Aspirations, Goals and Pressure

I think about my future very often. I am one of those people who rarely thinks 'in the now' but rather always 'what's going to happen'. I am always planning way in advance, sometimes unnecessarily. I always have really big ambitions and often they are irrational but that won't stop me from trying my absolute hardest to make them a reality. This however, isn't always a positive. Because I always have big, ambitious goals I tend to beat myself up quite heavily if I don't achieve them which obviously is not very healthy. Today I really wanted to talk about aspirations and why they can sometimes be a negative as well as a positive.

I am very aspirational, ambitious, a 'dream-bigger' if you will.  Every year I set myself 'Year Goals', every month I set myself 'Month Goals', and you guessed it, every week and every day I do it too. Some of them are perfectly reasonable, like 'Write a New Blog Post Today' or 'Record This Vlog Today'. Some, are much bigger and sometimes even out of my control, such as "Reach X Amount of Subscribers on YouTube". Often when I complete one of my goals I feel really good about myself, I feel empowered. But when I don't manage one or I mess up I feel absolutely rubbish. I tend to feel sad that I didn't complete it and then I'm hard on myself for not making sure I had the time to do it, even if having that time is completely impossible. I know in my head that it's irrational to be angry with myself that I haven't recorded a haul vlog I've been planning for over a week yet. I haven't had time due to work, YouTube and so on, yet I will still think "I could have still done it, and it's your own fault you didn't" even if in reality I really couldn't have fit it in. I know that it's irrational to be angry with myself and yet I find it completely impossible not to be.

It's no secret to anyone that I put myself under a lot of pressure. Arguably much more pressure than is actually necessary to complete what I need to. The problem is, I never want to be someone who just does what is needed, the absolutely minimum. I have always wanted to be the person who goes above and beyond and always does more than I need to. I always want to gain the approval of others as a "hard-working person" who always tries her best with everything she does. I know I don't need other people's approval. I know that only what I want from my life really matters. Yet, I cannot seem to convince my brain or heart of these simple facts.

You don't see me when I go to work each day, you only see the creations I publish when I am at home. You know the level of hard work I put in based on the content you see released, but what you may not know is that I sam exactly the same at work as I am at home. I always make an effort to produce things at 110% quality, rather than the asked for 100%. I always try to be the fastest to complete tasks whilst keeping them high quality, or the most detailed, or the most enthusiastic despite not actually needing to be and in reality, not really gaining from the experience. Often this want to achieve highly is more of a detriment than a benefit. I stretch myself far more than I really need to and yet I cannot seem to stop myself from doing it.

Each day I set goals and each day I complete some of them. I never seem to manage to complete them all anymore. In the past I could, but now I tend not to because I set myself far too more than is reasonably possible in just one day. When you run three YouTube channels, a Twitch channel, have a job and study a degree it's hard to have any time to sit down for a moment and reflect on what is going well and what is going wrong. Ideally, you make mistakes or you identify what you're doing wrong to pressure yourself so much and you adjust your expectations to make it more manageable. I don't do this. I rarely have the time to stop and think and when I do I tell myself I will improve it or lower my expectations but I never do because I am self destructive and somehow I think there's a part of me that actually enjoys being stressed.

Often I find the one time I get chance to sit and actually think about how I'm feeling is when I am typing out these blog posts. I always have a basic idea of what I want to write about and then as soon as I begin typing it's like my brain melts from my head and all of my thoughts flow through my hands and end up in a babbled, crazy mess on the page. These blog posts are starting to become a little escape for me which I actually really do love, and your comments are always wonderful to read.

My aspirations will never be diluted. I will absolutely always have big dreams. My dreams tend to lead me to weird place and often I find them leading me there alone, mainly because I am very independent and enjoy my own company. One thing I have definitely done successfully this year, one of my goals I set early in 2018, is to make more of an effort with friends and family and remaining close with people I care about. But that absolutely doesn't replace the fact that I do thoroughly enjoy being alone and doing my own thing most of them time.

I hope even just some of what I have written makes sense. If it doesn't, I am very sorry, haha. Perhaps some of you can relate to some of what I've said, perhaps not. Either way, thank you for reading it and I hope you have a great weekend.

Bea x