The Relationship Between Mental Health & Achieving My Goals: 3 Keys for Success
by Tizita Seifu MA, LPC
Here are keys for success that can help with making progress toward personal and professional goals:
3 KEYS FOR SUCCESS:
Key for Success: Hope
Hope energizes, motivates and excites us. Hope helps us to survive, and it can even help us to thrive. When hope is injured and especially when it is injured multiple times, it can become harder and harder to hope. It can then become harder and harder to access energy to do the work necessary to achieve and maintain our hopes, plans and resolutions.
Key for Success: Mental Health
The resource I see as often needed yet often benefitting greater consideration first, as it relates to success, is the resource of mental and emotional energy available through mental health, that includes emotional health and spiritual health. Mental fitness is a major part of what helps us move our hope into reality. Mental health is a major part of what helps us get up and show up, even when we want to put it off until later. Mental wellness is a critical part of what helps us have the energy and will to persevere, even when a part of us wants to quit. Mental health helps us keep pursuing what is possible and not just what is available or comfortable.
Mental and spiritual health energizes us,
helps us get up, show up and persevere in what is possible.
Just as a race would be hard for you to run with a heavy bag on your back, so it is even more when we do not work through the things that weigh us down mentally, emotionally, or spiritually. Though you may be able to run with the heavy bag, you will tire much more quickly. The heavy weight makes it harder to reach your goals and even harder to maintain your goals. This can cause a cycle of hope, trying hard, running fast, growing tired, then consciously or unconsciously stopping pursuit of your goals as you may become aware of your exhaustion.
You have the right to run the race of life light and unburdened by extra weight. You have the right to give yourself the best chance at success at life. Your right is possible and accessible. We can run lighter and lighter, the more we face and release the things that weigh us down mentally or emotionally.
Chances are strong that if what has been bothering you has been present for several weeks, it likely will not go away any time quickly. Therapy, also known as professional counseling, is a place that can and often does help us drop weight, run lighter and make it easier to achieve our personal and life goals. Professional counseling not only helps us drop the heavy things that have weighed us down mentally, but it also helps us learn new skills to achieve our goals.
As you pursue your mental health and emotional wellness, you will likely find it easier to remain consistent in pursuing your goals. It is likely that other goal setting strategies will prove more effective because you will have opened capacity in yourself to fully leverage other methods.
Mental health and spiritual health is the foundation to being well-equipped to reach and maintain our goals.
It might be easy to take this article as a reminder to engage your self-care practices or to work harder at finding strategies to achieve your goals. Hard work matters and so do effective strategies, and yet mental health and spiritual health is the foundation that will energize us with the sustained capacity to pursue and maintain effective strategies to achieving goals.
Key for Success: A Proven Plan
Good intentions without clear plans rarely lead to longterm success. While hope and mental health are key for success, so is a clearly defined and well informed plan. Therapy can help you define a clear plan to achieve your personal and professional goals. A Licensed Professional Counselor, such as myself, has received at least 4 years of education and training regarding researched and proven methods for personal success and can help you find the plan that is right for you.
2 self-assessment questions that can help you determine where therapy may help:
1. Am I generally feeling mentally, emotionally, and spiritually energized and motivated?
2. Am I generally able to achieve and maintain my personal or professional goals?
If you were unable to confidently answer yes to either question, schedule your Therapy or a Mental Wellness Checkup to begin your journey toward discovering your way to further success.
