Do you believe goals can make you happy?
Are you thinking about changing something in your life?
“Happiness is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.”
William Butler Yeats
Research has shown that personal goals that are congruent with your interests increase your emotional well-being. This means that working on your goals makes you happy.
Well, most of us have something we would like to change in order to become happier.
With that said, setting goals and making progress on them can make us happier and more satisfied in life.
Well-defined goals can make you happy because they help you to:
- Focus on what you want
- Take charge of the life you want to live
- Spend time in meaningful ways
- Enhance confidence
- Feel enthusiasm
- Increase self-development
- Discover more about yourself
- Explore new situations
- Meet new people
- Find new strengths
- Work around your weaknesses
- Move closer to your ideal life
- Learn and develop new skills
- Increase your confidence to tackle bigger and more difficult goals
- Feel proud of your accomplishments
How Our Goals Impact Our Emotions
Starting with short term, realistic, easy to achieve goals, will keep our emotions positive.
Regardless of the goal we are working on, how far we perceive we are from our goal can lead to positive or negative emotions.
Furthermore, setting achievable goals and pursuing them will produce a sense of well-being. Accomplishing a goal you’ve been working on tends to increase contentment, pride, and happiness.
On the other hand, if you do not succeed in an attractive goal, you are more likely to feel sad. Depression may occur when the progress is too slow or the tasks too difficult.
What’s more, dopamine levels tend to increase whenever you set goals, big or small, and accomplish them. Also, crossing off your to do list tends to trigger dopamine release. It encourages you to keep going and making progress toward your desired outcome.
In other words, reaching a goal you’ve been working hard towards makes you feel good about yourself. It helps you develop positive self-regard, which tends to improve your mood and self-esteem.
In addition, realistic goals enable you to reach milestones in your life. As a result, you are more likely to feel inspired and confident. Both long term and short-term goals help to ensure that you have something to look forward to and enjoy.
Moreover, knowing what you want to do, where you want to be, or what you want to do differently is critical. It helps to ensure that you do not feel lost or stagnant.
“If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or things.”
Albert Einstein
Steps to be Happy by Working on Your Goals
1 – Make a Decision About Your Goal
The first step is to get started. Figure out what you would like to work towards.
You can decide to start with a small or big goal. However, starting with a small goal can be motivating as you will notice progress and accomplish it faster.
In addition, achieving a small goal will build your confidence to pursue bigger goals. If you find it difficult to decide on one goal you will find some help here on how to make difficult decisions.
Also, consider what activities make you feel excited and joyful. What do you look forward to do during the weekends? You will feel happy if you work on a goal that you love.
2 – Put it in Writing
Writing down your goal will provide clarity of purpose and you will feel committed to work on it.
Make sure to put your written goal in a visible place so that you remind yourself many times per day of what you are trying to accomplish.
3 – Be Specific
Ambiguity is often referred to as the enemy of change. Therefore, if you want to accomplish your goal, be specific.
- What exactly are you trying to accomplish?
- How long do you think it will take you?
- What is a reasonable deadline?
- How will you know that you achieved your goal?
4 – Have an Implementation Plan
Having a mini action plan is critical. It helps you follow through on your goals. What first step can you take right now?
5 – Break Your Goal Down
If you are working on a big goal, break it into small pieces.
Working with several smaller goals makes reaching your goal easier.
6 – Minimize Multi-tasking
Paying attention to two or more things slows you down.
What’s more, it increases your probability of making mistakes and getting distracted.
Therefore, reduce distractions by blocking time.
Make time in your schedule to attend to your goal.
You need to have a specific start and end time when you fully dedicate your attention to working on your goal.
7 – Have an Accountability Partner
Sharing your goals with someone helps to ensure that you follow through on them or stick to your commitments.
Make sure that the other person is encouraging and supportive, especially during difficult times.
8 – Be Optimistic
It is important that you hope for the best.
You need to believe that things will go according to your plan.
Optimism makes you consistent and resilient. It helps you bounce back from setbacks.
If you need extra confidence about your future, try reading some personal development, self-help, or autobiography books.
