The life lesson: sometimes you have to give up on your goals – for your own good. The successful woman: Anna Quindlen, a Pulitzer-prize winning author.
“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing,” says Quindlen, “is giving up on being perfect and beginning the work of being yourself.”
Sometimes you have to give up for your own good. This means:
- looking at your goals
- determining if they’re achievable and healthy
- either re-evaluating them or giving them up entirely
Giving up for your own good is about learning how to let go of your goals without feeling like a failure. It’s about seeing success and opportunity in quitting — and about quitting one thing to make room for another.
Giving Up for Your Own Good – Anna Quindlen
Before you think about changing the direction of your life, consider these two guidelines:
1. Does your goal represent who you are? “If you’re pursuing something that doesn’t honor who you are, it’ll make you sick,” says bestselling author Sandra Anne Taylor, co-author of Secrets of Success. “The results will be negative.” Whether your goal is professional, personal, social or spiritual – it has to honor who you are to be worthwhile. Your goal has to be in line with your personality, beliefs, values, and future plans.
2. Surrender the outcome of your dreams. “Surrender the outcome so that you don’t move into urgency and desperation,” says Taylor. “Take action towards your goals, and periodically stop to reevaluate if the action is working. Be flexible with that action, and move in a different direction if necessary.”
This doesn’t mean that you stop caring about the outcome of your efforts – or achieving your goals. Surrendering the outcome means you’re open to anything. You can flow into new experiences and re-evaluate what’s not working. You still hope and dream, but you’re not clinging to one particular outcome.
Some things you’ll want to give up on because the time has passed and it’s not healthy for you to continue. Other things just require that you stay focused, determined, and resilient! The trick is knowing when to keep trying, and when to move on…
What do you think about giving up for your own good? And remember that giving up on your hopes is a process. It doesn’t happen overnight…like my hope for having kids! I’m slowly beginning to realize that having my own biological children may something I need to let go of; I think the gradual process of accepting that it’s time to let go of that hope makes it much easier to move towards something new and different!
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Lovely topic, Laurie. Surrending in every area of my life is my focus lately, but particularly with goals. I’ve discovered over the years that the more ‘effort’ I put into my goals, the slower they manifest – like walking through mud. Yet, when I become trusting and surrender the outcome (and sometimes even the ‘how’) things move more easily and quickly. I’m amazed at how many times when my clients let go and surrender the dreams they’ve been ‘trying’ to ‘make’ happen, how things suddenly fall into place or something new and better opens up for them.
Our analytical minds, which do most of the planning, only see a small portion of what’s possible, whereas when we surrender, we open up to our higher spiritual selves which sees the whole bigger picture and all the possibilities for its manifestation.
Thanks for the reminder,
Gini