3445: Unsure About Your Goals, Start Here by Josie Michelle Davis on Personal Development and Growth

This is Optimal Living Daily. Unsure about your goals? Start here by Josie Michelle Davis of JosieMichelleDavis.com and I'm just a molecular personal narrator where I get permission from the authors of the best blogs I can find on personal development, minimalism, productivity, anything that I think will help you live a more meaningful life. And then I simply read their content to you for free.

Happy new year, wishing you a wonderful one and by a nice post about goals to start us off right. So with that, let's get right to it as we optimize your life. Unsure about your goals? Start here by Josie Michelle Davis of Josie Michelle Davis dot com.

It's January, which means everyone and their mom is talking about one thing, goals, goals, resolutions, intentions, whatever you choose to call them. They can be straight up terrifying if you aren't sure where you want to go. And all those people saying, you've got to get clear on your goals are only making it worse. How are you supposed to magically get clear on your goals when you feel so unsure of everything?

It's like that scene in Friends where they ask Phoebe if she has a life plan and she says, I don't even have a plan. So how do you find clarity on your goals? How do you even know what goal to set when you have no clue what direction to take your life in? I feel you, seriously. There have been so many times in my life finding myself once again wondering, where do I go now? When I dropped out of university for lack of money and found myself living at home again with no job or plan,

or when I realized the career I had been working on for years wouldn't fit with my long-term life goals or pretty much a million other times in my life I felt lost at sea. Seriously, I've not had a plan more than I've had one. The truth is finding your goals is a process.

All those YouTubers who make it sound like a 20-minute exercise and bam, if you've got a life plan, obviously don't understand feeling lost. The truth is, it's harder than just creating a vision board or spending 10 minutes brainstorming. These are the ways I've slowly but surely found clarity when I felt completely lost on what to do next. Explore.

The world is your freaking oyster. You can do anything, but you can't do everything. Throw in a few more cliches that are way overused but are good nuggets of truth. It's all true, but sometimes the vast array of choices makes it even harder. Personally, I wish I had about 10 lives so I could do all the totally different things I dream of.

Sit down and write out any and everything that interests you. Even crazy things. Get them all out of your head. Then take time and work through the list. Research each idea as if you're really going to pursue it. This can and should take more than just an afternoon. Fully flush out each idea until you know whether it's a real possibility or if it doesn't make sense for you right now.

When I realized working as a full-time stylist wasn't going to fit with my long-term dreams of working remotely and having flexibility with where I live, I started researching new options. One of my top ideas was to become a registered nutritionist dietitian. I spent a few weeks researching the ins and outs, the requirements, what schools I could potentially go to, and lurking Reddit boards of R&Ds to learn the goods and bads.

In the end, I decided it wasn't going to fit with my big life goals and had to let that idea go, at least for now, but I can now look back and feel good that I really spent the time to rule it out and can sleep well knowing I made the right decision. Sometimes a big part of figuring out what to do is figuring out what not to do.

So don't get down when you rule something out. No matter how crazy your ideas might be, give them the due diligence of exploring them seriously. Try not to hold those ideas too closely, but be willing to let them go when you see red flags. Maybe you'll find that one of those crazy ideas is actually the perfect path for you. Experiment.

As adults, we often don't let ourselves just experiment and try new things out without the pressure to make it our lives work, but oftentimes it's the experimenting that can teach us more than anything. When I left college, I had no idea what to do. I realized I was really interested in event planning, so I emailed all of the event planners I could find contact information for in the Philly area, and one responded,

I took an unpaid internship and drove over an hour each way to work for her, all while also working a fee-retail job as much as I could to make money. Even though I eventually decided that planning weddings wasn't for me, I don't regret it for a second. I learned so much from that internship, most of all, what a kick this business woman looks like.

You don't have to take an unpaid internship to experiment. Try taking classes in things that interest you or go to meetups. Ask someone in the field if you can shadow them for a day or just learn from online tutorials. Try to let go of the pressure that this thing will be your ultimate goal and just let yourself try something new. It's that experimenting that can teach us the most about ourselves.

Remember, it's okay. Seriously, it's okay. I know, you don't believe me. I know that because I never would have believed me. I still sometimes mentally beat myself up for not making the Forbes 30 under 30 list, although I do technically have a few months left for that one, but I have a feeling it's just not gonna happen.

Not where you thought you'd be at this point in your life? Forget it. Seriously. You won't get anywhere if all you're doing is focusing on what you haven't done. Practice some self-love, take a deep breath, and girl, believe in yourself. I have spent too much of my own life beating myself up for not being where I want to be and wasting that energy has never helped me.

The only times I've truly reached my goals are when I let go of what was behind me and just started focusing on what was ahead of me. Last year I started practicing meditation and it's really helped me to learn to live more in the moment. Let the f*** go and move on. That's my mantra.

In the end, the best advice I can give you is to just invest more time in yourself. You won't figure out your life calling by overstressing yourself and obsessing over it every day. Believe me, I've tried. Work on understanding and developing yourself, and you'll start to see your path more clearly.

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Thank you to Josie. I definitely related to this post. I experimented and tried so many different things before landing on this podcast and I believe I found what I truly love to do. So thank you for being part of it and listening. The greatest thing you can do for me this year is help spread the word about this podcast. We talked about goals in this article and our goal or resolution is to grow this in addition to all of our shows.

So any help sharing this show is greatly appreciated. I'm sure you have some friends or family that would love to know that this podcast exists, or even what podcasts are, so you can point them to oldpodcast.com or even better. Simply show them how to subscribe for free right on their smartphone if they have one. Thank you for doing that. It means a lot, but I'll do it for today. Again, happy new year, and I'll see you tomorrow, where optimal life awaits.