People who have endured emotional violence or difficult times have a hard time planning their future and have little idea how to achieve their goals. The Resource Psychology Project tells you how to get close to what you have planned, if it seems that you have forgotten how to move forward at all.
How ready are you to plan your next summer? What would you like to do in five years? Where would you like to live, what would you like to learn, what to see, who to meet? How do you think you’ll get what you want?
A surprisingly large number of people find it difficult to answer these questions, and especially the last one. It seems that few people feel in control of their lives enough to plan. No, of course, “if you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans”, but really planning your own future includes a factor of retreat to a fortified position or a change of tactics if the world turns out to be sharply against it.
Interestingly, dreaming is easier to learn than planning. And to dream boldly, on a scale. What difference does it make until no one asks what you will do to make this dream come true – and in most cases a person does not ask himself about it. Just so you don’t get discouraged.
Plan the steps to achieve the goal, of course, teaches many different interesting books in bright, usually soft covers. The essence of advice is to write down the goal and break it down into small steps. But for someone who is not used to plan far, the second sentence – a very difficult task. How exactly should look the steps to change the city of residence or learn a new profession, if you have to also on the old to support the pants to work, and to monitor the life?
Nowadays, a little help from the Internet, where people who have already achieved the same goals, talk about the past stages. But their experience is not always suitable due to other starting conditions: other skills, the availability of support from family, in the most literal sense of starting capital. In addition, some goals entice too few people to easily find someone to share their experience.
There’s another way: the strategy of ultra-small targets…
This method is slightly different from the step-by-step planning strategy. It’s for those who find it easier to climb a mountain by climbing it so quietly that no one knows you’re climbing it at all. Although it has something in common with the strategy from popular advice books: first you should take a pen and paper to capture your goals.
You have to imprint them in pairs. There are two ways: to record pairs that are connected to each other, or, conversely, connected very little. One goal is a big, dream goal, and the other is not just a small goal, but one so insignificant that you won’t want to share it with the death penalty. Normal people do not even think about it, they will immediately inform you (well, or it seems to you).
Examples of couples connected.
Big goal: to become famous. Small: like a celebrity, get up later in the morning.
Big goal: to learn calligraphy. Small: to get used to writing letters every night for thirty minutes.
Big goal: to become a really good hostess. Small: to learn how to throw garbage in the trash can in time so as not to run into it in the evenings after work and not to panic when someone goes to visit.
Big goal: to move to another country. Small: to learn the tacit rules of decency of this country and to learn to think in different situations that in that country would have solved the issue differently or would have had a different dialogue. Just as a training or a game.
As you can see, it is not difficult to come up with a plan to achieve most of the tiny goals – for example, to allocate yourself in the evening from five minutes to the usual prescriptions, gradually increasing the time. But some of the goals, if you look closely, may be big: in order to get up later in the mornings, you’ll probably have to change the whole way of life, and every evening half-hour and even five minutes of calligraphy will be very much disturbed by the fact that you have nowhere to go with the prescriptions, or your relatives deliberately twitch you if you are busy doing something that you like. Then you’ll have to add new target lists until you form pairs where a small target is achievable.
Unrelated pairs seem less logical to use
Still, they can help you learn to take control of life in your own hands, gradually abandoning the feeling of helplessness you have learned. It’s much easier to imagine them.
Big goal: I want to learn to speak French. A small goal: and train every night to draw arrows in front of my eyes.
Big goal: I want to pump up my stomach to make it flat. Little Goal: And shake the sheet on the open balcony every morning.
Big goal: I want to be a model. Little goal: and I want to read classic literature every Saturday for half an hour.
The peculiarity of such lists is that the “small” half of the pair should be a process, not a result, let alone a deadline. It is easier or seems simpler to come to the repeatability of a certain process, which seriously strengthens self-confidence and returns the feeling of some kind of inner force.
Does the constant achievement of small goals (provided that the old set some new ones) certainly help to achieve large? Let’s be honest: sometimes. And sometimes we just make your life much better.
