Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) is a system of ideas you can apply to achieve desired emotional and behavioral change. Long-term goals that aim to boost life satisfaction require effort sustained over time. I like to think of sustained effort over time as the power of perseverance. Achieving a long-term goal is a process. One needs to plan carefully, implement the plan through many steps, recover from setbacks, and improvise. Controlling your emotional reactions is crucial to staying the course towards long-term goals. REBT can aid you in long-term goal achievement. It will help you maintain healthy attitudes, leading to motivating negative emotions that will help you recover from setbacks and sustain effort. REBT will help you control what you can control as you stretch for your long-term goal.
The Easy and the Hard Parts of a Long-Term Goal
It is easy to imagine a long-term goal but challenging to make it a reality. It is easy to run out of gas or give in to disappointment when you hit a setback. REBT’s ABC model can be used to maintain motivation when moving toward a long-term goal becomes difficult. Adversities at A include thoughts, known as inferences, like these:
- I may not have the required stamina to do the work this long-term goal requires.
- This setback proves I cannot achieve this long-term goal.
- I will fail and look foolish.
- I will waste my time and money pursuing this long-term goal.
- I could be dissatisfied in the end.
Focus on Self-Defeating Attitudes that Underpin Your Inferences About Setbacks and Possible Failure
REBT is a unique form of cognitive behavior therapy and prefers not to challenge the accuracy of your inferences. An inference is a conclusion, a hunch, or a thought REBT prefers to assume may be true. This thought is placed at position A of the ABC model and used to identify the underlying attitude at B of the model. The attitudes at B play a more critical role in our emotional experience than our hunches or inferences at A. REBT argues that holding healthy attitudes at B about your adversities at A is essential in sustaining an effort to change what you can. Examples of unhealthy attitudes at B that will undermine your enthusiasm and sustained effort for achieving your long-term goals are:
- There (absolutely) should not be so much work to do to achieve my long-term goal.
- I (absolutely) have to feel motivated to do the work that this long-term goal requires.
- It is too hard to sustain daily effort over months to achieve this long-term goal.
- There must not be setbacks along the way to achieving my long-term goal.
- I need a guarantee all the time, money, and effort will pay off in improving my life satisfaction once I finally accomplish my long-term goal.
- I cannot bear failure at the long-term goal.
- Failing at this goal will make me a fool for spending so much time, effort, and money pursuing this long-term goal.
- It would be awful if I am not insufficiently satisfied after making many sacrifices to achieve this on-term goal.
- Life will be completely bad if I am not sufficiently satisfied with my return on investment in this big goal.
Dispute and Challenge Your Self-Defeating Attitudes
There are many ways to examine and challenge the above attitudes. Some of the most important questions to use include:
Where is the evidence that supports this attitude?
If it lacks evidence, what does that suggest?
Does this attitude help me persist in pursuing my goals, or does it undermine my motivation?
What attitude could I construct and use to replace the unhealthy attitude that lacks evidence and undermines my motivation to continue tenaciously pursuing my goal?
For each of the above attitudes, carefully applying the four questions above would reveal no evidence to support them. Furthermore, reflection will show that each will produce feelings likely to lead you not to persist over the long run in the tenacious pursuit of your goal. Space does not allow me to take each question above and apply it to each attitude. It would be best to do this for those attitudes that resonate with you when you tend to quit on your long-term goals. I call this process thinking deeply about your unhealthy attitudes, which is necessary to convince yourself to relinquish them.
Cultivate a Healthy Alternative Attitude that Will Preserve Persistence
Below would be the healthy alternative attitudes your disputing will lead you to create to replace your unhealthy attitudes. Use these as models for your healthy attitudes:
- I wish big goals and long-term projects did not require such great effort, but sadly, there is much to do. Big plans usually require significant effort. Achieving big long-term goals does not have to be easy. I will stay the course if I accept the work involved and chip away at it each day. It is likely worth it in the end.
- I do not have to feel motivated to do the work that this long-term goal requires. It would be nice if each day I were enthusiastic about doing the grind that big dreams require, but things do not have to be this way. I can take action even when I do not feel like doing so. Action is a choice, and it is harder to take action when I am not in the mood. I will take action day in and day out because the goal is worth it. When I am less than enthusiastic to work towards my long-term goal, I will remind myself that motivation often follows action rather than precede it.
- It is hard to sustain daily effort over months to achieve this long-term goal, but it is not impossible. I can work on having a short-term focus of doing the big project in little chunks that I derive satisfaction from doing at the end of each day. Little differences add up, and I will record how long I work on my long-term project each day. Record keeping helps maintain motivation. Use a month at a month-at-a-glance wall calendar and post it somewhere I see it each day. I can also reinforce myself by doing something pleasurable, like watching an episode of my favorite show after completing my scheduled work.
- I wish there were no setbacks to achieving my long-term goal, but setbacks and adversity are part of life. Life does not have to be setback-free. Life is a never-ending stream of advances, setbacks, and adversities till the day I die. I can have a healthy attitude toward setbacks and see that they are bad, not awful, uncomfortable, not unbearable, and will bring out the best in me if I use my REBT!
- I wish to have a guarantee all the time, money, and effort will pay off in improving my life satisfaction once I finally accomplish my long-term goal, but I cannot have one, nor do I need one. I cannot avoid calculated risk-taking to achieve some of my bigger life goals. Research also consistently shows that people have more regret over things they choose not to do than things they decide to do. Inaction haunts us more than regrets of action.
- Failure at my long-term goal would be difficult to bear but not unbearable. I could bear failure at the long-term goal; it would be worth bearing if it occurred as I would have little choice but to bear it. Rather than focus on failure, I will focus on what I can control, which is my attitude towards persisting at my long-term goal and dealing with adversity as it occurs rather than losing drive by disturbing myself over failure long before it occurs.
- Fools do not exist; I just think they do. Failing at this goal will prove I am a fallible human who spent much time, effort, and money pursuing this long-term goal and failed to achieve what I set out to achieve. It happens. Get over it by seeing you cannot prove you are a fool but only stupidly define yourself as a fool. Definitions are subjective, and it is wise to avoid such self-damaging definitions. Stick to the facts. If I fail, I will have failed. I might or might not succeed in the future if I were to try again, but even if I failed again, I can only magically make myself a fool by defining myself as a fool.
- It would be regrettable, not awful if I am not insufficiently satisfied after making many sacrifices to achieve this on-term goal. I hope to succeed, but in the end, I will be happy that I tried my best to achieve my long-term, big goal in life. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
- Life will undoubtedly be bad, but not completely bad, if I am not sufficiently satisfied after making many sacrifices to achieve this long-term goal. I hope that my return on my investment will be satisfying, but whether it is or is not, it will show that life remains a mix of good, bad, and neutral outcomes and events.
Leverage the Power of Persistence
REBT is a powerful system of ideas to maintain effort toward your long-term goals. It is fundamentally a hedonistic philosophy that does not merely help you address your emotional disturbance, but it assists you in making your life better by taking calculated risks AND following through with the sustained effort to achieve your goals and dreams. There is power in perseverance, and expert use of REBT philosophy cultivates that power in those who wish to possess it. Dream big and work hard with REBT.