Go with the Flow

(part of the Happy Friday series)

Goals are essential for a happy and fulfilling life – right?

Well, that depends on your perspective. Despite being a life coach, I’m a bit dubious on the goal front myself.

Of course goals are great for giving us forward momentum, a drive to keep going. And if you don’t know what you want, chances are you’ll meander somewhat aimlessly through life, not really feeling any major sense of fulfillment or satisfaction.

But I think that when we get too attached to them, goals can actually stop us from being happy.

The thing is, there are loads of wonderful opportunities and possibilities out there to experience, and many of them might never even enter our imagination until they land in our laps out of the blue. Delightful surprises that can change our course and take us in a direction we would never have dreamed of.

But when we fix our sights on specific experiences and outcomes in life – the goals we set ourselves – we can blinker ourselves to some of those unexpected opportunities. Often we don’t even see them, or if we do we might dismiss them because we’re so tunnel visioned about what we think we want.

And often what we think we want turns out to not be the Holy Grail we thought it was.

In actuality, what we really want is usually very different to the specific goal we focus on – which is more likely to be a set of feelings, emotions, or a way of being. What we set as goals are generally the means of achieving those feelings, emotions, that way of being. Those are the things we really want.

The goals aren’t the end result at all. They are merely a means to get us there. They are “How To’s”. And if we focus on them too much, we can lose sight of what is really important to us. And possibly close ourselves off to other opportunities.

My tip is to not put too much emphasis on the goals. Instead, examine what lies beneath them. Ask yourself

• If you had this goal, if you’d achieved this end, what would it give you?
• And in turn, what would that give you?
• And what lies beneath that?

Keep peeling back the layers of what you’d get from achieving your goal until you can go no further. Then you’ve reached the core desire, what it is that you really, really want.

Once you’ve got that the job becomes easy. There’s only two things you need to do.

1. Switch your focus to having the feelings, the emotions, the way of being: what you really want.

2. Then open yourself up to all the possible ways that it could come about, even those that you can’t imagine right now.

Just because you can’t imagine another way to achieve your desire doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Be open to being surprised. You may be delighted with the results.

How does this work for you? Does a focus on your goals help you to be happy, to live out loud? Or do you find that your goals sometimes get in the way of what you really, really want?

Comments

[Joanna Young]

Hi Hilda

I smiled reading this.

When I first worked with a life coach I remember saying to her "I don't want to set goals!" and we found a way round it that focused more on things like ways of being, the kind of environment that I wanted to live in, things I'd like to see in my life (note to self: haven't done enough to find them yet...)

I think my main problem with goals is that they can make you too future focused rather than living in the moment (something I know you've written about before). So I liked this formulation to have a kind of split focus - both on the big things you want but also being open to different ways of getting there, leading to a more relaxed state of 'going with the flow'...

Thanks :-)

Joanna

[Hilda]

Hi Joanna,

you've hit the nail on the hit. Goals can get in the way of enjoying the here and now if we place too much value on them. It's great to have a general destination to head towards, but the journey is much more important, and detours are very welcome :)

all the best,

Hilda

[Galba Bright of Tune up your EQ]

Hello Hilda:

Thanks for an interesting perspective in this article.