Thrive Global: How Setting Goals Can Improve Your Relationship

"Often, it’s easier to provide support if you’re sharing similar goals. I say “often,” because technically, you can help facilitate goals you don’t hold for yourself. It just might be harder. Goal alignment helps to make happy relationships. We form friendships with people who hold similar goals and therefore encourage us to stick to what we want. In elementary school, you might have made friends with kids who liked to play on the monkey bars as much as you did. In high school, your friends may have been into the latest fashion and supported your goal to look good and be cool. At work, you’ve probably formed friendships with people who uphold your values of hard work and honesty (and who watch the same TV shows or read the same books). Over time, as we grow and our interests change, friendships cool down and friends drift apart. It’s natural for high school friendships to dissipate, for example, when you go off to college and form friendships with people who share similar academic and life goals. These new friends are more useful for you, and you’re useful for them.

Of course, sharing the same goals doesn’t guarantee a supportive relationship; it only increases the odds. Your colleague who competes with you for a promotion shares a similar goal but might try to sabotage your professional success. In this case, the person who shares your goal is the last person you’d consider a friend. On the other hand, your parents might support your academic and professional goals even if their own paths in life were vastly different. One doesn’t need to have earned a college degree to support one’s child doing so. Ultimately, what matters is that a relationship helps rather than hurts your goals. If a parent doesn’t support their child’s wish to become a writer, an artist, or a chef, their relationship is likely to cool down."

Read the complete article here.

💬 Think about a relationship you have and share how it has impacted your goals. Do you think being open about your goals in relationships can help?

#Relationships #Goals #Stress