Author: Steven Aitchison
The owner of this blog. Proud father, doting husband, blogger, hire me as freelance writer, and addiction worker
A lot of people find it difficult to reach their goals and consistently give up on them, often thinking themselves a failure for giving up. This compounds their fears and pretty soon they are afraid to try anything new for fear of failing. Well, it’s time to buck the trend and finally reach your goals.
How is it possible to reach my goals now if I’ve failed in the past?
Every single person on this planet can reach their goals if they really want to. Don’t worry I’m not going to give you stories of people who have overcome, seemingly, impossible hurdles to reach their goals. This is about you, nobody else. Every time you set yourself a goal or a target you are wrestling with yourself. However there are ways to give yourself a fighting chance of reaching your goals.
A scenario
You’re all ready to go, you’ve set yourself a goal in your head and you’re saying ‘Right, this is the first day of the rest of my life’ you screw your face up like a sherpa puppy dog, clench your fists and say ‘I’m going to do it this time!’ Then a few days later you don’t reach your goal and say ‘Oh well, I knew it wouldn’t work anyway, but I gave it my best shot.’
Did you really give it you best shot?
Here is the conversation of the above scenario between you Id and your Super-Ego
Id: ‘I want to reach that goal‘
Super-Ego: ‘We’ve been here before and it’s sure to fail, look at everything we have to do to reach that goal, it’ll be too hard’
Id: I don’t care I want to have it!
Ego: Okay, let’s plan this, we all want the same goal but we have to take it easy.
Super-Ego: ‘Ego, we have failed in the past what’s the point of even trying.’
Ego: Let’s just try again, we’ve had some success in the past.’
Id: ‘Yeah, yeah, knock yourself out, go for it.
A FEW DAYS LATER
Super-Ego: ‘Oh well, I knew it wouldn’t work anyway, but I gave it my best shot.’
Id: ‘Of course you did, you thought about it really hard, you did lots of good work (Sarcastic tone), you didn’t take any bloody action but you did think about it really hard, it’s a shame it didn’t work out, I still want it.
Ego: This is another thing that’s going to dent my confidence in the future, maybe I should hold back a bit more and listen to the Super-Ego.
The Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego
Most of us have heard of the Id, the Ego and the Super Ego, they were terms coined by Freud as part of the Structural Theory of the personality.
The Id is the part of you that craves pleasure and the basic desires in life like food, water and sex. When it gets the basics it moves on to other pleasure seeking thrills; ‘I want that new car it’ll make me feel so happy, I want a new dress, I want a new house’ it’s always want, want, want with the Id.
The Super-Ego will give you all the reasons why it will or won’t work, it will look to your past and look at the successes and failings of the past and correlate it with your current goals.
The Ego is the go between for the Id and the Super-Ego trying to satisfy both of them with reasoning and acts like the mother/father figure.
How will this help with reaching your goals
Knowing that the Id and the Super-ego are constantly in battle is useful to know in many ways. For example, imagine setting yourself a goal of making 1 million pounds in 2 months. The Id is going crazy, jumping up and down thinking about all the pleasures it might bring. The super-ego is going crazy thinking about all the reasons it will never work and poor old ego is is stuck in the middle trying to appease both of them. When the goal to make 1million pounds fails, the Id is extremely annoyed, the Super-Ego is saying I told you so, I told you so and the Ego has it’s hands on it’s head saying ‘Oh my god, this is a nightmare.’
So your aim is to satisfy all 3 parts of the personality. How do you do this?
3 Ways to reach your goals quicker
- Play to Your Strengths. Your Super-Ego refers to past successes and failures when it is deciding what to say to the unconscious mind and speaks directly to your mind by way of putting doubt and fear there. If you play to your strengths there is less chance that doubt will creep into your mind.
- Smaller goals for larger gains. When you make a goal make it something that is going to be easily achievable at first. For example, set yourself a goal of earning $300 extra this month. The Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego can all live with this. When you’ve reached your target of $300, your next months goal will be higher, say $500. Now, because of your past success at reaching $300 the Super-ego won’t have a problem with the higher figure, The Id is excited and the Ego is happy.
- Communicate your goals on different levels. When you set yourself a goal of any kind, make sure to communicate to your mind on different levels. These levels can be as follows:
- Visualisation
- Writing, write down all your goals
- Acting, act like you’ve achieved your goal
- Physical pictures (Like a scrap book)
- Watch movies about the goal you desire
- Listen to interviews of people who have achieved the goal you desire
- Reading- read about successful people, read your goals everyday,
All of this helps to entrain your brain into thinking about success and directly communicates with the super-Ego to appease it and make it believe you can achieve your goals. In essence you are giving yourself evidence that your goals can be achieved.
