What would happen if you focused on how you want to feel this year?

A lengthy blog title but an excellent question!

It is still very much the season of goal setting (though as a disclaimer in my opinion it is ALWAYS the season for goal setting there is no right or wrong time to focus on your growth) and I pose this question to challenge you but also to make you think about how you felt last year, how you feel right now and how you want to feel going forward.

When setting goals we often focus the end result on a place, a moment in time, an achievement or something materialistic. How often do you set goals that centre around your feelings and your emotions? Now don’t get me wrong setting goals or working towards a fixed end result is important sometimes but what happens after you get there? What’s next? What would happen if you attached a feeling to the goal as well?

I’ll give you an example that might help make this make sense…….

In time’s gone by I have been a January gym cliche, I have started a new diet, hit the gym all with a mental superficial body image or target weight in mind. It has often been easy for me to stick at for a short period of time but eventually the motivation has dropped off and that future scale weight or mental image hasn’t been that much a priority or motivator anymore.

So let’s flip it.

What if my goal was instead to feel healthy and strong? Changing the goal to a feeling means that I would have to maintain the actions in a different way. I would have to think about how the things I do contribute to my feelings rather than what I see in the mirror or what it says on the scales. Changing the goal to a feeling means that in this case it becomes part of my lifestyle and much easier to check in on myself, I can ask myself questions like, “what have I done to make myself feel healthy today”? I can break this goal down and focus on it in the present rather than looking ahead to a destination. It also removes the all or nothing approach as I can do things that make me feel healthy and still find balance.

What if you have already decided your goals and have started working towards them?

If you have already decided on your goals for the year you can still do this and actually adding a feeling to your goal is a great way to strengthen it. In NLP when working with a client on their goals one of the questions we will ask after we have established what the goal is, “and what will that do for you?” In asking this question we want the individual to explore what else, aside from the end result , the goal will give them. This is where we encourage them to think about all of the other positive by-products to their goal such as how it might improve their quality of life, how it might improve their mental health, how it might give them more freedom or improve their relationships. Having an idea about how our goals should make us feel or how we want them to make us feel gives us another measure for success. For instance if one of my goals is to be happy and I am not, it gives me an opportunity to re-evaluate, change tactic and hopefully move forward in a happier way.

If you want to spend some time exploring how you can connect with your goals in a more powerful way, or you still haven’t decided your goals for this year yet I am taking on new NLP clients, book a consultation today!