What makes you happy? Seeing your family healthy and joyful? Witnessing your best friend marrying their soul mate? Settling down to movie night with a loved one? There are many things that spark happiness in our lives, but have you ever considered how powerful it could be to plan ahead for your happiness?
Happiness tends to be manifested in the here and now, which is fantastic and is the core pillar of living a mindful life. However, setting goals and having long term plans can help to ensure we live happily for many years to come. Here’s our top three reasons why setting goals can help in our pursuit of happiness.
Goals Are Motivational
Having clearly set goals gives us the incentive to strive forwards to meet them, which in turn helps to boost our self-esteem when we get there.
For example, setting a fitness goal, where you aim to be able to run a certain distance, exercise non-stop for a set period of time or flawlessly perform a specific yoga move by a particular date will help to give you focus. Otherwise, exercising where you’re not measuring progress can be hard to stick to as you won’t have any targets or benchmarks to inspire you.
The Vitacodis course, Beginner to Fitness Course for Women Leading a Healthy Lifestyle, with Fitness and Lifestyle expert, Emma Titelbaum is a great introductory course if you are new to exercise. During this course, Emma will guide you through the benefits of exercise and crucially, how to find and plan the right fitness journey to suit you and your lifestyle best.
Imagine the feeling of accomplishment when you reach or exceed your goal, and how exhilarated and alive it’ll make you feel!
Goals Give Us Purpose
Living a life without goals can mean that we idle along, without much thought for where we’re going or what we want to achieve. Setting goals that relate to our careers, health and fitness for example, will make us accountable and give us the impetus for striving to get to where we want to be.
Being goalless can also allow us to indulge in the side of us that likes to procrastinate and put things off. Procrastination can make us feel frustrated and far from happy, so setting achievable goals gives us the proverbial kick that we sometimes need to move forward and be happy.
Goals Allow Us to Be Our Best Selves
As well as plodding along in life without much purpose, being goalless can mean that we’re living our lives without putting much effort in. As much as it can be nice to wing it sometimes, and we all certainly know people that seemingly put no effort in and always land on their feet, we don’t always become our best selves if we’re permanently living footloose and fancy free.
Success is made, we’re not necessarily born with it. For success to work, we need to put the work in, and that means making goals that we can measure our success by. Success also breeds confidence, and that in turn equals more chance of happiness.
Begin small, and aim for small increments at a time, and see how happy you can feel by meeting your goals!
