As we ring in the new year, many of us have set goals for ourselves. To achieve a goal, we need a game plan. However, as all of us know, goals tend to lose their luster when we realize all the work it will take to achieve them. Goals dangle an end result in front of us, but this result is only a fraction of what a goal entails. After all, a goal requires ambition, dedication, intention, and diligence. That’s an awful lot of commitment for college students who barely have time for breakfast.

Our ambition thrives within the to-do’s on our calendars, but where does peace have room to thrive in our hectic schedules?  Is it possible to be both ambitious and have inner peace? The way I see it, ambition has two tracks. The first is the healthy track that nurtures peace, where we focus on cultivating our potential for growth. The second is the unhealthy track, where we focus all our energy on beating the competition and end up sloshing around in our own pride and insecurity.

How can we both honor our ambition and experience peace when working toward our goals? A good place to start is to not focus on changing the old, but on building the new. If we focus on changing the old, we will find ourselves working against reality, where when we focus on building the new, we are working in reality to shape a brighter future. In other words, instead of focusing on digging ourselves out of a pit, let’s focus on the view that awaits us when we finally reach the top.

Furthermore, a piece I believe gets lost in the goal-getting puzzle is excitement. Excitement revs us up and gives us energy to keep us reaching for what we want. It’s easy to have excitement at the beginning of our goal-getting process, but as time passes, that excitement tends to fade away. The key to is to find ways to stay excited on our goal-getting journeys. After all, ambition is useless unless excitement tags along with it and it is excitement that adds to the joy of goal-getting.

While we focus on building the new and generating excitement, we should remember to also commit to working from a place of joy, not stress. Every moment we have the choice to be, if not joyful, at least excited as we go after our goals. We ought to check in with ourselves throughout the day and ask if we are approaching our circumstances from a place of joy or stress. If we find that it is stress, we need to remember to take a moment, reset, and choose joy.

Another thing that can compromise our joy is resistance. Resistance is that feeling in your gut that screams ‘No’! when things don’t go as planned. Sorry to burst your bubble, but life never goes as planned, so unless you do something about that gut-wrenching reaction of ‘No!’, it’s going to get old really fast. Resisting resistance means going with the flow. If things don’t go as planned, no worries. Everything is figure-out-able.

As we embark on our 2020 journey, let’s make it a goal to allow our ambition and inner peace to coexist in order to create a brighter future filled with fulfillment.