7 Days Theme: How goals fit into your life story📚📚

Hello steemians;
In reading about these themes, you might find yourself gravitating toward one of them. Perhaps you’re prioritizing relationships at this point in your life, or you’re struggling to overcome trauma.

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“The trick really is identifying the type of theme that will work for you and your life (there’s no “one size fits all” solution here),” says UC Riverside professor Will Dunlop.

So how should your life theme inform your goals for the next year?

The first thing to understand is that goals are part of the tapestry of the life story. “There can be no story without intention,” wrote McAdams in 1992. “Further, there can be no intention without story.”

As a rule, then, life stories and goals tend to align. In a 2006 study, researchers asked undergrads to describe their goals and their life stories. They found that students with social goals (to meet people or make friends) were more likely to have social life stories—life stories emphasizing the themes of communion and altruism. Goals can even shape which memories we’re more likely to recall.

Achieving this kind of integration between goals and life stories will make us more motivated and energized to work toward our aims, says McAdams.

“Goals are crying out or beckoning to be brought into the narrative,” he says. “There’s this ongoing story about life, and if a goal is worthy of being brought into that ongoing narrative, then it’s arrived.”

When a goal gets integrated into our life story, “it raises the stakes,” he adds. “It says, ‘This is an important thing. My very identity is (to a certain extent) hinging on success.’” And the more a goal becomes part of our identity, self-determination theory suggests, the more it moves from being extrinsically motivated toward being intrinsically motivated.

Yet McAdams also points out that a goal may represent a departure from our previous trajectory in life, a kind of transition or turning point—and that can become part of our life story, too. The workaholic who vows to make it home in time for dinner may be shifting from a theme of agency to a theme of communion, for example.

Either way, it’s wise to understand how our aims for the future relate to our path in the past. Goals and New Year’s resolutions don’t have to be isolated aspirations, failed and forgotten. Instead, they can contribute to crafting a life theme and an identity that endure.