Align your Actions with your Life Goals

We’re all running and most of us are doing so quite fast! But are we sure we’re running in the right direction? There is no one fixed “right” direction as such because what may be right for one person may be wrong for another and vice-versa.

What, then, can one consider the right direction? The answer to this question can only be known once you are sure about what you want from your life. When we know clearly what we want to achieve or do in our lifetime, in the short term and also in the long term, we can sort out our life beautifully.

Read our complimentary post on “goal setting” – Power of goal setting

We can then ensure that we are moving in the direction that leads us to our short-term as well as long-term life goals instead of away from it. Easy as all this might seem while reading, it is, in fact, quite difficult for most people to do in practical life.

After one is clear about one’s life goals, one can align each one of his actions to the direction which can lead him to the pre-decided goal instead of away from it.

How Non-alignment Creates a Vicious Cycle

Smita, a mother of two, wanted the best for her children in life. She undertook great pains to please her children and invested in the best of toys and games for them (even though they were hard for her to afford) to make her kids happy.

However, every time one of her two children did not listen to her, she would reprimand them a bit too aggressively and even slap them at times.

This, obviously, hurt her kids’ emotions deeply and their personality too got affected negatively due to her aggressive and over-controlling style of parenting. They became withdrawn and aggressive instead of being calm or happy.

When she saw her children remain upset frequently, Smita became even angrier and a vicious cycle got created before anyone could realize. However, she did not bother about how her parenting style was affecting her children and what she, herself, was doing to them because she was sure that she was doing the right thing by being controlling and overly strict with her children.

In her mind, it was necessary for a parent to be so. There was no other ‘right’ way!

Her actions, however, were ‘wrong’ because she was not going in the direction she wanted to. Had she opened her eyes and seen how she, herself, was causing much emotional disturbance in her children, she could have improved but there was no scope of that happening since she was so blinded by her own perspective that there was no scope of her seeing beyond it. A very common folly that most of us are guilty of!

Conclusion

This is exactly what we must be careful about in our own lives. Be honest with yourself when choosing your life goals and live your life in alignment with what you desire otherwise you will not feel satisfied or content.

You’ll be working hard but still won’t feel like you’ve done anything worthwhile; simply because the actions you might be performing might be in direct clash with your life goals.

Over a period of time, one tends to feel empty and even depressed unless one stops to check what is really going wrong in one’s life. Let’s say you decide that your primary goal in life is to live a stress-free life. Anytime minor tensions spring up, you can repeat your life goal to yourself and cross the minor hurdle without getting stressed.

This will of course take practice and effort but if anything is worth it, your life goal is worth it. Slowly but steadily, as you come closer to achieving your life’s goals, you will experience a deep satisfaction instead of feeling lost and drained since you would have led your life in a sorted out and aligned manner.