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When it comes to having your dream wedding, and ensuring that yours and your fiancé’s life together after the wedding is as blessed, beautiful, and fulfilling as possible, there are all sorts of different things to keep in mind.
While directly pragmatic concerns such as good financial management and planning and effective budgeting are important factors in ensuring that your dream wedding goes off without a hitch, and while the relationship between you and your partner is by far the most important thing, there’s also a good argument to be made that effective goal setting – in general – can be vitally important.
Here are just a few ways in which a good goal setting strategy can benefit both your wedding and your life, in a range of very positive ways.
By helping you to get a clear sense of what you really find meaningful
Whenever you are trying to plan for a significant event in your life, and to determine the best course forward, it’s extremely important to be able to identify what you really find meaningful, as opposed to just “nice” or “fun.”
In the context of your wedding, where you choose to allocate your resources and how you choose to structure the day will have a major influence on all sorts of things ranging from how well the experience serves to highlight and elevate your relationship with your significant other, to how fondly you look back on it in future.
It might be that having a wedding at a Landmark Wedding Venue is genuinely meaningful to you, or there might be other things that you would prefer to emphasize.
Either way, effective and intentional goal setting can help you to clarify and specify just what it is you find truly meaningful.
By helping you to develop your own authentic vision, rather than just adopting someone else’s
Many people feel uncomfortable trying to set goals, or actively pursue particular desired outcomes in life – partly due to feelings of insecurity in some cases, and partly due to a desire to just be easy-going and avoid creating fuss, in other cases.
The thing is, if you don’t develop your own authentic vision of what it is you want in life, and then take steps to proactively go after what you want, you will tend to have the course of your life determined by the decisions and preferences of other people, which won’t always be properly aligned with your values and hopes.
Taking up a focused and intentional goal setting practice can help you to develop your own authentic vision, rather than putting you in a position where you are simply adopting someone else’s vision – either knowingly or unknowingly.
It’s important to realise that having preferences and pursuing them isn’t an immoral thing to do, at least as long as the things you are pursuing are in alignment with your higher values.
Life can take many amazing twists and turns, and there are all sorts of great possibilities to tap into. Goal Setting can help you to do so in a way that draws out the best in you and maximises your potential, as opposed to just leaving things vaguely defined.
By helping you to maintain positive momentum in your life, in the right directions
As a general rule, many of the greatest and richest, most beautiful, and powerful moments of our lives tend to come about as a result of us proactively generating positive momentum and heading in a valued and desired direction, while at the same time being open to what our experiences have to show us.
On the contrary, when we fall into a state of inertia and passivity, we very often find ourselves feeling hopeless, apathetic, and caught in the kinds of negative spirals that it is difficult to properly escape from.
Unfortunately, it’s not hard to get caught in a slump and have years seemingly flash by in a heartbeat without us doing much, if anything, to pursue our dreams.
Setting yourself goals and pursuing them can really help you to generate and maintain positive momentum in your life, that points you in the right directions and helps to elevate you and magnify your potential, while safeguarding you against complacency, passivity, and all the rest.
By helping to make everyday life more exciting and fun
Let’s face it: virtually everyone wants their life to be fun, exciting, and adventurous, at least within reason.
A big part of the reason why people tend to be so drawn to films and their protagonists, is because they are naturally attracted to the idea of living life at a high intensity, with meaning, excitement, fun, and intrigue all thrown in together.
When you have some goals that you genuinely value and are actively pursuing, life inevitably becomes significantly more fun and exciting as a result. Instead of days seeming aimless, you always have particular things to work towards and pursue, and various ideals that can help to nudge you out of your comfort zone and expand your horizons in a positive and transformative way.
By helping you to keep the “bigger picture” in your awareness
Over the course of everyday life, it is – unfortunately – quite easy to get completely sidetracked and distracted by the relatively minor and ultimately quite insignificant concerns and frustrations that frequently arise as we are going about our business.
While it’ll always be necessary to do things like manage work deadlines and deal with domestic chores, however, it is also critically important to realise and remember that these things are not what life is ultimately about.
In order to live in a meaningful and rewarding way, it’s necessary to keep the “big picture” in your conscious awareness, so that you can refer to it constantly, and check that you are in line with your higher values and aspirations.
A good goal setting strategy can really help you to align yourself with these bigger picture considerations, and can also put you in a situation where you are far better able to adjust your focus and keep one eye on the bigger picture at any given time.
Of course, it certainly helps if your goal setting system includes regular reviews so that you can reflect on your goals and how far you have progressed towards them, at any given time.
And, it should go without saying that this is only likely to actually “work” if the goals you’re pursuing are things that you genuinely value and feel invested in, on a deep level.
By helping you to emphasise positivity and optimism in your life
Life always contains pain, frustration, setback, and disappointment – and if we allow ourselves to focus on these things excessively, there is a real risk that we can end up becoming despondent, nihilistic, resentful, and bitter.
At the same time, however, life also contains a vast amount of opportunity for positivity, joy, uplifting experience, and happiness.
By setting yourself goals and consistently pursuing them, you can help to keep yourself focused more on the positive things in life than on the negative, and you can help to put yourself in a mindset where you experience gratitude for the good things in your life, while simultaneously taking steps to make things better and brighter around you.
Of course, this is not to say that goal setting will solve all your problems, or anything like that. But there are always things that we can do to make a situation either better or worse, depending on the outlook we approach things with, and the actions we take.
*Collaborative Post
