When you’re young, setting goals was simple, your goal is often to graduate college, find a well-paying career, get into a committed relationship, buy a house and start a family. Along this road, the young hope for financial stability, recognition and happiness.
For some young people, they want a life of adventure with no ties. They want to backpack across Europe and find their way as they go. When you’re young, the goals are often big.
Growing older, those goals all change. By the time you’re an older adult, you’ve already had or still have the career, you have the relationship, the house and the family. You’ve accomplished your goals, you’ve achieved what you dreamed about doing.
Once you’ve done this, you might discover that you’re not feeling the same happiness you once had. The reason for this is that you need to have new goals to strive for regardless of your age.
Seeking out goals and reaching for dreams gives a person a sense of purpose, which is tied in to a greater level of happiness. You need to have goals for your happiness as you get older.
Even if they’re not as big and even if you don’t pursue them with the same fervor a young person has, you still need goals. You can set goals and dream of what you want to happen, and you should.
Having goals helps you feel younger emotionally and mentally and helps you be happier. The key is found in having focused goals. Some older people have simpler goals like getting started in exercising or moving closer to the grandkids.
Others have goals that are based on things they feel they missed in life. Maybe you always wanted to be an actor, but life took some twists and turns, and you never fulfilled that dream.
You can set a new goal and fulfill a dream by getting involved in community theater. Perhaps you’ve always wanted to lose weight, but never seemed to have the time or energy.
You can start small, focus on a pound or two a week. Join a group so that you have support and social interaction as well. If you’ve always wanted to write a novel and dreamed about that, but haven’t started yet, it’s not too late.
Begin by joining a local writers’ group. Learn the craft and set writing goals such as a certain word count or page count a day. You have to know what your goals are and what your dreams are before you can do anything about them.
Ask yourself what moves you, what you’re passionate about, what thing or things you regret not having done. In the answer to those questions, you’ll find the goals that you need to work on.
You don’t want to look back on your life and feel depressed about what you didn’t do and what you feel you missed out. Instead, look at today as a clean slate. You can start now, and you have an edge over younger people. You’re far more mature, you’re already settled in life, and you have more resources that you can turn to in order to meet your goals.
