An Alternative to Goals

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With 2020 drawing to a close and the dawn of 2021 on the horizon, I’ve been thinking a lot about goals and our usual approach to them, aka how we’re told we “should” approach goals in order to be productive, effective, and worthy as humans.

For many, the end of the year feels like a natural time to reflect on the year past and plan for the year ahead. But many of us (me included!) find that difficult, this year especially. Because if this year has taught us anything, it’s that our most carefully laid plans are fragile and do not guarantee the future we envisioned.

In 2020, we’ve been forced to live in a state of prolonged uncertainty.

But what if our experience this year has not destroyed our ability to set and achieve goals, but is calling us to try something else? What if embracing the unknown became part of our dreaming and goal-setting process?

How I see it: embracing uncertainty is embracing reality, and if we choose to be awake to reality — even if we don’t always like what we find there — then we step into the expansive realm of possibility.

Many of us have been taught to set clear, measurable goals with a time limit (often called S.M.A.R.T. goals), which leads many of us to burden our dreams with arbitrary dates, statistics, and markers of success that may have very little to do with the actual feeling we are trying to create.

I used to follow this formula (or sincerely tried to) and attach dates and metrics to my goals, only to feel like a failure when my intuition and general humanness led me off-plan. This system never felt quite right to me, and I realized that setting such rigid goals is akin to seeing through a pinhole. It eliminates so much possibility. It forces us into narrow-mindedly thinking that success may only happen in the one specific way that we’ve predetermined, and keeps us stuck in a binary of being within the plan or outside of the plan, with no room for the in-between or side adventures or plot twists.

It’s like going on a hike with the goal to get to a waterfall. Rigid goals are like walking down the path with your gaze straight ahead, focused only on reaching the waterfall, while refusing to look around at the beautiful scenery around you, refusing to deviate from your hike to stop and examine a beautiful wildflower, and refusing to consider the possibility of everything else surrounding you that constitutes beauty and wonder.

I believe in this space of possibility is where the magic happens. This is where we start to connect with our true markers of success that may not match up with the metrics we’ve been told to aspire to. Instead, we finely tune our navigation system so that we continue to follow the feeling that we seek in doing meaningful work. This is where we truly dream and imagine new possibilities instead of trying to squish our hopes and desires into the box of what our culture has deemed acceptable and worthy of pursuit.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve really distanced myself from the idea of goals.

Those old S.M.A.R.T. goals began to feel arbitrary, stifling, and flat. I started to feel like those goals were holding me back from my potential and what I really wanted to create. And, to be honest, I resented the idea of chasing after a singular fixed point and only when that narrow definition of completion is reached may I deem myself a success, regardless of how I actually felt. The old system felt discouraging, lifeless, and unimaginative.

Instead, I’m embracing inquiries to illuminate feelings and tune into what my soul desires and allowing those to be my guide. In this way, I’m no longer unconsciously going through the motions of a plan that might no longer support me. Through inquiry I can ask myself how I want my day-to-day work life to feel. And this is actually something I did with my team during an ironically dubbed meeting “2021 Planning.” In that conversation, I shared that I want our work to feel spacious, easeful, and joyful.

Those three words — and sensations — will be my guide for the foreseeable future, until one no longer fits and a new one feels more true, then I’ll update it! But for now, it feels enormously easeful to create more flexibility and potential for evolution within my intentions for the year. And… if I accomplish those feelings on any given day, then that’s cause for celebration. No more waiting for my level of productivity to dictate my worth and my cause for celebration.

Some prompts to help you explore this for yourself:

What feelings are you aiming to cultivate next year?
What intentions support you fully in mind, body, spirit, and community?
If you allow yourself to release yourself from the grip of goals, how does that redefine success for you?

If you’d like someone to share these with or talk through it, I’m here. You may email me here, or we can find a time to connect and chat over Zoom.