Aim for your ideals to achieve full potential

Get a better job, lose weight, make more money or travel to some nice place for the holidays. These are goals. An ideal on the other hand is a personal vision of the best possible thing, person or situation that deserves to be in your possession.

Picture a beautiful dream of whatever suits your fancy that effortlessly floats into your mind while you sleep. Often times we run around doing impressive mileage chasing goals. While their attainment may be progressive, goal-achievement only begins to scratch at the periphery of our potential. Wanting to get a better job, fit within a specific apparel size or record an impressive bank balance are all not strong enough endeavours to ignite the real fire in us to go the full nine yards on our underlying desires. This is the reason why the minute the processes becomes demanding, slow or unexciting, we give up and find excuses to explain our lack of achievement. "I do not have the right qualifications". "It's in the genes, you know; my whole family is big-bodied". "I do not have the money to invest.”, “I am not connected to the right people”.

While these excuses may be true, they are not the real reason that we do not arrive at our final destinations. Know that our goals, however impressive are simply side-effects of the real stuff that we should be aiming for. Ideals are the name of the game on our actualisation.

Ideals are the profound principles that make up our core. They are what we actually do care about. Anyone can tell you what you want because they will presumptuously base it on what they themselves want. That will usually be totally untenable for you because it is an imposition of their programming on you. This is the reason that makes; "Who do you think you are to tell me what to do?" a common objection to advice especially when unsolicited. All the rules, norms and acceptable ways of being are creations of others. Let's marinate in that for a moment.

Apart from a small percentage, those around us are conditioned to execute other people's acceptable ways of being: “Women don’t do this, that or the other”, “children are not supposed to...”, “men must...”, “married people always...”, etc. Why do we allow the opinions of people who had no idea about the lives that we would lead today dictate how we live? It is a limited existence that we allow other people to impose on us.

No one outside of ourselves can purport to tell us what our ideals are. It is not a verbal conversation you can have with anyone. We come to the realisations of our ideals during or after long, patient and sustained effort in self-education. It is the personal process of finding meaning in our lives and articulating what we truly stand for.

From practising good nutrition and nurturing good health to doing meaningful work that resonates with us are ideals that make the aforementioned goals unnecessary. When we understand this, we effortlessly live in alignment with the ideals that naturally deliver outstanding output that others appreciate and pay our asking price for.

Which will it be for you as we go into the new year; goal or ideal?