You can wear a shoe that doesn’t fit properly and go for a walk, but you won’t get far.
The same applies to your goals. They die by Tuesday because they don’t fit you, not because you lack grit or willpower.
To build genuine momentum, and consistently take action, stop trying to squeeze into someone else's dream.
From education to early employment, we’re all gently ushered down a road that sounds right, but feels off.
Your priorities and goals are rented from your teachers, parents, managers or even your social media feeds.
That’s why you may be productive but still feel empty. There’s no alignment, no momentum. Just motion without direction.
A UK poll found that the average person wastes almost two hours daily on "doing a whole lot of nothing," which totals over 12 hours a week. (https://studyfinds.org/loses-26-days-wasted-time/).
And these hours are hours outside of goal attainment.
Do this daily and you will end up losing 26 days a year of time you will never get back.
That’s nearly 4 weeks!
I’m mentioning this to say, when you’re not working towards something authentically valuable, you become more inclined to waste time because you’re not intrinsically motivated to continue.
This leads to those 624 hours annually (26 days), only increasing.
Less time for you, more time spent on stuff you don’t care about.
How many more hours are you willing to fund a future you don’t want?
When the why is yours, the when takes care of itself.
Misaligned goals bleed minutes of your time because they demand you to become a person you’re not.
The fix is simple: make your goals/ambitions self-concordant. Meaning, aligning your goals to your true values and needs.
Research on self-concordant goals shows alignment improves adaptive coping, so when things get rough you stay engaged, adjust tactics, manage obstacles better and keep moving because the outcome actually matters to you
Longitudinal research on the self-concordance model shows aligned goals predict sustained effort, higher attainment, and better well-being in Sheldon & Elliot’s, 1999, Self Determination Theory.
https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/1999_SheldonElliot.pdf
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4288988/
But, in order to actually make your goals self-concordant, you need to firstly understand what you actually value in life and your identity.
But without firstly dedicating time to understanding your personality/identity and what you value in life, a quick way to identify whether a goal is aligned is by first writing your goals down and then answering the question, under each one, of “Why does this goal matter to the person I want to become”.
Another way to establish an intrinsically meaningful goal - that is aligned with your personality, values and the person you want to become - is by completing BetterBrain’s Destiny Definer.
The whole process is perfectly packaged into one journalling system that will help you go from an abstract vision about your future, and whats important to you, to the immediate next step of being able to start taking action on it.
We believe in Better. So should you.