When feeling overwhelmed by faraway goal

I believe it is the first trigger to create passion and bring you in action regarding what you want to achieve.

The important thing to understand is that the feelings we generate today are pointed in a new environment that was not the same environment in which the fight or flight that is an autonomic response, in an environment where this response was a guard against real physical danger - and not the uncertainty that we deal with on a psychological or cognitive level. In other words our environment has significantly changed but our physical evolution has not caught up with this - so our emotional centers continue to release responses that no longer suit what they were originally evolved for. The net result of that is that we are mentally stimulating hormones such as adrenalin and cortisol in a manner which is triggered by what we perceive inside our heads rather than what is actually happening in reality. The good news is that we can change our thinking to change the reality we perceive, so in this means, we can deal with our reality distortions - and one of those ways is to fake it till we make it. Words do matter for the simple reason that we transform imagination into real world realities and those realities are one's we hope are for the betterment of our society - but we can choose to move our imagination in whatever the direction of choices/decisions go. If feelings is then the language of these choices, emotions are the messages we should be listening to - and that is what emotional intelligence is about. As we take care to form our words, we can be equally mindful about our feelings - and there are different layers of feeling - some very concrete and linear, while other feelings are dynamic and subtle. Each emotion we we emit emanates from either a value we hold or a reaction which we do not consciously reason. Our emotions, like our fight or flight reaction are meant to point something out in our life, but we do not live anymore in a culture of storytellers or an oral culture, as we move from a written to a visual culture, the underlying sophistication we had about emotions make us less rather than more likely to read the root cause. In less demanding times our emotions were far more situational, so they communicated values far more directly than today living in a complex world. The complexity adds to what we are able to pay attention to and attention itself is finite. I can think things through to this sixth paragraph because my attention has not been exhausted - and that is because I have cut off competing attentions - in other words I have managed my mental bandwidth or at least make an effort to be aware that I have the bandwidth to think this through. I am answering this based on a free flow of my thoughts as they occur to me in the minute I am thinking this. If there are various stressful situations occurring in one's life, or issues which absorb a lot of our attention, we will not feel free to think the way I am thinking this - for the simple reason we do not have the bandwidth to either think through these thoughts or even follow the reasoning. Are we really overwhelmed by a far-away goal or do we have too much on our plate as we add to our mental shopping list a new far away goal. This brings me to our appetite for certainty and uncertainty. This at an emotional or spiritual level is the same as fitness is for a physical level. There are people who can lift heavy weights, while others are straining and stressing due to poorer health - so the energy state we have may dictate a need for certainty, beyond which threshold we get out of flow, or we may possess far greater capability and our threshold is higher. In a physical comparison would you run from a fight with Pee-Wee Herman or get into a fight with Mike Tyson? We are therefore not the same in our capacities and capabilities - so here it is good to know ourselves. If we know ourselves then think of what makes us get into flow and what gets us out of flow - and if we are too deep into overwhelm, Mihaly Cziksentimayhli's "Flow Theory" tells us move gradually into more and more anxiety, and if we are too shallow in underwhelm, the theory of Flow says we move more and more into boredom. Either anxiety moves us into psychological distress or boredom moves us into psychological depression. The question is whether you have this stretch within to ensure the anxiety that leads to progression or transition to one's next level of capability is within manageable parameters. That is also how physical fitness works - where we add some weights to push us to get us to a new level of fitness - but if we don't know what we are doing, we can injure ourselves physically or we try to do what is not healthy to do and we give up through discouragement. Finally, we must note our ability to be self-driven or whether we draw our energies from social relationship - if we are introverts what others think may not impact us, if we are extrovert - and this is enhanced even more if we happen to be more humble or more egotistical. All these frames do make a difference as to how we push ourselves and the motivations that either add or subtract from our energy. For sure we all need a healthy, vibrant environment and there are people who I call negative batteries, and so avoid these negative people whose only purpose in life is to suck away your life. At the same time there is a certain learned helplessness in always fueling our motivations through the opinions of others - rather than engaging our own thinking and then do the hard bit which is "deciding". Do note that the word "decision" means to cut off choices - not make more of them. The paralysis of having too many choices was well documented by Barry Schwarz in his talk "The Paradox of Choice". Even thought I have poured out a lot of thoughts here, there is no guarantee that I will act upon my own thoughts - there are natural blockers such as procrastination and change resistance where we get inspired to do something, but then do not follow through. Think "New Year Resolutions" here. We do not keep these resolutions because we make them too big too swallow - hence the overwhelm - rather than do what we do with our digestion system, which is to cut choices down to their smaller pieces and do what Johnny Cash said he did with his automobile - make it "one piece at a time". Whatever the reason for the overwhelm, it is far more nuanced than simply chanting affirmations as pointed out in the character of "Carolyn Burnham" in the 1999 movie American Beauty. Carolyn Burnham - American Beauty https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dadm_QQBKxo So long as we understand our own irrationalities, our own powers of reason, our limitations and capabilities, our will and visionary zeal, and a host of other factors that are much more than just a simple dream - that tell us who we are and what the likely outcome may be - but if we are simple and not anywhere over-thinking things like Carolyn Burnham - the chances are a simple affirmation can be helpful. In that case it is reframing our life - and frames play a big part how we see life. Indeed it is frames that advertisers, sellers and influencers utilize on us - so if a salesman can sell us something we did not actually intend to buy, think of what we can sell ourselves when we sell ourselves our own betterment and opportunity for a brighter, bolder and engaging future. We can both use reason to create a logical reality and we can use magic to create an innovative reality - so long as we don't end up in magical thinking or in logical loop of our own argument that leads us not engaging any action. [CityVP Manjit - 23 Mar 2016 - Capability & Talent]