The Hazards and Pitfalls of Striving for Personal goals
Lessons on confronting inner conflicts to achieve personal goals
Much of the second half of my life has dealt with striving for something; smoking cessation, weight loss, sobriety. I learned several lessons from these endeavors about discipline and resilience.
Improve Stress Management
For those striving for something important, I want to pass on some valuable lessons I learned. If you get good at managing the starts and stops of striving activities, your chances of success improve.
Striving is typically a contentious activity with lots of stress. Day to day, motivation goes up and down, doubts appear, and resolution ebbs and flows.
Coping with Hazards and Pitfalls
These daily hazards and pitfalls alert you to the need for self-discipline. And self-discipline means you are trying to control, manage, and regulate your conduct to improve something.
Striving requires the ability to make yourself do things you know you should do even when you do not want to. And this is what self-discipline is all about. Striving means you are contending with conflicting desires; you must be a cap on this conflict.
Suppress but Initiate
By this, I mean suppressing the tendencies that take you away from your intention while giving a free pass to those energies that power you forward.
Let me give an example from a present battle to stop coffee consumption; the attraction still pulls me because of the energy boost I love.
Now, however, I must suppress that love. How? I know indulging will bring the pain of heartburn. So, it is an easy decision to stop. But still, the temptation lingers.
What to do? The activity solution is to find another beverage, tea, or hot water. The cognitive solution is to distract my attention by deferring to reflections about health benefits and better sleep.
The ideal solution is to refer to an over-arching value position. My value is a long-term commitment to self-care, which, in my case, is a path I have chosen to boost self-respect.
Do these solutions work every time? They have so far as I bask in the pleasure of normal positive feeling unalloyed by painful heartburn.
Restraint
In this example, what stands out is the activation of a behavioral restraint in the form of an alternative beverage. This is combined with cognitive restraint concerning self-care and self-respect.
The research literature indicates that beliefs about self-discipline play a role in how successful you are in completing tasks calling for either restraint or initiative.
If you view self-discipline as an unlimited resource, you can achieve your goals no matter how many energy-depleting tasks you have performed during the day.
Belief in Inexhaustible Will Power
This suggests that you and I do the same: choosing not to view self-control as a depletable resource may give us extra motivation to overcome complex, demanding tasks.
How can you improve your capacity for self-control?
I found in my experience that I could persist at a task when I believed doing so would embody a value position; this was especially true when that value suited my psychological needs.
As mentioned elsewhere I have come to value self-worth as a primary value. Its development organizes my daily activities and justifies what I do.
Since I had a low estimate of my worth as a younger person, a rebuilding project was appropriate, and it continues to this day.
An additional pitfall that happens in striving to work is anger at one ‘s self for falling short. My reaction tends towards giving up or fleeing the field.
I find you can wait out these moments, and they will pass. Don’t let your frustrations derail your best intentions.
I find it helpful also to develop an identity as a striver or self-disciplined person. I came to see myself, due to self-analysis, as a striver after more worthiness.
The takeaway lessons on striving are these: Have a specific goal in mind, and a means to attain it that has your firm belief and faith; when inner conflicts arise, find both behavioral and cognitive solutions that quiet the conflict.
These solutions should serve to restrain what is stopping you or give you the initiative to plow ahead. Know that self-discipline is a resource that you can always call on.
Don’t let anger at temporary failures derail your plans. And try to develop an Identity as a self-disciplined person.
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