How to Enjoy the Journey, Not Just the Destination

The challenge when trying to accomplish any Big Goal is that 95% of your time will be spent in your journey toward that goal.  You then may spend 5% of your time enjoying having reached your destination.  After that, you’ll soon pick another Big Goal to tackle!  So, life is spent in this never-ending journey of striving toward one goal and then another.  As a result, if you want to really enjoy life, you have to be able to find fulfillment in the individual journeys toward those goals, and not just in their destinations.

Admittedly, that’s hard to do!  That’s because the journey is fraught with uncertainty.  After all, when we are striving toward a goal, we have no idea if it will come to pass.  We are simply moving forward based on the faith that we can do it.  That can feel uncomfortable, to say the least.

But the key to enjoying the journey is to take your focus away from the uncertainty.  Instead, your focus should be on enjoying the journey itself.

As a very simple example, let’s say that your goal is to become fluent in French.  That’s a goal that will take a long time to achieve, unless you move to a French-speaking country.  But while you are in the process of learning French, you don’t have to fret over how long it will take you to become fluent.  Instead, you can just enjoy the learning process! 

One way to enjoy the process is to track your progress each day.  You also might immerse yourself in French culture by cooking French food, reading French literature or watching French films.  You might even join a Francophile club.  All of that is really fun, and you haven’t even become fluent yet!  That’s how you enjoy the journey!!

Below are ways to stop worrying about your destination and to start enjoying your journey toward your goals.  If you learn to enjoy the process of getting to your goals, you’ll truly start enjoying life!

Embrace the Present Moment

In any given moment in life, there are good things happening and bad things.  That’s the nature of life.  Your life is never going to have a single moment or period when everything is perfect.  Once you accept that fact, it is much easier embrace your life as it is in the present moment.

For instance, let’s say that your goal is to graduate from college.  That takes 4 long years.  It may take longer if you are doing your studies part-time.  But you will waste years of your life if you only can be happy once you have that degree. 

Instead, embrace the present moment.  Take classes that inspire you.  Get to know your professors and the other students.  Simply enjoy the learning process!

A couple of years ago, my husband and I moved my daughter into her dorm room for her freshman year at college.  Before we left, I was trying to find the right words of advice to give her.  Ultimately, the advice I gave was this: “Take as much as you can away from this experience.  College is expensive, so get the highest rate of return on this investment.  Live your college experience to the fullest.” 

Well, three years later, I can attest to the fact that she has done exactly that.  She has attacked her school work and gotten straight As.  She’s taken fascinating classes, and as a result, she has become a highly intelligent, knowledgeable and insightful young lady.  She truly is enjoying her 4-year journey toward her college degree to the fullest.

So, embrace each moment of life.  Don’t just fixate on your end goals, but live life to the fullest during the journey toward those goals. 

Set Periodic Milestones

We can get discouraged during our journey toward a goal if we don’t feel that we are making progress.  The challenge is that when we are pursuing Big Goals, progress can be slow. 

For instance, if you are trying to get fit or lose weight, you may not notice a difference in your physique after only one week or even one month of working out.  Or, if you are trying to advance your career, it may take a couple of years to bolster your resume so that you can be hired for a better job.

In short, Big Goals simply aren’t achieved overnight.  Instead, they take months, if not years, to accomplish.  So, to enjoy your life while working toward a goal, it helps to set periodic milestones.  Those milestones are mini-goals which you can more easily accomplish and celebrate!

For instance, let’s say that you have a Big Goal to become healthier.  You might set a milestone of walking 10,000 steps a day for one week.  Then, when you achieve that goal, you can give yourself a pat on the back or treat yourself to a frozen yogurt! 

The idea is this: You aren’t going to resolve all your health issues in one week.  Or even in one month.  So, to enjoy the journey toward good health, set periodic milestones, like walking a certain number of steps in a week.  Then each week, you can feel a strong sense of accomplishment, even if you haven’t yet achieved your Big Goal of great health.

When we set periodic smaller goals during our journey, suddenly our journey becomes a lot more fun!  That’s because those smaller goals translate into “small wins” that we can celebrate along the way.

