Three Types of Effort You Must Make to Achieve Your Goals

Over the years I have come to realize that making an effort is not something I really understand all that well.

In the meditation course I subscribe to, this thought recently arrived in my inbox:

There is no reason that what is meant by self-effort should be vague. It’s just a matter of doing it. If we don’t do anything, then no self-effort is being applied.

What I learned from this – initially – is that there are two different types of effort. I also learned that both are essential if I want to achieve my goals.

Setting a goal is the first type of effort. Doing the actual work required to achieve that goal is the second type of effort.

Truthfully, I am mostly already quite good at the former – goal clarification. I am even good at plotting out the steps towards achieving a goal. But I’m still not good at all at following my own plan by actually doing each of those steps.

In another installment of my meditation course, I received this additional insight on how to get better at goal achievement.

Specifically, the course says this:

When the mind is directed in a way that feels good, then all the universal forces work in our favor. Everything reinforces our own feeling. Everything, including how we are affected by circumstances, is a mirror of our basic feeling. And our basic feeling is determined by our predominant mental attitude.

If we persist in allowing ourselves to think things that make us feel bad – even though we blame these bad feelings on situations and conditions and other people – we are draining ourselves of spiritual energy, misapplying universal law, and inviting further disruption and difficulty into our life. In short, there’s nothing we can do as long as we persist in thinking thoughts that do not feel good.

So – it would seem – it is not optional to control the mind, at least if we want to succeed. And in the context of making an effort to achieve a certain goal, it is particularly important to closely control against thinking the kinds of thoughts that suggest you might never achieve the goal you just set.