goals:
The idea of goal flexibility is within the name itself. A lot of bad feelings comes from missing goals. but goals should be used and serve a purpose for you. What a lot of people do instead is have a goal and then give everything up for the goal even though the goal is no longer useful in helping you build the life you want.
It’s helpful to remember that goals serve you, not, you serve your goals.
You don’t need to feel bad about something to change your actions. Maybe bad feelings help you change your behaviour but they’re not always necessary. They’re not “bad” either, because you can always use things to give you more momentum or use that as a motivator.
Especially when the goal “turns” into an impossible goal. For example: people will have a goal to get 100% on an exam, but after they’ve written the exam, and they’ve gotten their marks back they’ll still have the goal to get 100% but they can’t do anything about it. It’s better to focus on what you can control and remind yourself that there are things that you can control and things you can’t. The Goal turns into an impossible goal because it’s impossible to change the past. This is where you have to let go of goals.
Some people are just more quick in letting go of goals. and you’re usually not giving up on the end goal, you’re just letting go of the sub-goal that would’ve helped you get to your goal “faster”.
You just need to be more flexible with goals you set that are no longer achievable. Adding extra conditions is another example of switching your goal of xyz to having a goal for feedback as in, you set a goal to learn coding in 10 months because “johny” learnt it in 11 months and you’re just as smart or smarter than him. The goal you have in your mind isn’t really to learn coding, it’s a goal to prove that you’re already smart or smarter than “Johny”. why else have the 11 month goal? the time it takes you to learn something is how long it takes you to learn. The only thing you can really do is devote more or less resources into achieving it and to put more resources into actions that take you closer to the goal means you’ll have to sacrifice other things. so the real question isn’t the time frame because who gives a shit. You can’t directly/easily control the time it takes to learn something but you can control how much energy, time and resources you put into learning the new skill.
This is a big problem with an insecure view of self image. There’s fragility in the way you set your goal, if you set your goal: “do X in a time frame” with the intent to prove that you’re already smart than this is just you trying to stroke your ego.
The only reason to set a time for a goal is because you need it done by then or else X and there are clear boundaries and distinctions for when you hit your goal. You can then take a look at your progress periodically and adjust how much resources you’re devoting to hit that goal.