Works in Progress and the Personal Growth Waiting Game
Setting a new goal can be extremely exciting. I know that when I think about the life I will have once I’ve achieved my goals, I feel so ready for that next chapter. After all, the whole point of setting a goal is to somehow better your situation in some way. But all that excitement can lead to impatience when things don’t change right away.
As someone who is naturally very results-oriented, I’ve struggled a lot with the Personal Growth Waiting Game. When I set a goal for myself, I want to reach it ASAP, even sooner if possible. And I’ll be the first to admit that these feelings have led me to resent the work that I need to do in order to achieve my goal. This, of course, makes the process even harder. I had to learn how to temper that impatience and change my way of thinking when it came to my personal growth progress. And this came with quite a few changes to my own internal biases when it came to what success looks like for me.
The biggest shift I had to make was to start viewing myself as a constant work in progress rather than a project that would ever be fully completed. Does that sound disheartening? Don’t worry. I felt the same way. But as I have adjusted to that line of thinking, I have found that it gives me quite a bit of comfort. It removes the pressure to be already at the end of your journey, because your journey has no end.
Personal growth isn’t a one-and-done type of deal. You don’t just set a goal, reach it, and then you’re done. There are so many smaller wins to be had between those two steps. And once you have reached your goal, there’s another goal waiting to be set just beyond it. We are always growing, learning, changing, and building the lives we want to be leading. So why are we putting pressure on ourselves to hurry up and be done with all of it? Are these things not what make life worth living?
We are all works in progress. We are all figuring out our next steps and setting our next goals, whether we are doing it on our own or with the help of a life coach or other support network. Once we remove the need for us to be done with our journey before we even start it, we can sit back and enjoy the ride. We can enjoy the ups and the downs and the little achievements along the way. We can look forward to where we will go next once we have achieved our current goals. And that makes the Personal Growth Waiting Game just a little more enjoyable to play.