Are your Goals Even What You Really Want?

Kathy from Nashville writes, I have a list of 142 goals. All my goals are things that would be nice to accomplish in life, but none are major things. You can't live without goals. Should everyone have major life goals? Is it possible that I simply haven't discovered my major goals yet? And if so, how can I figure out what my major goals are? Well, there's a couple of aspects to the answer to this question. First of all, you have to define, how are you defining the word major? You know, a lot of people think that major means you have to like, have your own television show or have a mansion on the hill, or end hunger in your county or eliminate some disease on the planet. Basically, you know, if you've defined your life purpose and you get in touch with what it is you really truly want, whatever that might be. For some people it might be something major like, I want to transform education in the world. I want to help bring peace and prosperity to all the people that live on this planet. Those are huge goals. Now, some of you may just want to sit in an a frame somewhere away from society and write poetry and then get your poetry published. And it's not like you're doing some major thing in the world except you're expressing who you really are. So basically, if you find what your life purpose is, and there's a lot of exercises that we have that we can teach you to do that, and some of you have been exposed to those on the livestream. There's one in my book, the Success Principles. You can go to the website for Jack Canfield Coaching and there's an exercise there on Life Purpose. So many different ways to get in touch with it. But the main thing underlining all this is it should be bringing you joy. If you're not experiencing joy when you're pursuing your goals, then you are off purpose. Now if you've defined your life purpose, then you want to set goals that are in alignment with that. So if my goal is to transform education, then I might have goals like doing trainings for teachers. I might have goals like writing a book like Self Esteem in the Classroom, which I wrote, or Leadership Skills for Educators, or did Chicken Soup for the Teacher's Soul. So all of these were things that were aligned with achieving my purpose. Now I sit here as someone with a huge life purpose and some of you may be out there comparing yourself to, to me. Don't do that. Just decide what it is that's going to bring you the greatest fulfillment. What it is you truly want the size of your goal should be determined by what you truly want, not by what you think you should do or by what somebody else is doing or in comparison to somebody else. So the main thing is to pursue your goals and just pursue becoming the best person you can be in the arena of what it is you want to do. Now, if you've not discovered your major goals yet, that's okay. Some of you may find that as you move forward with your goals, you'll discover more of what you enjoy in life and more of what you want in life. So basically simply ask yourself, what would get me to the next level that I want to go to? What might be a goal that would do that? So remember, visions are the big picture of how we want to live our lives. And sometimes that's five years out, 10 years out, 15 years out. And goals are the steps we take toward those visions.