3 Bugs That Take Us Away From Our Purposes

Most of the long-term goals we want to achieve mean we have to vary our daily or weekly plan and adopt a new routine. Think about learning a new language, exercising more, following the online course you’ve signed up for, seeing more of your friends or improving your diet. All of them are classics, but you can add the one you want. Thus, today we want to talk about the failures that keep us from our purposes.

How many times have you tried? What have you done or not done to not achieve it? How did you feel the first day you didn’t follow the plan? There are many variables and circumstances that can make the option of quitting more tempting. So, next, we will talk about the most recurrent factors and over which you do have control – failures that take us away from our purposes.

Failures that take us away from our purposes

Follow the heist plan

Every great goal deserves some planning time. We are going to dedicate many hours to it and we are going to have to face serious obstacles. Thus, having written a good script and even planned some solutions for certain problems will make us more efficient.

With the plan, we will have more mental space (cognitive reserve) to concentrate on what we are doing at that moment, instead of our mind being able to make an avoidance escape, making us the tempting proposal to spend time deciding what to do next. Thus, for example, we will not run the risk of ending up checking our email in the hour that we are going to learn that new language.

Actually, we did not want to end there, but looking for interesting web pages to learn (English, French, Chinese, German …), we have registered in one, they have sent us the confirmation email, validate the email … In this way, no Not ten minutes have passed and we are commenting on the photo of our nephew’s communion -in perfect Spanish, of course-. Then, as we are, we can upload a photo of our desktop and earn a few likes for our self-esteem.

Irony aside, let’s come up with a smart plan. If we are one of those who find it difficult to wake up, of those who do not turn up their revolutions until after ten o’clock coffee, let’s try not to put what is going to demand will first thing in the morning.

At night it can seem relatively simple to get up at six to go to the gym. However, what happens when the alarm goes off? We probably remember the father of our good ideas and his entire family, not to venerate them precisely …

Gather social support

We go with the second item on the list of failures that take us away from our purposes. In the absence of a good coach, trainer or derivative – if our goal is really important, it would be very positive if we looked for one – we can always choose several people from our circle of trust as supervisors.

Obviously, they are not going to ask us the lesson, but they can help us, for example, not to smoke when we are with them or they can ask us about our progress in the last week.

Mind you, let’s choose supervisors in the right spirit. else…

Thus, knowing that each week we will have to render accounts, dissonance will play in our favor. A motivation, which can now seem so poor to us, such as not projecting the image that we are weak or lacking will, can help us overcome that first moment of laziness, make us put on sports clothes and go out into the streets. Once this is done, it is much more difficult to go home without having followed through on the plan.

Beware of going further

We go with the third item on the list of failures that take us away from our purposes. The first day we have all the energy in the world. We have no stiffness from the previous day, we have a new piece of clothing and we may not have to work. We are “so overflowing” that instead of doing what was planned, we do a little more. The funny thing is that this happens despite the fact that the plans of this style that we draw up are usually more demanding than they should.

Now what is the problem? Why not do it if we have the strength or the resources? The reason is very easy to understand if we know how our mind works; more specifically, our motivation. That day, when we get home, and have run 10 minutes instead of 5, we can feel in paradise. In other words, we have obtained a huge reinforcer – translated into motivation, it will have to be measured with the next day’s stiffness.

However, I’m not going that way. I’m going to put aside the physiological fact that going out the next day is going to cost us more because the wear and tear has been greater. What will happen mentally the next day? That to feel good and have the feeling that we are moving forward, we will have to run at least 10 minutes, when there were six in our plan. By increasing the race time on the first day, the difficulty of obtaining satisfaction (reinforcement) on the following days has increased.

The force of routine

The danger is fully configured if we take into account that we are talking about a non-established routine. It is still very weak. We have gained very little, so we can also lose little if we abandon it; contrary to what happens when it is already established. Are we going to stop exercising with all that it has cost us to get in shape? Probably not. However, this force is weak at first. We have very little form to lose, because we have gained very little.

As we have seen, our mind plays a decisive role when it comes to achieving long-term goals that require changes in our routine. In this sense, not knowing how some variables influence our motivation can make us ignore mistakes that keep us from our purposes and make poor decisions; misleading: they seem to bring us closer to our goal, when in fact they drive us away.