In these books you will learn how others overcame difficult circumstances and successfully achieved their goals or learned important life lesson.
Learning about all the obstacles that others had to overcome to achieve their goals will give you new ideas and a positive attitude to achieve your own goals.
9 – Listen to Music
Whenever you feel down or discouraged, listen to music.
Upbeat songs can put you in the right mindset and help you push through with your goals.
Find out how music can make you happy.
10 – Celebrate
Take time to celebrate when you accomplish your goal. What’s more, show gratitude to your accountability partners.
Do not lose sight of what you learned and what you loved most about working on your goal.
What goal do you think will make you happy?
What goals are you working on?
Is there any specific strategy that you find helpful to achieve your goals?
Let me know in the comments below.
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I have a lot of smaller goals, but one of the biggest goals we have is to save the money to build our own home on some property in Florida. Having it written out and using small goals to get to that big goal really helps seeing the steps.
I agree that goals make you happy. Has to do with self-worth and having that sense of accomplishment. So no matter how big or small, reaching goals must be celebrated!
I know breaking down my major goals into smaller accomplishments helps a lot! That’s how I’m training for my 10k.
Achieving a sought after goal is definitely one of the most rewarding things we can experience! I can see how goal oriented activities would be toed to well being as it is so uploading to work hard on something and see it to fruition. Great post!
Great Article!!
I am ALWAYS working on my goals, all day, every day – which is probably why… I am always so happy!!
I love a lot of small goals, but my major goal that would make me super happy is to completely declutter our home and do some small repairs so that we can list it for sale. We decided a few years ago that our home wasn’t right for us, but its taken awhile to work towards this goal.
Decluttering a home is a major undertaking. May be starting with one room per month, and one closet per weekend. It also helps to have someone else involved in decluttering otherwise as soon as one shelf is empty, someone will start accumulating new things there. You can do it!
I definitely agree that having goals and achieving them can definitely make you happy. One of my goals is to pay off all my debt hopefully I can get there 1 day. I will be using your tips to get there thank you so much.
I have to have it on paper! Nothing feels better than marking a line through a completed task or reached goal.
These are some amazing tips. I always work hard to achieve my goals everyday.
I love working towards my goal, it makes me happy and feels a sense of accomplishment. Totally agree to work with someone who is a good partner.
Yes.. working on my own personal goals does make me super happy. And yes.. I do learn so much more about myself. Research is key as I know things change often. I’m passionate about a lot of things so I try to remain focused on those things that give me excitement and income.
With a new blog, I feel like i’m always working on goals. But you’re right, just working towards what I want is a huge step forward and feels so good!
I’m a big list maker and love how it helps me feel more goal-oriented on my most busiest of days.
I love working towards my goals. It just give me this sense of happiness and it makes me so hopeful and happy for my future. You made some great points
This is so accurate! I always feel more happy and confident in my daily goings-on when I have goals that are set and consistently being met.
These are some really cool tips and I do agree you cannot be happy without goals. Of course, they need not be tall ones.
Using Smart and achieveable goals is important as they are easier to achieve if broken down into small chunks
I can see this. I always try to meet my goals and I do feel pretty dang good when I do.
Making a lists of either a personal or a family goals helps me a lot and its really possible to happen if you have a good and reliable partner on reaching those goals.
This is so true. It’s so satisfying to write your goals out!
The best part of goals is seeing them done. I always feel good when I reach a goal.
I love this! Its so true. Working towards a goal puts me a in a great mood!
Working on your goals and also, seeing it coming into manifestation really makes me happy! I put it into writing just to keep it on track. And most importantly, congratulate yourself once you tick off a goal! That really keeps me joyful while working on my goals.
I love setting goals and smashing them haha It’s the best feeling in the world!
I find that I personally need to have goals and to achieve it I have to write it down and look at it constantly and I know I will achieve it
i love being able to cross those goals off the list as I meet them. so satisfying!