For a more indepth look at the Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego you can read more here:
The Id, the Ego and the Super-Ego
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{ 20 comments… read them below or add one }
Striking a balance among the Id, Ego and Superego is indeed the key to success and of course happiness. Even though many of us weren’t brought up to think about the necessity of addressing these conflicting thoughts, it’s critical that we learn to master this balance now.
I can safely say that this is the first time I’ve seen goal achievement highlighted this way. Very simple one would think, “Why didn’t I think of that?!”
It’s a no-brainer to play to our strengths, so why do we so often not?
Smaller goals – chunking it down – is a great way to build your self-confidence that you CAN achieve your goals.
My personal favorite – Communicate your goal on different levels. This is what makes us successful (aside from the ‘taking action’ part). You’ve included all the tools we recommend. Here’s one of the most effective ones: surround yourself with people, books, and audio that support success and turn off that tv!
Great post. Thanks for sharing.
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Good stuff. I recently purchased BEYOND FREEDOM which if you dont know is a personal development program.I also joined Liberty League so I have a vested interest in this topic.I have only just started the program and things are starting to happen already, it’s amazing how quickly you can change things.Changing the way you think and how you go about your day to day life can bring about an unbalievable transformation in your life. You need to change your mind set, get out of your comfort zone and do the things that most people wont do, the people who do these things are successful in achieving their goals. Your thoughts create your life what you think is what you are. You can talk about this all day it is a hot topic and more and more people are getting into it every day. I have found Beyond Freedom very helpful in changing every aspect of my life so far, it takes 90 days to complete but it is recomended you just repeat the process over and over. If you think you can do it on your own go for it, but if you would like some help from a proven program that has changed thousands of lives and has been at the forefront of personal development for years then visit my web site: https://www.libertyleague.com/freeme
Its true what you have said. We can further understand it by the iceberg analogy. The tip of the Iceberg, that’s visible to everyone is our superego; its our conscious. And the rock bottom part of the iceberg not visible to us is our id; its our unconscious. In between the two is our Ego; the part of our personality that acts as the buffer between the id and the outside world.
How about having an alter-ego?! Some people have this kind of stuff. But definitions of this alter-ego vary depending on the person.
a thing to remember, we must learn from out mistakes, its common for a human to commit mistakes unless you think your inhuman, the best thing to do after doing mistakes in our life is relax and unwind, have a vacation.
Everyone must be aware of the presence of the ego, superego, and id. One might not fully believe in them, but acknowledge the fact that they are present in different forms.
My favorite saying is “there is no failure, only feedback.” It puts a positive spin on things and is a much healthier outlook.
Ego can really eat you from inside, There is a famous saying about Ego
“Give up all bad qualities in you, banish the ego and develop the spirit of surrender. You will then experience Bliss.”
After flicking so many pages,at last i got such an interesting topic that will surely help me out with my goals.I do agree with you that Superego,Id and ego are the main forms of our personality and Web jobs portrait a very good example of it.
And i personally believe in the saying that Success is the key to failure.
Sometimes sports and love can change people’s lives, make their own self-confidence, like me.
Surely there will be failures as we go on with our lives. And it can be very depressing at times. but what’s most important is that you have thrived along that road, and you can tell yourself that you did your best to achieve that goal.
There is a book entitled. A New Earth-written by Eckhart Tolle. And he teaches the only real success is to be in the present moment without any ego noise in the mind. Good points in this book, that may tie in well with some of the topics discussed in this post.
Gratitude,
+Baker
There is a good saying, “It’s better to take risk and to lose than not take risk at all”. Too many times we stop ourselves from trying because failure is the only outcome that we foresee. In fact the outcome can be any of the numerous success-failure combinations. It’s never a pure failure since you learned something new, gained useful experience. It’s never pure success either – there is always a trade off, things you have to give up. But what can be worse that just sit there and keep guessing about things that could happen, without taking your chance to actually find it out by trying.
Self made People always gets batter in their life so be selfmade, depends on your which way you wanted to choose you have to determination your goal and how you reach at that point with your confidence for that you need lot of dedication…
Nice:
My favorite saying is “there is no failure, only feedback.” It puts a positive spin on things and is a much healthier outlook.
What a heart stopping thing you revealed here…!
Some things, I have never ever imagined but some yes.
I should say its Very terrific solution, My self realization is every time stopped by Super-Ego, but you tame me to thing about it….
I remembered my school teachers words: Confidence is good but over confidence let you down!
Now am just Communicate my goals on different levels….!
wow!
Great article. A new perspective to think about. I have also found that it is easier to use small steps to reach your goals instead of going for it in one big step. Thanks for the great information!
If one subscribes to the idea that it is the journey rather than the arrival that is important then sorry to put a damper on the importance of goals. However, the very good news is that you never have and never will depart from the real goal! The genuine you cannot; you just have to realize it, that’s all!