BE-FORE SETTING GOALS
Setting goals each year can be a bitch. It sets off a desire process and we know wanting equals suffering.
Why? Because as soon as we want, we must contend with not getting. Facing that little fact is painful for it involves loss. You go from not having (blissful ignorance) to wanting (perceived lack) to not having (reward prediction error) and pain (dopamine drop). What a circle-jerk that process is.
Around the end of each year, I get the quiets from people when I ask about their goals. Some are “good” students and go “all-in” on goal setting. One of our guys has his done in October. Pretty sure he’s on the spectrum, I love those guys whose systemizing brains make us all look bad.
I swear a lot of people get sheepish about goals the last couple of months of the year. Ask them about them and they will often give you the equivalent of the guy who shuffles his feet while looking at his shoes. It’s like mommy just caught them heading off to school with their bed unmade and homework left undone.
Others will just lie. The ego is part of your integrated central nervous system and denies, distorts, and represses inner and/or outer reality to reduce anxiety and depression. The ego has its own wisdom.
Of course, all this is unnecessary. The reason for this is because the first step in setting a goal is to set an intention around being. If goals remain unmet, it’s because you are setting them as you are in the present, expecting to remain exactly as you are now at some future point but with a goal reached. See the problem with this?
Think of yourself ten years ago? How different are you from that person now? Exactly.
Achieving goals starts with being, not with doing.
At the repeated risk of sounding repetitive (see what I did there?), you either form an aspiration and clear intention about your identity, and then support that ideal with daily actions which become part of your lifestyle which then informs personality, or you risk that your identity will cobbled together bit by bit by mostly well-intentioned people around you meeting their needs, not yours.
To set goals is to aspire to be someone different. If I want to learn to public speak, the act of going to Toastmasters for a year changes who I am. It’s an identity shift. I must see myself as a public speaker and then go and be that which I have imagined by doing.
Reaching goals is first about setting intentions for who you want to be. It is by imagining who you could be and adopting that completely, internalizing that being, and then doing the things each day which supports this image you have of yourself until it becomes normalized, and shit gets done.
It’s the oft-called for Be-Do-Have. First be the person that is the kind of person who does the things that you desire achieving and lo and fucking behold, you soon get what you want.
So, who are you going to be in 2022? Not the same guy as in 2021, that’s for sure. You will change. In which case, you might as well be the one deciding how that’s going to turn out.
Brings new meaning the phrase, “to your well-being.” Well, who are you being?
Questions? Comments?
True and Free, Love & Power,
cw
©CHRIS WALLACE, advisortomen.com, 2022, all rights reserved
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