This is a question I’ve asked myself for many years. Sometimes it’s about making a career move, maybe it’s an important decision, or simply when I’m tired of working toward a goal that seems out of reach.

If I look at my thought processes when I was right out of school, I can see that I had no perspective, particularly from my current vantage point in life (I have a big birthday coming up soon!). I was just wandering trying to figure out who I was and what I wanted to be.

If I look at my middle years, I was consumed by my career aspirations and how much I could achieve. Today, now that I’m living closer to my parents, I find myself thinking about the future. Regardless of the time in my life, I’ve always seen goals as something to achieve.

The times I’ve achieved my goals, it was a feeling of ‘now what?’ that accompanied me after the celebration. I was left feeling empty and wondering if my hard work had been worth the effort.

And this is exactly why goals are something you put out into the future to continue to work towards. They are constantly changing with your answer to the always relevant key question ‘what do you want?’

We build our life from a series of experiences. Setting goals is really a tool to use to gain the experience you choose to have. It was this realization I had recently after working through a particularly difficult situation that was always associated with a lot of fear and frustration.

I was working through the emotions I associated with money, and I realized my constant focus on having more money was the wrong goal. Changing my goal to not have automatic fear and frustration associated with money was the better goal for me.

As you look into the future in this chaotic time, you can use goals to set yourself up for experiences that are important to you. Knowing what you want is so key to living the life you want and setting goals can be an important tool to help you move forward.

Goals are really something to strive for to stretch yourself to learn more, do more, experience more. They are not necessarily something you have to achieve or complete. When you create goals, remember to ask yourself if the objective is to reach the finish line or to experience the journey towards the goal. Remember, each step along the way counts just as much as the endpoint.

When I was younger, I thought winning was the goal for many of the activities I was involved in, including competitive sports. At the time it was the right goal for me, but as I look back with the perspective I have today, it was the experiences that came from working towards the win, that I learned so much about myself and the world around me.

Maybe setting some goals for yourself can be a way to help you move into the next chapter you want to create for yourself….