When you stop using alcohol or drugs, you will already have made a significant step forward to improving your quality of life. It would be a mistake though, to assume that you have already done enough to guarantee your future happiness – it doesn’t work like that.
In order to get the most from your recovery, you need to be continuously setting new challenges and working towards accomplishing these.
Why You Need Goals In Your Recovery
The problem about standing still in recovery is that you can become a victim of entropy – this is natural tendency for things to decay over time. The only way to prevent this is to keep on moving forward in your life. The way you do this is by setting goals and working towards these. This means that your life is always going to be improving, although it might not always be obvious. It is important to understand that there is never going to be a time when you have completely made it; life would be very dull if it were not for future goals.
Effective Strategies for Achieving Goals in Recovery
Below we have listed just a few of the effective strategies that will help you achieve your goals in recovery.
1. Break Big Goals Down into Smaller Ones
If you decided that you wanted to climb Mount Everest tomorrow, you wouldn’t just fly to Nepal and begin climbing. There is a huge amount of planning and training involved in order to make this type of goal a reality. The reason most individuals who would love to climb this mountain never try is because the task appears too intimidating – it just involves doing way too many things to make it happen. The problem is that the goal of climbing Mount Everest is too intimidating, but this becomes far less of an issue if you break this goal into lots of smaller ones. For example, your first goal might be to research what is involved in this climb.
Breaking large goals into small goals is a great way to stay motivated until you hit your final target. Every time you achieve one these targets, it is going to give your determination a boost so you will soon be on your way to the next mini goal. You are not going to feel overwhelmed by all you need to do because you are just focusing your attention on the next target.
2. Learn to Use Failure to Your Advantage
The most common reason why people fail to achieve their goals is that they are put off by failure. The person takes this type of setback way too seriously, so they end up giving up in frustration. This happens because the person does not understand that failing is the secret of success – it is necessary to fail many times in order to find out what works. [pullquote align=”right”]There is only one real failure in life and this is when individuals give up on their goals[/pullquote]
The best way to deal with failure is to always look upon it as a learning opportunity. Remember that successful people got where they are because they were prepared to fail a lot more than the average person was. You need to understand the lesson from the failure, and if you can do this, it is going to benefit you greatly going forward. Sometimes understanding what doesn’t work is as important as understanding what does.
3. Learn to Ask for Help
Successful entrepreneurs are greatly admired in our society and rightly so. These people have likely had to be extremely tenacious to get where they are in life. The idea that these individuals got to where they are purely by their own sweat is a myth. In reality, successful people get to where they are by asking for help. They recognise their own limitations and they find the people or resources that will be able to make up for these deficiencies.
If you are unwilling to ask for help when you need it, you are going to struggle to reach your goals. There is no loss of pride to admitting that you do not know something or you are not able to do something. The only real shame is doing things badly because you are unwilling to accept any type of assistance.
4. Set Realistic and Clear Goals
A mistake that many people make is that they set goals that are too vague or just unrealistic. If you set yourself the goal of being rich, it is going to be very hard to ever achieve this. The problem is that as you make more money, your understanding of what rich means is going to change. This means that you could become a billionaire and still not feel like you have reached your goal. It is much better for you to make the goal of achieving one million pounds than for it to be about getting rich.
You will probably be amazed by what you can achieve in life, but it is important to set realistic goals – you can always set more ambitious goals afterwards. The problem with unrealistic goals is you very quickly become disillusioned because your job is just too hard. It is equally important not to sell yourself short; if your goals are too easy, you are never going to push yourself.
5. Get Ready to Leave your Comfort Zone
If you always stay in your comfort zone, it is unlikely you are ever going to achieve anything special in your life. The problem is that you have to take additional action in order to bring new things into your life. Even if your goal is to win the lottery, you are still going to need to get out of your comfort zone enough to go to the shops to buy a ticket. The secret is the more you are willing to go out of your comfort zone, the more you will be able to achieve.[pullquote align=”right”]The secret is the more you are willing to go out of your comfort zone, the more you will be able to achieve[/pullquote]
The great thing about stretching yourself more than usual is you extend your comfort zone. For example, if you train yourself to run for an hour every day of the week, after a few months this will be within your comfort zone; it will never seem like that much of a big deal to you again.
6.Remember to Enjoy the Journey!
The best bit, if not the total idea behind getting clean. Do not treat your life like it is just the dull bits in-between achieving your goals. You need to learn how to enjoy (and trust) the process of working towards these targets you set for yourself. The surprising thing is that when you start to do this, the journey toward the goal can be almost as enjoyable as achieving it. In fact, the real reason to set yourself goals is for you to enjoy the fun of making them a reality.
