When determination is a strong insistence to achieve something, it often leads to success. But on it’s own, determination can also be exhausting, especially when obstacles are hitting you in the face

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Here are some suggestions how to positively use ‘determination’ to achieve your goals:

1. Examine your strongest desires most deeply:

If you decide on a path to action, understand deeply what you truly want out of it. The more deeply you understand this, the more data your brain has to work with. Want to make more money? Why? Just to have fun? Donate? Abstract visions of fancy hotels and airplanes? This is not that useful to the brain that longs for deeper thinking on such issues. You could ask yourself: how exactly can you sketch your path to happiness from having more money? What does money truly mean to you? Having this depth really lubricates the road for your brain’s ideas and determination.

2. Plan ahead:

Plan means that you punch in the navigation anchors so that your brain does not have to keep asking: where to next? Planning also creates order, and this order will help sketch the shortest distance between two points as a destination so that your determined brain does not keep living in the energy sapping states of the unknown. Having said that, see 3. Below.

3. Accepting unknowns as opportunities:

Even with the best planning, unknowns arise. Rather than seeing unknowns as threats, see them as blank canvases or dark roads. In the unknown, you can paint on your own hopes and dreams and develop hypothetical plans. Like being on a dark road, you can make a plan to walk and slowly feel the ground as you experiment with moving in the direction of light. While this is scary, it is also an action that is more likely to get you to your goal than going nowhere.

4. Balance your determination with re-energizing tools:

Listen to music you love, exercise, form connections with friends. Seamless determination requires breaks. In fact, the breaks are part of seamless determination, much like silent spaces between beats are in music.