Golden Oldie: Whose Goals Are You Pursuing?
by Miki Saxon
Poking through 11+ years of posts I find information that’s as useful now as when it was written.
Golden Oldies is a collection of the most relevant and timeless posts during that time.
Last Wednesday I noted with the year three quarters over people were likely to start obsessing and stressing about accomplishing the goals they set last January. I also said I would discuss goals further today.
Topping the list of choosing goals is the need to identify whose goals are — as explained in this post from 2009. Next Monday I’ll share one more bit of insight about goals from way back in 2006.
Read other Golden Oldies here.
This might come as a shock, but there is no Eleventh Commandment stating, “Thou shalt place thy career above all things in thy life and draw all sustenance, mental and spiritual, as well as economic, from it.”
For decades I’ve held (and preached) the career-as-part-of-life MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™), as opposed to the reverse.
Life is LARGE; career is but a small part of the whole. A major problem is created when the adjectives (and, therefore, the attitudes) are reversed.
Steve Roesler has a great post on a better way to look at your work and your life.
“The issue of work-life balance is about what kind of a life you want to have. Work plays a part in that. Decisions that you make about life determine how much work and what kind of work you do. Spending time getting clear about who you are and how you are talented is time well-spent. You may not even like the answer at first. It may conflict with expectations from you, your family, the community, and even society at large.
Maybe that’s the place to start. For those who work best with a label, perhaps Life Integration would offer a better target than Work-Life Balance.”
I like that—Life Integration.
Very few people choose how to die, but too many don’t choose how to live.
They allow the expectations of parents, educators, friends, colleagues, movies, society-in-general and the ever ubiquitous ‘they’ to choose for them.
Most will deny this publicly, but anyone who honestly remembers the power of peer pressure in school will privately admit that it doesn’t cease to exist upon graduation; in fact the pressures increase dramatically while becoming more covert.
Few successful people care to admit that the goals for which they are working and even how they spend their non-work time are more about fitting in than personal desire.
They chase the goals and do the things that ‘everybody’ is doing in the name of being ‘with it’. And that includes “work/life balance” and “having it all right now.”
So the net time you are ready to tear your hair out STOP; stop, take a step back and honestly determine whose goals you are trying to reach.
The answer may surprise you.
Image credit: arkitekt on sxc.hu
October 8th, 2018 at 1:15 am
[…] Golden Oldie: Whose Goals Are You Pursuing? […]