Working to accomplish any goal is challenging, and often enough, it’s the mental challenges which cause us to buckle under pressure

We tend to set goals out of excitement, in high energy and with the focus of who we can be and what we can uncover when we achieve them. Although, it is naive to think that this is how we’re going to feel throughout point A to point B, but in truth, we need this naivety in order to set goals in the first place.

We have to allow our ambitions to override our instincts when setting goals, otherwise we’d see nothing but the challenges we’re going to face. There’d be no motivation to set a goal if all we focused on were the difficulties we’d come up against.

Our ambitions allow us to momentarily bypass reality and harness the intention of our desires. It’s a powerful force because that feeling we get when setting a goal, is a feeling we want to embody.

It’s like a higher version of self pays us a visit, shows us who we have the potential to be in order to seed an intention, then leaves us figure out how to make it happen. – Practically the epitome of the human experience; problem solving.

Challenges, they bring us back down to reality, they make us focus on the present moment and we should be incredibly grateful for that. For without our challenges, our goals would have no purpose whatsoever and we’d be living ignorantly and without purpose.

When my clients talk about “giving up” I merely remind them that they’re only responding to the challenge at present. That if they truly wanted to give up, they wouldn’t have bothered setting the goal in question, in the first place. Nobody in the history of everything, started something with the intention of giving up. Giving up is a really dumb idea – go splash your face with some ice-cold water and realize that you’re still alive and in control.

If we’ve invested in our goals, then we should be equally, if not more invested in our challenges too. Our challenges help us identify what we don’t know, that’s why they’re so liberating when we overcome them, they help us develop.

If you feel pressured and feel like you should give up, just remember you’re responding to the challenge and not the goal. If you cannot handle the challenge, then scale back and formulate a new strategy, that’s all you have to do.

Many people overlook the fact that we yearn for the emotional response when achieving a goal; it’s that self-validation we’re striving for. It’s self-validation we need in order to unlock and harness our potential, and become self-realized. Giving up is self-sabotaging behavior and the only thing you’ll ever learn from giving up, is that you’re incapable of living and designing your own life.

On that note, I leave you with this one question: if you’re not living to experience what you’re truly capable of, what is it exactly, are trying to do with your life?