Most people would offer the advice that it is better to be optimistic about goal setting, to find the positive and see the cup as half full.
But this is not necessarily true because being optimistic is a form of ignorance, to be optimistic it requires us to overlook things.
Have you ever set an optimistic goal for yourself and felt a slight anxiety about it in the back of your mind?
That is your intuition telling you that you are feeling really good about this goal because you are ignorant of the negatives.
So eventually you find yourself ignoring goal setting altogether because you keep setting goals that are unrealistic and you never achieve them.
The downside of being optimistic is that you are always setting yourself up for failure, because you are overlooking the negatives, it’s not realistic.
So what’s the alternative?
Being pessimistic about things isn't that great either because your a massive downer and who wants to hang around a massive downer?
Instead if we look at the bigger picture, we realize that any time we are feeling emotional it’s simply our body's way of giving us feedback to let us know we are ignoring half of the picture.
If we are feeling positive it means we are overlooking the negative, if we are feeling negative we are overlooking the positive, if we have a balanced view on the situation like the picture above we have self governance and we can set realistic, objective goals for ourselves.
If we set goals in this state when we are objective and we see both the positives and negatives equally to the same degree then we can set achievable goals.