What is the Message of Your Goal?

Conventional goal-setting wisdom is to set a goal, create an action plan, and then pursue it. If you fail, revise your targets and try again. The problem comes when we face goals that can't be achieved, say due to societal limitations (e.g. you can never repeat senior year of high school with the same batch of classmates) or physical limitations (e.g. age limit to enter competitive swimming). Also, there are times when we don't progress in a goal despite multiple tries. So does that mean we have failed? This is where knowing the message of your goal is important. In this episode of The Personal Excellence Podcast, I share: What it means to know the message of your goal 3 reasons why knowing your message can be that difference between struggling and thriving, being miserable and being happy 4 goal scenarios of how to apply this concept — losing weight, building your blog/business, being a professional athlete/performer, and improving your relationship with your family — and how this can relate to you 3 questions to ask yourself in any goal pursuit Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, TuneIn, Pocket Casts, Podcast Addict, Overcast, Castbox, or subscribe to the RSS feed. The Personal Excellence PodcastWhat is the Message of Your Goal?Show Podcast Information Read the transcript for this episode here. If you find The Personal Excellence Podcast helpful, please take a minute to leave a nice rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to the podcast. Your rating makes a difference and will help spread the message of conscious living to more people out there. Thank you! :) What is the Message of Your Goal? [Transcript] Welcome to The Personal Excellence Podcast. The show that's all about helping you be your best self and live your best life. Now, your host, Celestine Chua! Celestine Chua: Hey everyone, welcome to The Personal Excellence Podcast Episode 3, I'm Celestine Chua from PersonalExcellence.co. I want to thank you for listening. We have over 4,000 downloads for the podcast so far which is amazing because we only have two episodes so far so including this is the third one. And we've just launched for a few weeks! So I'm so grateful to all of you for tuning in. I'm just looking forward to creating more great episodes for you. Let's get to today's podcast topic and this is a question that I want you to think about, which is: What is the message of your goal? What do I mean by this? I thought of this topic when I was reading a reader question on my Facebook a week ago. This reader was telling me about his aspiration and ambition — which I think is marvelous — to be a professional football player. He has been facing difficulties along the way and he wanted my advice on the situation. My advice to him was to think about the message behind his goal, which is what I want to talk about today. So let's talk about what I mean by "the message behind your goal." The Message of Your Goal Here, message means, for whatever is the goal you want to pursue, what is the reason that you want this goal? What is the intent that you want to make happen? For example, let's say I want to improve my relationship with my parents. I want to take them out on a vacation. The message here could be, "I want to better the relationship with them. I want them to be happy." So why is it important to discover your message? The first reason is, think of our goals as one expression of our message. So maybe you want to lose weight. Losing weight is the goal itself. But maybe your message is you want to have a healthier body, you want to live a longer life. So here, losing weight is merely one expression to be healthier. And by knowing this underlying message, you can think about all the other goals that can help you realize this message. The second reason is some of us get attached to our goals when it is our message we should be loyal to. Let's say we are facing some immense difficulty...