Anxious Living

A Different Look at Goals

November 22nd, 2006 by Aaron

I just finished Finding Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and had a few thoughts about it in regards to social anxiety. For this post, I’m interested in how the book suggests that satisfaction with life comes from a well balanced combination of goals, challenges and successes.

If you have no goals, or set easily achieved goals, you’ll experience no sense of challenge and therefore find your life stagnating. But if you set impossibly high goals you’ll find that you feel worse and worse about yourself as you continually fail to meet them.

I’m certainly familiar with impossibly high goals. As embarrassing as it is to admit, quite often my main goal for any given task is to do so well at it that I finally prove, once and for all, my worth. This is where the incapacitating perfectionism of SAD comes into play.

But I have had moments when I was able to focus on a smaller, more attainable goal and meet it with success. It would seem from what I read that this is what I should work on.  A series of small goals met could help me to feel better about dealing with SAD, which in turn would give me the confidence to seek out greater challenges.

Now the end game of this is the same end game of the grand goal I fail to live up to over and over. I’d have to keep my attention on the small goals and let those push me forward. In some ways, it is similar to what I was trying to get at in a previous post about slow and steady progress. Smaller, more realistic goals, build towards a bigger picture goal.

So what kind of goals could we set that would be challenging, yet attainable?

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