How To Achieve Your Goals While Living Abroad
The problem living abroad is that there’s so much to do and, even with the low working hours of a teacher, so little time. With the myriad of things to do in Korea, like traveling, cultural stuff and nightlife – it’s very easy to forget about your long term goals.
Whenever I’m pumped up about big goals and the future I get obsessed with taking action and making my larger-than-life dreams come true.
The problem is if you try to get a million things done every day, it’ll be fine while your energy and motivation keeps you going, but over a longer a period you’ll become overwhelmed and things you would otherwise enjoy become chores.
I love watching inspirational videos and TED talks that inspire me to take massive action. The problem I’ve found is you get a manic enthusiasm for success and every second you aren’t “stepping up” at life makes you feel guilty.
This kind of sucks when you’re living abroad because you don’t want to miss out on living your life but you also don’t want to ignore steps you need to be taking towards the life you want to build.
What I suggest in cases like this is…
Dynamic Action Taking
Dynamic action taking towards different areas of your life that you want to grow in.
Motivation comes in waves for different areas at different times. This is fluid motivation. The trick then is to tap into it when it’s there and roll with it.
– Be flexible with your schedule to account for this.
– Be okay with not sticking to a rigid, linear set of daily tasks
– Feel out what is most important to you RIGHT NOW and go with it.
Habits
Daily actions repeated consistently that are beneficial to long term health, awareness, focus and growth
We are what we repeatedly do. Excelence, then, is not an act but a habit – Aristotle
Habits on the other hand are actions that you perform every day that you just have to get done. Making a task into a habit has the upside of:
1. removing the need for motivation
2. but the downside of it becoming automatic and uninspired.
I think the best way to be growing in all areas of your life at the same time is to have a base level of habits that keep you growing slowly but surely. This means a small amount of action taken consistently whether you’re inspired or not.
Examples include things like:
1. 20 minutes of meditation in the morning everyday.
2. 30 minutes of language learning a day.
While you aren’t going to make massive progress by doing these types of things its the cumulative effect, as well as mitigating LOSS of the skill, that you get from it.
What this means is that when you get hit by a stroke of motivation for that area of your life you can just ride off this solid basis and make some massive progress while you’re “feeling it”.
Of course there are times when there are goals that you have to put all your focus into no matter how you’re feeling. What I’m talking about here is a system of balancing the important areas of your life while living abroad.
Summarized:
Success = baseline habits + dynamic action taking ~ based on fluid motivation
My Case: Motivation While Living Abroad
Right now my main focuses are:
1) Meeting Koreans
2) Keeping in shape (strength training)
3) Working on my website
4) Improving my teaching
5) Getting my diet on track (cut sugar, up protein intake, up water intake, up greens intake, up clean foods intake)
6) Traveling around the country
7) Enjoying life
8) Learning Korean
9) Making Korean friends
10) Meditation
Now obviously it’s impossible to be focusing on all those simultaneously. So what can I do instead?
I’ve recently made some friends who are just travelling the world having living amazing rockstar-style lives. Of course every time I hang with them all I care about is living it up. I get jealous that I’m not doing the same thing. And yet I have the huge advantage that I AM traveling the world, just at a slower pace, and all the while growing in other areas as well as doing what they’re doing.
I also have the advantage that I have a setup that I can use to make progress in all the areas above using habits and dynamic action taking.
Gym, healthy eating and meditation can just be habits for a period. I can maintain my social life by doing social stuff during the week with friends. Then I can go hardcore work mode on my website.
Conversely I can travel, live it up, try my best to eat healthily, while work stuff takes a backseat.
What should determine how I balance my life is on which area of my life my moivation is most focused and then MAINTAIN in the other area by making them into HABITS.
The biggest thing is not to be hard on yourself because you’re not doing everything at once. It’s impossible, so why not give yourself a little slack and use the ideas above to make the journey go a little more smoothly.
Got any tips to achieve your goals while living abroad? Share them below 🙂
Inspiring and helpful. Thank you!!
Korea is often a fast-paced, colorful and even confusing place. I try to maintain a tripod of balance between teaching, married life (with a Korean), and my interests. Sometimes I have to slow down when I feel ill, and other times I speed up when I have to do something important by a deadline. No matter what I do, I always try to be the cause rather than the effect if you know what I mean.
I liked your blog and the previous comment. I get the impression that you are relatively new to Korea. What you like and what you think about Korea may change with time–after ten years or so. Ciao.