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Write your goals in black and white

Long-term recovery must have both short- and long-term goals in place for ongoing success. Goals act as a roadmap to your future of health and happiness. Therefore, setting goals will encourage long-term sobriety and avoid relapse.

Why Are Goals Important?

Goals are what motivate you and keep you accountable. Without goals, you may lack direction and lose focus on where you are trying to go. Therefore, goals also cultivate structure. Additional reasons why goals are important for recovery include:

  • Goals define what is important
  • Goals identify what is needed to be accomplished
  • Goals define where you need to improve
  • Goals allow you to measure and evaluate our success
  • Goals make it possible to see a future life that has blessings, health, and success
  • Goals help overcome patterns of failure by identifying a better pattern

How Do You Make a Goal?

The goals you decide to pursue should be specific to you. If you desire to pursue a dream career, you may start by going back to school. Alternatively, if you wish to play live music, you may set a goal to take music lessons. Recovery is all about replacing past negative behavior with healthy actions and activities.

Therefore, the goal should speak to you and help you move in a healthy direction. Remember, no goal is too small. Therefore, you will want to be realistic and understand that small goals are the small brushstrokes that paint the overall picture. How to go about making goals includes:

  • Setting achievable goals
  • Breaking each goal down into smaller goals and follow your steps
  • Making a timeline for each goal that identifies when you want to achieve each goal
  • Allowing flexibility in your lists of goals
  • Remembering that failing is part of the process, and failing means recouping, learning, and trying again

How Do You Maintain Healthy Practices With Goals?

Patience and persistence is the key to any successful endeavor. It may take time to build momentum. The key to accomplishing this is balance. This is because there is no fast track to success; you need help along the way, just as you need to experience things to understand how to navigate challenges. Therefore, when maintaining goals, you will want to remember to:

  • Set goals for both mental and physical health
  • Set goals for relationships
  • Set goals for your spiritual health

Setting goals helps identify patterns of failure and self-sabotage and allows those patterns to be addressed. Expect life to interfere with some of your goals; when this happens, it is important to keep perspective and keep moving in the positive direction towards success.

Substance use is a chronic and long-term condition that requires constant diligence, as well as commitment and goals, in order to sustain recovery. Creating long-term goals gives your life purpose and keeps you productive and focused. Keep your goals simple and use positive words. At the Guest House, we know how hard it can be to create goals while you struggle with your mental health or addiction. It can be hard to see any future outside of what you see as your current reality. We are here to help. Call us today at (855) 483-7800