Achieve Your Goals with Less Grinding - Expanding Awareness - Every

When it comes to pursuing goals, you can learn to notice when you’re grinding, and instead of leaning harder on the accelerator you can opt to disengage the parking brake. The feeling is incredible: suddenly you can go faster, turn more easily, and set your sights on more distant destinations without worrying whether you’ll make it.

feelings should be combined with evidence, reason and the ever-vigilant awareness that they might not reflect the full landscape of what’s actually going on and what you happen to have noticed within it.

Let’s say you have perfectionist tendencies—meaning that your assessment of quality may exceed others’—you’re working on a project and you’re approaching a deadline to submit a draft for feedback. The idea of submitting something below your standards feels wrong, so you grind late into the night until it feels right to share it. However, if your se... See more

Once you know where you are, and where you want to go, the last thing you need to do is make sure you don't have any conflicting goals. When someone is grinding this is usually what's happening—but the conflicts between goals can be subtle and hard to see.

In summary, when you notice yourself grinding there's probably a bug in one of three places. Either your sense of where you are is off, you’re not clear on where you want to go, or you have conflicting goals that need untangling. Rather than pressing down on the figurative accelerator and powering your way through, you might like to consider taking... See more