Are you in a toxic relationship with your goals?

It’s the end of January, we made it!

January somehow always seems like both the longest and the fastest month of the year where everyone’s frantically wanting to make changes while still recovering from December. 

It's a weird month!

And I wanted to share something that I've been seeing my clients experience all month.

“I’m already behind.”

The first time I heard a client say that was January 4th.  Yes, seriously. 

So many of us create our plans for our goals from the perfectionist fantasy mindset, which in my experience tends to be unrealistic and with zero flexibility. And when life happens, as it inevitably does or things don't go 1200% according to plan, we throw up our hands and go… 

I’VE ALREADY FAILED

I’m behind now… and I’ll never catch up. 

I have something to tell you my darling friend… you might be in a toxic relationship relationship with your goals. 

Imagine if you went on a date and met some lovely person and immediately decided that THIS person was the answer. Being with this person was going to fix everything. This relationship was going to change who you are and finally allow you to accept yourself. 

That's a lot of pressure! And the moment that person didn't live up to the huge expectation of changing how you felt about yourself, you'd get disappointed and either double down on the pressure for them to fix you or maybe you’d just give up.

Not the healthiest of relationships right? 

But that's how we treat our goals.  When we set goals we often have this idea that reaching the goal is the point. And that result we attain is what will make us happy. 

So when things don't go perfectly we freak out because we make it mean that we won't get that result and we’ll never be happy. 

But that's not actually how it works. 

Our goals aren’t there to make us happy, but to change us.

In order to achieve a goal, to do something we’ve never done before we actually have to go through a process of transformation. We essentially become a new version of ourselves. 

We become the person who can achieve that goal. 

And THAT does not happen in a perfectly planned and executed way. 

Transformation is messy. Transformation takes time. It takes trial and error. It takes practice. 

There is NEVER “perfect progression”. 

Who we become during that transformation is the purpose of our goals because that is what changes who we are and how we feel about ourselves. 

So if you’re feeling behind or like you've failed… breathe… breathe again… and take off the pressure. 

Change is a messy process, let it be messy.