If you really don’t know what you want, you must first discover who you are. Goal-setting is a journey into self-discovery. Perhaps you’ve been living someone else’s life. If you have been living your life only to make someone else happy, you may wake up one morning to realize that…not only are you not happy…you don’t even know what it would take to make you happy. This often occurs when women marry young, have kids, and devote themselves to their family’s needs. Later in life, their kids are grown, their huisband is absorbed in his career, or maybe he’s left or has died, and she finds herself alone. How does she know what she wants if she has spent her entire adult life fulfilling other people needs. The first step in the journey to self-discovery is to set goals designed to build and improve yourself as a person. Goals to get healthy, to become a better listener, to learn a new language, to be more patient…things like that, things that’ll build your confidence and self-awareness. The next step to self-discovery is to branch out and experiment with lots of different activities. Join a group for a month…then leave if you don’t find it interesting or fun. Take a yoga class, join a reading group, take a hiking seminar, study martial arts. Once you discover something you enjoy, the process of doing it will tell you something about yourself. Self-discovery has begun! How do you react under the stress of competition? Do you enjoy social interactions with different types of people? What special skills or talents have you discovered? Now…you should know more about yourself and now you can discover what you want to do for a living that will be challenging and interesting and FUN! This may surprise you, but once you’ve discovered who you really are and have learned to think differently, you can make a living doing virtually anything you enjoy…no matter what it is. ~ M Newton
