I have clear-cut, particular, intense, emotional, measurable goals.
This is the next installment of examining affirmations about goals. This one is about having specific goals. It’s a very targeted reminder that goals are exponentially better the more specific and real you can make them. Notice the third and fourth items in that description: intense and emotional. That’s not something you see very often when someone tells you how to set goals, but these are excellent points to consider.
We take the other three for granted. Just about everyone is going to tell you to make your goals clear-cut, particular and measurable. Those tell you what your goal is and reminds you to make it so that you can tell when you’ve achieved it. Intense and emotional tell us to make our goals real though. It means we should make our goals something that affects us in our gut. We get excited about achieving the goal and are committed inside, in our hearts.
Intense means that the importance and impact of the goal should be big. Setting a goal to get off the couch in 5 minutes is neither intense, nor emotional for most people. Setting a goal to run a marathon after a debilitating injury is huge. You can get behind the emotions there. That’s a triumph worthy of national attention and praise. It’s intense because you’ll have to work harder than you’ve ever worked or ever will work to achieve that goal.
While that’s an extreme goal since most aren’t in that starting place, it still illustrates how your main goals should be life-changing in some way. Isn’t that the point of a goal? If you don’t set a goal to change your life or someone else’s, what’s the point of setting it? How invested in it can you be? That’s the other side of the coin. An intense goal will cause you to be emotionally connected and invested in it or you’ll be indifferent. There’s no middle ground. If your goals don’t evoke an emotional response, how likely are you to work toward them?
Intense and emotional goals don’t mean they have to be grand, public or extravagant goals. They do need to have a major impact on you or someone else. That impact is what will generate your emotional response to the goal. Little things generate little responses. The greater the impact on our lives we perceive, the greater our response. For instance, if you have a job and your boss asks you to spend 5 minutes a day doing this new task, you probably won’t think twice about doing it. If your boss asks you to add a task to your day that will take two hours to do and you still have to do all the rest of your work, aren’t you going to respond differently? Won’t this make a major impact on your life? And for no gain because you’ll be paid the same amount as before? Won’t this trigger a major emotional response in you?
Conversely, if you add a certification to your skills so that you can earn more or charge more so you can better take care of yourself and your family, won’t you be more likely to commit to the extra work at no pay that goes into attaining that certification? Won’t you be willing to sacrifice in the short-term for the greater long-term benefit? Of course. That’s because intense and emotional goals should have a positive impact on your life.
Also note that subtle distinction I’ll talk about in a later post. Goals that come from you will be far easier to commit to than goals that are imposed from someone else. Those are far easier to have a positive intense and emotional experience.