Be Grateful for the Process

Admittedly, you can go through life without having any Big Goals.  And there’s nothing wrong with that.  Big Goals take a lot of time and effort.  But if you don’t set some Big Goals for yourself in life, you’ll be missing out. 

That’s because anytime that you set a Big Goal for yourself, a whole world of new experiences opens up to you.  You learn things that you didn’t know before.  You develop new skills, and you sometimes even meet new people.

For example, my Big Goal is to grow the “Create A Great Life” website so that people from all over the world will turn to it when seeking advice about how to live a happier, more fulfilling life.  However, growing a website’s readership takes time! 

The good news is that while I work at growing the website, I also am enjoying the process.  I love writing about topics that I think may help my readers.  And once in a while, I receive an email from a reader who expresses appreciation for one of my blog posts.  When I receive those emails, my heart feels so full of gratitude.  The process of growing the website is something that I truly enjoy.

So, don’t just focus on your end game.  Be grateful for the process involved in reaching your goals.  Through that process, you’ll be blessed with new experiences, meeting new people, and hopefully learning new things.

Embrace Challenges and Setbacks

Big, meaningful goals test us.  They test our ability to persist.  They force us to ask ourselves, “In the face of significant challenges and setbacks, can I keep striving toward this goal?”  For many people, the answer to that question is “No.”  And they give up.  The folks who ultimately achieve Big Goals are those who are persistent.

Big goals also give us a good dose of humility.  It’s easy to be arrogant if you’ve never experienced a setback.  But that also means that you’ve never tried to do anything significant.  Striving toward a big goal is a humbling experience because you learn that you aren’t always going to do everything perfectly. 

For example, during her lifetime, my mother achieved a Big Goal of getting a degree in piano from the Toronto Conservatory.  She recently passed away, and as I was going through her belongings, I found the performance evaluations that she received along the way toward getting her degree.  Some evaluations were quite complimentary, and some were critical.  But she didn’t become discouraged by the occasional negative evaluation.  Instead, she continued to work until she received her degree.  That takes tenacity! But those evaluations also imbued her with a reasonable sense of humility.

So, embrace the challenges and setbacks that you face while pursuing a Big Goal.  Realize that those obstacles are transforming you into a different person.  They are making you humbler, and at the same time, they are making you more tenacious.  And those are two great qualities that we should all want to possess!

The Journey Teaches Us to Be Flexible and Adaptable

Unfortunately, the journey toward any Big Goal is not going to be linear.  There will be bumps and obstacles along your path.  And those bumps and obstacles are our teachers.  They teach us to be flexible and adaptable.

Now, if you just want to putter along in life without any bumps in the road, you can do that!  You can fashion a life with no challenges, and as a result, life can be relatively smooth.  But the bumps teach us the important life skills of flexibility and adaptability.

For example, when I was in high school, I had a Big Goal of getting a college degree.  Unfortunately, in the United States, college is very expensive, and my parents didn’t make enough money to send me to a college in the U.S.  But I didn’t want a lack of finances to prevent me from going to college.  So, I pivoted.  I applied and was accepted to a university in Canada where getting a degree was substantially less expensive.  Fortunately, I ended up getting a great education and had a wonderful experience there.

But to accomplish my goal, I had to be flexible.  I couldn’t just say, “Well, if I can’t go to college in the U.S., then I guess I’ll give up on that dream.”  I had to be willing to go to another country to get my degree.  And I also had to be adaptable.  I had to adapt to living in another country, a long way from home. 

The good news is that those early lessons in being flexible and adaptable have helped me ever since.  Now, anytime I have a Big Goal that I want to accomplish, I’m ready to make whatever adjustments are necessary so that I can accomplish it!

So, realize that during your journey to a Big Goal, you’re developing the valuable skills of flexibility and adaptability.  Those skills will not just serve you in pursuing this goal, but they’ll help you when pursuing all sorts of goals in the future.

Of course, the destination is important.  Anytime that you achieve a Big Goal, it’s an incredible accomplishment.  But also remember that the journey toward that goal is where growth, learning, and fulfillment occur.  So, find joy in the journey!  Realize that as you journey towards your goals and aspirations, you are benefitting in a million and one ways! (To read about the secrets to self-motivation, click here.)