Achieving Hard Goals in Enjoyment

Changing habits involves hard work, only because we dwell on what we’re missing out on instead of appreciating, with vibrancy and newness, the new thing we’re doing.

That might seem impossible. It’s all about focus.

Focus is a time-bound thing. It’s only focus when we continuously centre our attentions on what we need to do to achieve the objective.

Time is Friend

Time is not our enemy, like: “As soon as I get this new habit squared away, things will get easier... life will be more fun—can’t wait for that day!”

Time is, instead, the gift of quantum opportunity—to deepen our experience of real life, which is strangely different from our typical experience. (Much ‘typical experience’ can resemble bondage.)

This is why changing habits and achieving a goal seems hard—it’s more foreign than hard. This is because we’re using our time differently; therefore, our conscious experience is bound to be affected.

Achieving goals in life is about noticing this simple law—that thoughts, feelings, and habits are either home or away; comfortable or uncomfortable—and defeating the power of fear with the power of God: a sound mind focused on what’s best, overall.

We can’t expect change to always feel good. It will feel foreign for a while.

Adopt the ability to think differently—holding such capacity for an extended time period—and we can achieve any goal that’s realistically achievable. The list of realistically achievable goals, as they apply to any person, is beyond our imaginations, but also more finite than we imagine, for some dreams will always be just that—unattainable.

Our deepest desires for change are God-purposed and God-willed. Moreover, our Lord graces us with the energy, resources, even the ingenuity to change.

Once we’ve set out toward our goal, time is a friend because, as time flows forward and never backward, we’re never closer to achieving our goals than we are now.

New Habits – A New Sense of Living Salvation

As Jesus said in John 10:10a: “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy.” One of life’s thieves is the duty of compromise.

We vandalise our own dreams and brutalise our desires. It’s basic human nature, when we have the resources of commodities at our disposal, to take things to excess.

But to live the abundant life, part ‘b’ of John 10:10, we must harness our desires in order to live our dreams—the ordinary, everyday dreams that are attainable for us.

New habits, as we stick at them long enough for them to become entrenched, are the way to that new sense of living salvation. This is not so much hard work as good work—the work of faith to ‘keep on keeping on’ despite the foreign land we trudge. Take a stoic enjoyment with you!

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.