4. Goals and Habits

Setting, pursuing and achieving goals is an essential part of our human make up and critical to designing our landscape. When we lack purpose and direction it is very difficult for us to be at our best. When we have a goal to pursue we are about to engage our strengths, marshal our efforts and take steps towards those chosen goals.

Learning about how to craft positive and healthy goals, and establish healthy and productive motivations as we pursue those goals, means we are able to increase our chance of success in achieving our goals, enjoy the journey, and find meaning even when we fall short of the desired result.

Habits exist to shortcut the thinking process for our brain as we go about our daily activities. By their design and very nature they occur in a somewhat automatic way, often without us mindfully choosing them. If we develop healthy and helpful habits then they serve us well and lead to higher levels of wellbeing. However if we have unhealthy or unhelpful habits we can find things pretty hard going and despite how hard we try, our well being declines before our eyes.

This design element shows us the science of habit formation and enables us to increase our ability to build a greater toolkit of healthy and helpful habits, and strategies to mitigate the risks of some of our not so helpful habits, ensuring that our automatic activities are contributing positively to our Landscape for Happiness.