10 Ways to Reduce Anxiety by Setting Realistic Big Goals
There is something about the beginning of January that turns us all into goal-setters. This is our year! We are going to use our time wisely and make things happen! We are hitting the new year strong, ready to do all the things.
Hey there, perfectionist… we need to take a hard look at all those things before you buy your planners and color coded markers and commit to a bunch of stuff that gets you in over your head.
(Let me guess, you already bought the planners, didn’t you?)
Do you really need to do all those things?
Do you even want to do all those things?
Does your family want you to do all those things?
Do you have time to do all those things?
Who are you serving by doing those things? Who are you letting down if you don’t do them?
I may be offering slightly conflicting guidance today, because I want to encourage you to scale your list down so that it is realistic and do-able, but I also want to encourage you to dream big!
In the field of counseling we often seek to help our clients hold space for opposite things, whether it’s
Emotions: A mom may be both happy that her daughter is graduating from college and sad that she is moving on to a chapter where she doesn’t need mom in the same ways as before.
Character qualities of ourselves: Someone might be both wildly creative and meticulously practical all at the same time.
Character qualities of others: A woman might reflect that her father was both involved, present at her events and emotionally absent.
Circumstances: The holidays can be both wonderful and stressful.
Our brains tend to shy away from holding those opposite things together. It makes us feel anxious to have to manage our thoughts around different things, and we want to make them mutually exclusive, either/or.
When we can compartmentalize things as all one way or all another it makes us feel as if we can skip the emotional roller coaster.
However, life is messy and complex. Opposite things exist together all the time.
Consider today’s blog post as a both/and exercise to help you tolerate the discomfort of that anxiety and make a plan for your year that feels authentic and do-able.
It is important that we both develop a realistic narrow focus on what we want to do and allow ourselves to chase our dreams. Often those dreams inform the narrow focus, and the narrow focus helps us accomplish the steps that make the dreams come true.
We can let our ambition run away with us, especially in January when we have a clean calendar stretching out in front of us. We think we have so much time! When we think of everything we want to do, surely 12 months will get us there.
When we crash into the hard reality that life quite often gets in the way of doing all of these things, it makes us want to give up on all of it. If we can’t do these things perfectly, we don’t want to do them at all.
It’s like we are on a pendulum. We swing too far to one side and we want to do everything, but on the other side we don’t think we can do anything. We need to find that middle ground where we can do the things we are supposed to do and let the other stuff go.
Jon Acuff writes about finding this balance in his book “Finish”(1). He maintains that perfectionists get in their own way of accomplishing things because they get too hung up on making sure it’s perfect. I highly recommend this book for more detailed information on how to move towards embracing your own imperfections and setting realistic goals. He writes in a fun, easy to read way and offers more robust explanations on how you can help your pendulum stop swinging between “perfect” and “nothing.”
If you have already written out goals for the year, let’s take a look and revise them. If you haven’t, I do recommend thinking about what you want to do for the year and finding a way to track your progress. Keep the following suggestions in mind as you create your goals.
How to reduce your anxiety by setting realistic big goals
Think about what you (just you, not anybody else in your family) want in life. Think broad. Think personal, professional, family, home, financial, spiritual, whatever categories make you who you are. This is where you allow yourself to dream big. I like to go even bigger and dream about the next 10 years. I think about how old my kids will be, what phase of life I will be in, what would I like to have accomplished by then, what kinds of freedoms I want to be able to enjoy. Then I bring it in closer, and do the same thing for 5 years from now. Then 2 or 3 years from now. Then I get down to next year. Of course all of that future stuff is something to hold loosely, because life tends to present twists and turns that influence those outcomes, but it is something that is good to think about. It helps to take those big, 10-years-from-now dreams and ask yourself what you need to be doing in 5 years to make that happen. 3 years? Finally down to next year – there is where you find the meat for a goal you want to set for yourself right now.
2. Now look at your goals through the lens of your family. If your goals are things that are going to go against what someone important to you wants from your shared life together (I am thinking this would be your spouse, but you may have others in your life with important input in your life) you want to note that. Do some journaling about that conflict and maybe have a discussion with that person about the conflict of goals.
3. Which goals jump out at you as the most important? Circle those goals. If you are a person of faith, pray about which goals God would have you pursue. If you are unsure about any of those goals, maybe write “revisit” next to them and check in on them again in a couple of months.
4. Now examine them through the lens of feasibility. How realistic are your goals in the context of your life right now? In the context of the other goals you wrote down? Don’t just dismiss something if it doesn’t seem realistic, but do brainstorm some things you need to be able to make it happen. Write these needs down – these might actually be better goals than the ones you wrote down if this step shows you that your initial goals are possibly unrealistic or need a longer timeline than you thought.
5. You want to narrow the list. I am not going to give you a number, because it just depends. But the fewer goals you have, the more effective you will be at really being able to throw yourself into them. If you have a family, then you will necessarily have family goals that factor in, which would limit your professional goals. It’s ok to have major goals and minor goals.
6. Once you’ve narrowed down, you want to make them very specific and measurable. Numbers are good here – if you can, quantify these goals with amounts that helps you know when you have reached the goal. It’s hard to do that with everything though. If you can’t put a number to measure the goal, write about how you will know you have met that goal. What will life look like when you’ve “arrived?” What will you be doing/thinking/feeling/saying?
7. Break them down into smaller steps. Where will I be with this goal in 6 months? 3 months? 1 month? What does my work towards this goal look like at all of those times? What does it look like today?
8. Now ask yourself if there are any ways to build in grace for those goals. Maybe some of those goals could use a two-year timeline instead of a one-year guideline. Maybe you can commit to paying off 3/4ths of your credit card debt instead of your whole debt. The idea is to relieve the pressure attached to the goal (thank you, Jon Acuff!) If your goal does not require unrealistic perfection, you will be more likely to keep at it. It’s attainable. Think about that. Just typing that word caused a feeling of encouragement to wash over me.
9. Give yourself permission to revisit and tweak your goals at the end of the month. Who says we have to have our goals figured out at the beginning of January? Nobody we need to listen to. It might be good to sit with your goals, see how your initial work towards them plays out. Maybe something you planned turns out to be more time-consuming than you thought. Adjust your goal, not your stress-level. Goals can be flexible!
10. If you are a journal-er, journal about your progress from time to time. Celebrate your little wins, write about how it felt when you met that goal or just met a baby step towards that goal, write about what is going right. Keep your brain focused on the positives with the goals. If you have a setback, you can write about that, too, but you want to make sure to reframe that as information you can use to figure out how to meet that goal. Normalize mistakes so you can take the pressure off yourself and notice that your mistakes show you your next area of growth. Use them. Don’t let your mistakes abuse you.
If one of your goals is to reduce your anxiety, stress, perfectionism, people-pleasing, or overthinking, I would love to come alongside you to help you make that happen. These things tend to have deeper meanings attached to them that can be hard to sort out on your own.
References
(1) Acuff, J. (2018). Finish: Give yourself the gift of done. Penguin Publishing Group.
Jennie Sheffe is a National Certified Counselor ™ who helps women find freedom from anxiety and peace in their chaos. She sees clients virtually in the state of Pennsylvania, or in her downtown Carlisle, PA office. She offers Christian counseling and EMDR Therapy.
