Why do we stop making goals for ourselves and stop progressing in life? One reason is the belief that we should accept who we are and not constantly strive to improve ourselves. The mistake we make with this is that whilst self-acceptance is imperative, it should actually be used as the basis for growth. When we're not growing, learning and seeking improvements in our lives, we tend to stagnate, accepting what is, and stop believing we can be better.
A key tool for creating goals and progressing, is using our imagination. Yet as is so often the case, by the time we've reached midlife, we've stopped dreaming about what we want to achieve and feel quite negatively about goal setting. Instead of feeling confidence, happiness and satisfaction from achieving our goals, we feel we are always falling short. That leads to disappointment, and we stop dreaming. We stop imagining the life we'd like to have or the person we'd like to be, quickly finding ourselves shattered by the pain of our reality.
Up until now, unless we work in the creative industry, we've found the idea of using "play" a bit childish. In the West, we're mostly operating from our heads, the rational mind. But it's beginning to be better understood, because using our imagination is actually one of the most powerful things we could ever do.
The problem with finding ourselves irritated for not achieving the goal is because the goal always changes and we're always adapting, whether we realize it or not. What happens, therefore, is that we end up feeling like we're never going to reach our goals. And herein lies one of the biggest misconceptions and reasons for failure, dissatisfaction and unhappiness. We measure against the goal, rather than where we've come from. Dan Sullivan calls this "the gap and the gain". We measure always against the goal, which we never feel we're reaching, rather than the gain, that is where we've come from. In measuring where we've come from, rather than where we're trying to get to, we see results. We see things we've taken for granted, or not noticed. It's a simple, yet profound change in perception, and what I love about it is the power it has to instantly shift us up a gear. It's so, so simple, yet has an immediate, positive impact on our thinking.