When you finally achieve your goal, you feel amazing and proud. It makes you feel confident and ‘hungry’ for more success. Unfortunately there are also people who don’t feel this ‘hunger’ after they’ve accomplished their goals.

They don’t feel fulfilled and amazing.  It’s probably one of the worst feelings you can have, because it feels like all the hard work and time that you’ve invested were all for nothing. In order to prevent this from happening, you need to find out why accomplishing your goals didn’t fulfill you.

Here are 4 common reasons why the achievement of your goals didn’t fulfill you and how you can prevent setting the wrong goals:

1. You only helped yourself

People who go after their goals and dreams deserve a lot of credit. It takes a lot of guts to follow through on what you want in life. However, at the end of the day, you’d like to have achieved something more than just your own goals.

For example, successful people aren’t only famous because they achieved something amazing. It’s because they inspired millions of other people to follow their own dreams and that’s what the journey is all about; inspiring others and helping others along the way. If you’re not helping someone to get closer to his/her goals or inspiring other people on your journey, then eventually when you’ve achieved your goals it just won’t feel ‘right’.

So it’s a great thing that you have the ability to focus on your own mission, but don’t forget about the positive impact that you can make on many people’s lives while you’re on your journey. It’s often more fulfilling and creates a larger impact than the achievement of your own goals.

“Success must include two things: The development of an individual to his utmost potential and a contribution of some kind to one’s world.” – Eleanor Roosevelt

2. Set goals for the wrong reasons

We all have our reasons for setting certain goals. We think a lot about which goals are the most important to us and that’s a good thing, because you’ll dedicate a lot of energy and time to achieving it. However, sometimes we make the mistake to set goals for ourselves based on reasons that we don’t (fully) support. For example, maybe you felt the need to prove to your family/friends that you could accomplish something, lets say becoming a lawyer.

So you begin to study Law and finally after a few years you’ve become a lawyer. However, despite this great achievement, you know deep down in your heart that this won’t make you happy, because you did it to please others and not yourself.

You need to get used to the fact that you won’t be able to please everybody. You need to make sure that you’ll please yourself first. You need to set your goals for yourself that you fully support without caring about what others will think about you. At the end of the day, you are your longest commitment.

3. You had the wrong expectations

We always set our goals with certain expectations, I mean who doesn’t? It’s good to have expectations about the rewards when you accomplish your goals, because that’s your motivation to not give up, regardless of how hard the struggle may be. However, many people make the mistake of having unrealistic expectations about the rewards and the benefits when they achieve their goals.

They often think that they’ll be where they want to be in life once they achieved a certain goal, when in reality it was only a sub-goal. Nonetheless, sub-goals are still of great importance, because they’re the parts that make up the end-result: achieving your vision.

The solution to prevent wrong expectations is by getting a clear image for yourself about what you’ve actually accomplished once you achieved a goal. Is it just one of the many goals that are needed to be accomplished or is it a goal that will make all the difference? Ask yourself these questions before deciding to work towards a goal and you’ll prevent disappointment and discouragement in achieving your goals.

4. You played it too safe

We often underestimate our own abilities to achieve something huge. One of the main reasons is because we have always been taught from an early age to be humble and to conform ourselves to societies norms. We don’t like to standout and prefer to be ‘normal’, because being normal is ‘crazy’ enough.

“If you play it safe in life, you’ve decided that you don’t want to grow anymore.” – Shirley Hufstedler

Although these characteristics certainly have their place in our society, these social ‘norms’ sometimes influence our goal-setting in a way that we set goals that aren’t even challenging or exciting. So when you finally achieve your goal you won’t feel satisfied, because you’ll feel like your accomplishment wasn’t extraordinary or difficult to achieve. It was just normal.

The best way to set goals that are worth your time are those that’ll challenge you and excite you at the same time. Try to set a goal so big that you can’t achieve it until you grow into the person who can. You’ll feel incredible once you’ve achieved it.

What are your tactics to set the right goals for yourself? Please leave your thoughts in the comment section below!