subject: Facing Failure And Future Orientation [print this page] Many people have conditioned themselves to set low limits when it comes to the goals they want to achieve. They may or may not be cognizant of this reality, but because they feel inadequate in many ways they will always set goals that are lower than their maximum potential.
Perhaps these individuals experienced a serious disappointment at some point in their lives. Maybe they failed to achieve a significant goal that they had set for themselves because the goal was too lofty and unrealistic given their skills at that particular time. Whatever the case may be, at some point in their lives these people probably got the idea that they were not meant to achieve great goals.
From that point on, they tended to focus on much smaller goals, whether they were conscious of this or not. Even worse, many people have ended up not setting goals at all because they wanted to save themselves the pain and embarrassment of failure in achieving their goals.
This is where the process of idealization and future orientation come into the picture. In order to break the cycle of mediocrity and engender a sense of enthusiasm and expectation, you need to begin thinking about your ideal circumstances. The idea behind this is pretty simple. You simply ask yourself what your life would be like if you had no limitations and no restrictions in any area of life.
You imagine what kind of job and salary you would have, but you also think about all the other areas of your life. You look at your current family relationships and ask yourself what you would improve if you could wave a magic wand and make everything perfect. You think about the house you would live in and perhaps the city that you would like to move to as well.
The point of this easy exercise is to begin programming your mind to accept the possibility that you could achieve much greater things than you have up until now. This is only the start of your journey towards achievement, of course. There are additional steps you need to take in order to set specific and realistic goals and increase your chances of reaching them. We will cover many of these in additional articles.
For now, however, focus on this idea of idealization and create a dream list where you try to imagine what your life would be like in five or six years if you had the power to change anything and everything about your life. This will get you on your way on the road to success.
