How to get your way

Sometimes we know exactly what we want – no onions, dressing on the side, please. It’s pretty easy to determine if we got our way or not and to advocate for ourselves if we didn’t.

Sometimes we know what we want, but we are willing to compromise – I’d rather watch Bridgerton, but I’ll watch Breaking Bad with you instead. We would like to get our way, but it’s OK if we don’t. Compromise is a good skill to have. Making peace with the fact that we aren’t always going to get our way will smooth the way through so many of life’s challenges.

Sometimes we define what we want so vaguely that we aren’t sure if we got our way or not.

I want to be a good student.

I want to be popular.

I want to be successful.

When we define what we want in this manner, we set ourselves up for perpetual striving. We can end up feeling like our results are never good enough. We don’t know where the finish line is, so we feel like we never reach it.

What does it mean to be a “good student”? If you score 85% on an exam in a class where you have never scored above an 80% on an assignment, does that make you a good student? Or do you need to get 90%, or 95%, or is nothing short of 100% going to be good enough?

What does it mean to be “popular”? If one person doesn’t like you, is that still one person too many?

What does it mean to be “successful”? Successful at what? Is it good enough to pass your classes or do you need to succeed at everything you try on the first attempt with little or no effort? Do you need to be perfect to be “successful”?

It’s too easy to beat yourself up and feel dissatisfied with your results when you don’t know what you are striving for. When we don’t define what our standards of success are, we tend to continue to move the goal posts further away every time we get close to reaching them. We never feel like our efforts are good enough, because we never reach an ending point. We never get to declare victory because there is always more work left to be done.

Imagine how frustrating it would be if your instructors set expectations in this way! When someone else asks something of you, you want to know exactly what the end goal is. You should demand the same level of detail from yourself.

When you can clearly define what you want and how you will know when you get it, it’s much easier to plan to meet your goal and to feel happy with the results. When you have a specific, measurable and realistic goal, you can begin to take action to work toward that goal with the assurance that you will know when you have arrived and will then have the satisfaction of knowing that you have succeeded – that you have gotten your way.

Instead of wanting to be a “good student”, could you want to get a final grade of 85% in your history class with an average grade of 90% on the papers and 83% on the weekly quizzes? That is a goal you can plan for! How many hours of study do you need to put in to achieve those scores? When can you schedule those hours into your week? Who do you need to get to proofread your paper to get a 90%? When will you schedule an appointment with the peer tutoring center to get help with your references? Now that you have a concrete goal, you can start to plan the action steps you need to take to make it a reality.

When your goal was to be a “good student”, you probably knew that you needed to study more, but you didn’t know how much more or what exactly you needed to do during your study time. Doing more and being better are vague enough to be completely overwhelming and yet utterly useless in directing our efforts toward achieving our goals. Well defined goals allow more detailed action plans which lead to success.

What exactly is it that you want? Are there nebulous goals, intangible desires, or vague ambitions lurking in the corners of your mind? Are you making any progress toward making them a reality? What might happen if you got out a flashlight and shone a bright spotlight on those ideas? Could you add some detail to them? How much more specific could you make them? What would happen if you added some numbers and a deadline to them? Would you feel more motivated to take the next steps to make them happen? I bet you would!

What do you need to do to start working toward those goals? What is the first step? What is the second step? Are you willing to take those steps today?