Are Your Goals Your Friends or Enemies?

Are you setting goals that sit back and judge you as not good enough? Or are you using kindness, curiosity and creativity to reach for those health goals?

A few weeks ago, I lay in bed contemplating where I currently was in my goals for this year. I set my goals quarterly and was not even halfway toward two of them. However, I was halfway through the first quarter of the year. I saw where I was and didn’t see how I would reach my goals. I put thought into the goals I go after. I want perfection with every box checked off. As I lay there, I decided there was almost no possible way to achieve that goal. And that was the moment when my inspiration and curiosity almost died, and my goals almost became my enemies.

Perfectionism for your goals is death to your inspiration and curiosity. The brain is a goal-seeking organism. I love this quote from?Mark Batterson?in his book?The Circle Maker, “Setting a goal creates structural tension in your brain, which will seek to close the gap between where you are and where you want to be, who you are and who you want to become.”

The problem is we see where we are on any given day and where we want to be. We want to be on top of the podium wearing the gold of a completed goal, but sometimes we fail. In my case, I have failed more often than I have succeeded. So what happens when you fail? How do you respond? Should you rethink or quit? Creativity, as it turns out, can help us salvage those goals, and here is why.?

Creativity, Attention, Motivation & Your Goals

On a rainy afternoon in 1940, a fifteen-year-old dreamer named?John Goddard?pulled out a piece of paper and wrote “My Life List” at the top. This list contained the goals he wanted to accomplish before he died. And they were no garden-variety goals. Milk a poisonous snake. Skin-dive to forty feet and hold breath for two and a half minutes underwater. Learn jujutsu. Land on and take off from an aircraft carrier. Run a mile in five minutes. Retrace the travels of Marco Polo and Alexander the Great. Marry and have kids. Upon his death, he had completed 109 out of the 127 original goals.

That sounds like a fantastic goal-filled life, right? Like all he had were rainbows and lollipops. Well, not exactly. He was married three times. His good friend, who decided to kayak the Nile River with him, drowned. He also almost made it to study the Komodo dragon on Komodo Island but was 20 miles off the island when his boat broke down. Undoubtedly, Mr. Goddard lived a life where he maintained curiosity and motivation for his goal list. Despite personal struggles and failures, he had to be creative and problem-solve to achieve his bigger goals.?

Neuroimaging shows that the people that are the most creative as they age are the ones that have a higher working capacity. They have changes in their brain that facilitate creativity. How did they get these changes? To have a higher working capacity, you have to practice bringing attention to your patterns of day-in and day-out life. To have a higher working capacity, you have to practice motivating yourself and using persistence day in and day out. When you practice paying attention, motivating yourself, and persisting through a task, you are literally changing your brain.

The ability of the brain to re-wire, and thus effectively to re-program itself, is called neuroplasticity. And what’s incredibly exciting about neuroplasticity is its availability throughout our lives. The prefrontal cortex (front part of the brain) in people with more working capacity has more connections allowing it to be more creative. Those connections didn’t come quickly. They struggled to make those connections, and it was the struggle that helped their brains grow and change.?

There was?a study in 2012?looking at working memory and creativity. In the study, musicians were asked to come up with three original pieces of music based on a theme (e.g., spring, fall, winter). They found that the musicians with greater working capacity had a more creative THIRD piece. The first two pieces of music were just as creative as the musicians with low working memory. After they persisted and struggled to compose the third piece, the front part of their brain started ramping up their creative output.?

Struggling and Smarts

Here is the problem we face. We have been brought up as a culture in the United States to believe that smart=success and success happens naturally when we are smart.?

"I think that from very early ages, we [in America] see the struggle as an indicator that you're just not very smart. It's a sign of low ability — people who are smart don't struggle, they just naturally get it. Whereas in Asian cultures, they tend to see struggle more as an opportunity for growth.”?Jim Stigler

We have been taught that a struggle when we are kids indicates weakness. This carries on into adulthood. In Eastern cultures, struggling is tolerated and often used to measure emotional strength. Struggling is just another way of saying that you are failing often and sometimes in front of others before you figure out how to succeed.?

People who hit their goals understand that failure is key to success. A famous quote by Thomas Edison says, “I have not failed 10,000 times. I just found 10,000 ways it won’t work.” When you dissect success, what you will find as you cut is failure through and through—success, as it turns out, is the frosting built on a cake made of failures. The failures were not a bad thing because, without them, we would never have baked anything at all.

We seem to celebrate failure and struggle and love quotes about how we will survive etc. But how often do we sit back and revel in the struggle of good work towards a worthy goal? How often do we teach our kids to embrace failure?

Sara Blakely, businesswoman and founder of Spanx, grew up with her father asking, “What did you fail at today?” He would be disappointed when she had nothing to tell him. What her dad did for her changed what failure was to her. Failure was not trying. Failure was giving up.?

When we start lifestyle change journeys to lose weight, eat right, add in exercise, or prioritize rest, we need to understand that there will be a lot of?not?hitting our goals along the way. Lifestyle change requires changing our daily life patterns, habits, and rhythms.?

I have not hit most of the goals I set out to hit six years ago, but my life six years ago looks nothing as it does now. Each time I miss a goal, I have a choice. Do I let the goal become an inspiration to teach me so I work on my creativity? Do I become curious and grow? Or do I measure myself against my desired standard and judge myself as not good enough?

My goal for you is to let your desires & your goals be your friend, not your enemy. It is time to be nicer to yourself and revel in your struggles if possible. Those struggles and failures are baking your success. When you can do that more often, the best is yet to come.

DIG Deep Action Steps:

Get?Deliberate: Grab a goal that you have failed at and see if you can get creative. Grab a pen and start writing about what made that goal hard but why you still want to pursue it. What can you tweak to make the goal something that works better in your schedule? Be kind to yourself and make that goal your friend.

Get?Inspired: Create your own inspiring goals!?Check out my free course?on finding your motivating picture-perfect scene to push you through the struggles ahead.

Get?Going: Check out this bonus free course I just finished on?Restoring Your Wellness Story?This course is designed to help you if you struggle with patterns and habits killing your goals. I will only have it free for the next eight weeks, and then it will move to a paid course! Please check it out while it is free!