Do you often equate happiness with achieving goals? 💜
While yes, having goals and working towards them is how we move forward in life, tying your happiness to accomplishing your goals can become a source of dread.
Happiness is an inside job, and that’s good news! YOU get to choose to be happy while you’re working toward your goals (while still holding yourself accountable), regardless of whether you achieve them or not. 👏
If you feel overwhelmed or burnt out or you find that your happiness always depends on getting external validation instead of your own internal drive, you may be experiencing success exhaustion.
Success exhaustion is when you are motivated by external approval, which leads to you chasing your goals to the extent that it leads to your own detriment.
The antidote to success exhaustion is success alignment. Success alignment is when your success is determined by internal motivation. 💙
Setting realistic expectations helps you to ensure that your goals are driven by internal motivation as it forces you to slow down and pay attention to what you are working to achieve and why you want to achieve it, as opposed to mindlessly chasing someone else’s idea of your success.
Yes, you might have a $ goal for revenue that you want to consistently hit each month, but why do you want to achieve that? Is it because people in your peer group are making that amount and seem happy and you consider them successful? Or is it because you know exactly what you would do with that $ goal each month and how it would make you feel?
The difference between success exhaustion and success alignment lies in creating your own reasons for going after what you want and setting realistic expectations for how you’re going to get there. 🦋