These are such great tips. Sometimes I set goes and get so overwhelmed and then abort the plan altogether. Breaking it down sound so smart, thanks
Super true! I was in a bit of a rut before because I was so focused on everyone and everything else besides me! I recently started setting goals and tracking achievements and wow!! What a difference it has made in how I feel:)
That is actually very very correct. Every time i feel overwhelmed with tasks, I list down my goals and I almost immediately feel a lot better.
I have big dreams and I know the only way I can make them a reality is to make goals in bite size chunks. Accomplishing these “little goals” give me a lot of motivation to push forward towards achieving my biggest dreams.
I love this post. We need to be reminded about all these important issues like working on our own goals. I love how kind and effective these steps are. The right timing to see the post.
I definitely agree that having goals to work towards makes you happy! I’m in a little bit of a rut while sorting out my new goals so this is really talking to me.
I love setting goals but have never linked it to happiness before. I love this!
I love this!! Goal setting is super important to me. You are right that it does increase your confidence to tackle bigger and more difficult goals for sure xx
These are great tips. I agree that listing down your goals will help you to fulfill it easily and it will also makes you happy.
I totally agree reaching your own personal goals makes you happy and accomplished x
Laura
Oh indeed. It makes me feel very productive, that I didn’t waste my time being lazy. I feel good what I have ticked off items from my list.
The day I finish my task list, it’s an absolutely delightful day. And yes, putting it in writing, planning out and being optimistic really helps in achieving the goals. And yes, setting up realistic goals in terms of time is also very important.
I write everything down because I am a very visual person and need lists, reminders, goals, everything. There is also nothing more satisfying than crossing something off that list as done. It is a huge feeling of accomplishment! It motivates me to keep going and get even more done to cross off the list.
This is so true! I find myself a lot more fulfilled and al ot more inspired when I am working on something I am truly passionate about.
Goals are kind of a trigger for me and then, I just kind of pidder out.
So true, being optimistic is a very important attitude in goal setting and execution. Be positive and the rest will follow.
Achieving your goals certainly does make you happy. I love crossing things off my to do list!
I love this post!! I always write my goals down, and it gives me such pleasure to tick them off the list!
Yep. That is why you have to make 2 kind of goals. short and long. To keep the phase up there.
This makes a lot of sense and I have some goals that I would really like to achieve but at this point in my life I feel like I would do better at achieving them with an accountability partner. Unfortunately I don’t know anyone personally and don’t have the money to pay for this just yet or to join a group.
I always love working on my goals. I get a sense of fulfillment when accomplishing the goals I’ve set for myself.
We love setting goals and striving for something, it’s also a great way to push yourself out of your comfort zone too!
Being specific and breaking it down into line items has always been a struggle for me.
When I make goals, I always try and make them measurable too – it’s good being able to see the progress you make
im amazed how informative this is and inspiring as well, i got a lot of ideas that i might use, thanks for sharing
I so much agree with you. Setting goals are the first step towards achieving happiness. Very well defined steps. Great motivating post.
Nothing could be further than these truths! These are by far a template for success. Thank you for sharing
I really enjoyed this as I agree 100% that setting goals for yourself is the way to go and it is the key to success. I try and make sure my kids get this too as I live by my lists and future goals…. 🙂 Makes me feel less stressed as well.
I love that listening to music is on the list. I love this for sure and always enjoy listening to music when I am working 🙂
I’m a pretty motivated and goal-driven person with big aspirations. Once I set my mind to something it is a lock and I love the feeling of accomplishment when I succeed and get to set a new goal
Celebrating is so key!!! Especially celebrating all the progress along the way to keep you motivated. I find I get stuck a lot at step 2 – writing things down. I write it all down but it’s more like a wish list than a get ‘er done list, and I get sidetracked!
I love this post and reading this alone makes me happy already 🙂
Speak of happiness, writing down my goals make me happy too and leads me to concentration. Thank you for this wonderful article.
These are some great pointers for goals! I love making goals and accomplishing them.
Breaking down your goals and creating a path to accomplishment definitely sets you up for success. They are both important steps in making goals more achievable.
These are great tips, thank you. For me, starting with a small goal and dedicating time to focusing on that one goal is the way forward. I love the celebrating one too though!
Starting with small goals sounds like an excellent strategy for big achievements!