Setting Good Goals

Goals are some of the most misunderstood facets of life. We all know the general idea of what a goal is but I think we fail to use goals to motivate us. We think things like,  “I’ll start working out tomorrow” or “I’ll buy more veggies next week.” These things are never completed fully and sometimes are never even started at all. Goal-setting feels like it should be common sense, right?

1. Set a goal
2. Do it

Why is it so hard to follow through, then? What keeps us from being consistent, motivated, committed?

In my experience with clients and in my personal life, I have seen goals set in unhealthy ways. Setting a goal in an unhealthy way will lead to frustration, disappointment, and will likely keep us from completing the goal. Let’s explore some ways in which we set unhealthy goals:

• 1. We make goals too big: Goals are necessary to complete tasks, but if we make the goal too large we put ourselves at risk for disappointment and frustration. Now I am not saying to “settle” or aim for less than your best, but we must manage our expectations for ourselves based on where we are. If my goal is to play in the NBA (at 5’7″, without a shred of basketball talent), I will likely be disappointed.
• 2. We start with more than we can do: If our goal is appropriately large, we must then begin to break that goal down into smaller pieces. If my goal is to bench press 200 pounds, I probably don’t want to start at 180. We have to crawl before we can walk. Break the overall goal into smaller chunks: “what can I do today to make progress towards my goal?” Set a smaller goal for the week, for the month, for the year, for five years. Let your goals guide your behaviors.
• 3. We expect perfection: setbacks happen when trying to make changes. This is inevitable. It is a very difficult thing to get outside our comfort zone and make changes. Our old ways will fight back and we will slip: we will skip a daily run or cheat on our diet. It is important to take the setback for what it is and stay focused to be more successful the next time you experience a setback in the changes you are making.

Crafting a healthy relationship with goals is a life long journey of trial, error, and compassion. The points mentioned above are great places to start, but there is no magic in them. Change is hard work, but I have seen that putting a bit more thought into the creation of goals themselves saves a lot of frustration and heartache when it’s time to get down to the business of self-improvement.

 

 

What goals are you setting for yourself today? 

Film Friday | “X-Men: Days of Future Past”

This film is a true testament to the insanity of Hollywood.

The original X-Men film, released in 2000, was a surprise hit. It jump-started the now-longstanding popularity of superhero movies and was a pretty well-crafted adaptation of a legendary comic series. A sense of surreal nostalgia washed over me as I watched this new film, Days of Future Past: in the year 2000, there were no iPhones, Frasier and Friends were still on the air, 911 was just the phone number we called for help, and Hugh Jackman was an unknown actor. Can you even put yourself back in that mindset? The world was a different place then. That the original cast could return to a film 8 years after the last one they made together is pure Hollywood insanity.

The movie starts in the not-too-distant future. Sentinels have taken over the world, enslaved humanity, and killed almost all mutants. The film opens by showing mutants trying their best to merely survive against the Sentinels: giant, shape-shifting, almost invincible machines. They meet up with Xavier (Patrick Stewart), Magneto (Ian McKellan), and Wolverine (Hugh Jackman) and contrive a plan to send Wolverine into the past to stop this reality from ever occurring. Wolverine is sent to 1973 where he meets the cast of the well-received reboot film X-Men: First Class. His mission is to prevent the assassination of Bolivar Trask (Peter Dinklage), the creator of the Sentinels.

If this feels complicated, just know that it is and it isn’t. Director Bryan Singer does a fine job of balancing what is happening in the future with what is going on in the past. The stakes are always very clear and the entire film feels appropriately tense. The audience can sense the race against time itself as Wolverine and the young Xavier (James McAvoy) and Magneto (Michael Fassbender) struggle to change their future.

The film is filled with great performances, particularly from Fassbender and McAvoy. McAvoy especially shines in this film as he must portray young Xavier’s arc from apathy to responsible leadership. The fight scenes are thankfully free of shaky-cam and finally feel like watching the old 90’s X-Men cartoon, where teamwork was more important than any individual power. The Sentinels were fantastically realized: cold, unfeeling, powerful, scary. Gone are the goofy faces of the cartoon sentinels; these ones mean business.

Overall, I would highly recommend this movie, especially if you’ve seen the other X-Men films. The narrative carries a lot more weight if you have developed a connection with the characters in their other movies, but this isn’t necessary. This was a popcorn movie done right.

What did you think of X-Men: Days of Future Past?

 

 

Spoilers/Rambling: 

• The Kelsey Grammer cameo almost made me give a standing ovation. Beautiful.
• The final scenes of the film, with all of the previously-dead mutants from the now-rebooted timeline, were very affecting for me. It felt like a strong closure and an appropriately warm goodbye to the characters.
• Quicksilver’s big moment was everything I wanted it to be.
• The end credit stinger was a young version of Apocalypse, one of the ultimate villains of the X-Men. He has pretty much every power you could ever want: shape-shifting, telekinesis, the ability to shoot energy beams, being able to change his body into weapons, regeneration, telepathy, teleportation, and he wears alien power armor that makes him even more durable. He’s an ancient mutant and occasionally recruits other mutants to become his Four Horsemen. Apocalypse was marvelously represented in the 90’s cartoon.  I absolutely love how deep into comic lore mainstream movies are getting, don’t you?