In my recent post “Discover Your Passion - Life Is Too Short For The Wrong Job“, I mentioned that activities that we enjoy, and being in the “zone” are clues to our passion. In response to these points, Dave asked a very interesting and valid question:

Lawrence, I have another query that you might be able to comment on.

What advice do you have for those of us whose passions all fall outside the world of work? For example, I am in the “zone” when playing PC games, watching cricket, hiking in the mountains, playing with my son, traveling overseas etc. None of which sounds very useful when it comes to guiding my career choice. Perhaps, as I am beginning to suspect, my calling is towards multiple divergent careers.

To answer Dave’s question, there are two points that I like to address:

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I mentioned two weeks back that I will be starting an advice column for readers to contribute questions and I will attempt to provide my two cents worth. I have received some questions and I will be starting the first of this feature with a question about self-doubt from Sam.

Sam first wrote to me and requested for an article about self-deception. I was curious about the request. As such, I’d probed a little and he wrote back:

I am interested in self-deception because it is related to me. I’ve been experiencing it from quite some time and I don’t know what to do about it. My prime concern, to ask you about self-deception is basically in context with one’s misconceptions on various things. For example: everyday I plan out certain tasks for myself particularly related to my studies but at the end of the day those objectives are not accomplished by me. Maybe the prime problem would be in setting a realistic or achievable goal for myself everyday. Or maybe I’m deceiving myself by believing that my planned goal is a realistic one and thus I can achieve it. But ultimately, in reality, it does not happened.

I am actually a student so a psychological overview will be appreciated. Each day, I think I am deceiving myself which is ultimately causing me lots of problems. Particularly in organizing myself for my studies and meeting various planned deadlines.

Reading Sam’s questions reminds me of those days before I learned about goals setting. Like Sam, I’d used to question myself if my goals are realistic, or am I just kidding myself when I say I can achieve certain goals. Big goals looked so impossible and I couldn’t see how I could achieve those goals. It’s like this treasure box, far, far away, and I don’t see any road to reach it.

I like to address Sam’s question in 2 parts: Goal setting techniques and handling self-doubt.

Goal Setting Techniques

1. Goals are better measured over the longer terms of months than in a single day. There are too many possible interruptions within a day that it’s not a good duration for measuring your progress with goals. I practice weekly and monthly reviews of my goals for short-term and long-term tracking.
2. It’s important to understand why are these your goals in the first place? How will achieving these goals make you feel? Are you setting them as goals simply because someone else say so? If that’s the case, you don’t own the goals in the first place. If your goal is about studying a certain subject, do you enjoy that subject in the first place?
3. Don’t beat yourself up for not achieving your goals. Life won’t run like a clockwork as you have planned it. Things will happen, mostly beyond your control, to disrupt your goals. I’ve learned that I achieved some of my goals and that I don’t achieve some. You see, the most important thing about setting goals is not about achieving them. It’s about having a direction in life. You don’t have to achieve all 100% of your goals. Even if you achieve only 50% of your goals, you have made some progress in your life. This is far, far more progress than someone without a single goal (there are many such people around us… just ask around).
4. As for the rest of the 50% that you didn’t achieve, you will learn over time if they are really that important to you. Maybe they’re not so important to you after all (see point 2). To be honest with you, I don’t achieve all my goals. Sometimes, I drop some goals because I realize they’re not important.

Handling Self Doubt

Self doubt has a lot to do with uncertainty. Worthy goals are often big challenges with no guaranteed way of knowing if you will achieve it. In fact, when I set big goals, I don’t even know ‘how’ I’m going to achieve them. One fine example is my goal for this blog - to have 3000 readers by end of this year. Do I really know for sure that I will achieve it? Of course not.

However, understanding and accepting that uncertainty is part and parcel of goals helps me feel better about it. Like my favorite phrase from Forest Gump,

life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’ll gonna get…

There’s no way we’re going to know how things will turn out. The best we can do for ourselves is to act in our best efforts in the direction of our goals and life will manifest itself over time.

I always like to ask myself, “what do I lose by trying?” Most of the time, there’s really nothing much to lose. This is a very powerful question for everyone, really. What do you actually lose? Once you put things into perspective, it’s so much easier to take actions, and take confident strides forward.

I also wrote a guest post in reply to Sam’s request: How To Conquer Self-doubt in 2008.

What you do think? If there is any advice you like to offer to Sam, or opinions to share, please comment!

Which Way? is a free advice column, provided by A Long Long Road to its readers to share questions and opinions on life’s challenges.