re-center yourself? And how can you avoid the cycle where you develop a plan, then analyze all the potential pitfalls and feel like you need to start over with a new plan, yet again?

posted by pricklypear to Human Relations (3 answers total)

When you're in the arena of assessing your life goals, you're usually dealing with quite far-reaching, complex bodies of activity necessary to achieve them, assuming your life goal planning spans a few years or more. Trying to process every last detail all at once to, say, become an astronaut, would be incredibly overwhelming, and as such often turns into a deterrent to even embarking on the journey.

I think the secret to planning/executing your life goals is to deal with first things first. When I'm faced with a goal that involves a lot of steps, I try to focus on the initial steps, without spending too much time trying to work out the details of the steps that follow. Depending on the frame of mind I'm in (sometimes I'm more easily deterred than others), I'll make the gradations between steps more and more fine, even to the point that my first step may be simply to get out of bed on day one. The idea is that you want to make steps toward goals that you can achieve, so as you're checking them off the list, you're building the momentum of self-confidence to move closer to attaining your end goal. It's kind of like exercising: it gets easier the more you do it.

As for believing in your own decisions, what works for me is being able to accept potential failure. If I can accept that my plan may fail, and that if it does, I'll pick myself up and try again, well, does it matter if it fails? Life's about the journey, right? If you're making decisions for yourself, failing and learning and trying again along the way, I don't think the failures are so important. The people who have been most successful throughout history have been so not because they didn't fail, but because they persevered.

Take some chances. Start small. Don't be afraid to fail. I think it's important to get out there and do. Sometimes you have to kickstart self-confidence, but once you get rolling, it gets easier to hold onto.
posted by Brak at 5:13 PM on November 13, 2006

I agree with all of what Brak said. In addition, if you need an extra nudge of confidence, select a small item that you already cherish. Maybe it's a necklace that belonged to your grandmother or a pebble you found on a beach.

Pretend you're a kid again, and imagine this item giving you the power to step outside of your box and do things you can't normally do. When you're getting ready to take a risk or confront a challenge, hold your item in your hand, and imagine yourself soaking in its powers.

Sounds silly, I know, but visualizations can be effective in changing your behavior or your perception of your boundaries. Think of it like an athlete and his lucky socks, or whatever. If you're open to the idea, it might just work, but if you're too skeptical, it definitely won't.
posted by nadise at 5:52 PM on November 13, 2006

Honestly, I know what you're feeling. I've had the experience of having a what I believe to be a good idea disintegrate under the weight of a single mocking comment from a friend or family member.

The best advice I can offer from my limited experience with life is to take the first step towards your goal. You don't need to figure out every step between you and where you want to be right now. Just the next one.

Just take the first step in the right direction; you can always make course corrections later. It's a lot easier to steer a moving car than a parked one.
posted by JDHarper at 8:35 PM on November 13, 2006