Goals, Achievement & Reverb 10 Follow Up

Well, that was interesting. Really interesting.
 
Earlier this week I authored one of the Reverb10 writing prompts. It was a privilege to craft a prompt that hundreds of people wrote about.
 
This was my prompt:
 
Achieve. What’s the thing you most want to achieve next year? How do you imagine you’ll feel when you get it? Free? Happy? Complete? Blissful? Write that feeling down. Then, brainstorm 10 things you can do, or 10 new thoughts you can think, in order to experience that feeling today.
 
The radical idea here is this: At the heart of all our goals, what we really desire is a certain feeling. We think achieving the goal will bring the feeling, but we don’t have to wait that long. What if, while we work on our goals, we also work on cultivating the feeling we want, right here, right now? We can brainstorm multiple paths to feeling the feeling we desire—some long-term, some short-term, and most radically — some immediate.
 
If you missed it, read more on that whole concept in Tuesday’s post or in greater depth, in my Goals Guide.
 
Over the past few days, I had the pleasure of reading dozens of posts in which people explored how they could get the feelings they really wanted — not in the distant future when some goal had been achieved, but today.
 
Alicia wrote about how getting out of debt will bring her feelings of stability, calm and freedom — and then considered how she might get those feelings today: “I can enjoy a cheap beer on the beach with my toes in the sand as much as I would a five course, five star meal because my company is what really matters.”
 
Amanda wrote, “When the day comes that I am making money from something I love – something I make, that’s mine, that I care about deeply…something I’d do, even if no one paid me… I imagine this feeling of excitement growing, until I can’t contain my smile. My heart will feel so big.” And then Amanda realized she can experience those feelings today in fish pose in yoga, or reading one of her favorite poets — Rumi or Mary Oliver. Beautiful.
 
In her post, Vincci discovered that feeling successful now requires thinking differently. On her list: focusing on positive results every step of the way, expanding her own definition of success, and changing her own negative thoughts.
 
Some fascinating themes showed up across the dozens of lists of “how I could get those feelings right now.” Many people realized that taking more risks was essential to attaining the feelings they wanted. Simple rituals of self-care, meditation, yoga, exercise, and spiritual practice showed up in many of the lists too. Many people wrote about professional goals for 2011 — to get a book contract, make x amount money, etc. They discovered that by digging deeply into the work itself now and loving the process, they could experience the feelings of professional success they previously thought depended on big achievements. That certainly resonates for me.
 
Just as fascinating were the myriad writers who took their posts in other directions.
 
Some people were so freaked by the word “achievement” that they couldn’t even take in the rest of the prompt. They wrote about their ambivalent feelings toward achievement and their annoyance at this achievement-focused post. You can imagine how thrilled I was to be perceived as the woman obsessed with achievement.
 
But really, their reactions spoke to something I see in myself, in clients, in friends. We’ve all inherited such a screwed up view about goals and achievement that fear flashes at the mere mention of the words, and we lose our capacity to think clearly and actually taken in the information around us.
 
Another group wrote all about what they most wanted to achieve, and how incredibly blissful they’d feel when they achieved it. They ignored the whole thing about accessing those feelings today. And my yelling at the computer, “What about the rest of the prompt???” didn’t seem to help. It’s easy to rest in the fantasy that x goal will bring y feeling, and harder to challenge ourselves to find those desired feelings today.
 
A third group grappled with the notion of finding ways to achieve the feelings they wanted today, but ultimately rejected the premise. “How could I feel that freedom today, before I pay back the debts? I couldn’t.” “How could I feel more calm, without clearing the clutter in my home first? Not possible.”
 
I’m not in their shoes, I don’t know what’s true for them, but I stand by my belief that if we aren’t fighting for our basic survival, if we are dealing with first world problems, then yes, we can always access the positive feelings we desire through through internal changes, through shifts in perspective, through coming home to ourselves. But it’s not easy to break the perspective we’ve been conditioned in for decades–that changes in external circumstances are what matter.
 
I got to see, again, writ (literally writ) large, how much we are stuck in ideas about goals, motivation, action and achievement that don’t actually serve us. How much we need and deserve better tools. There’s a saner more loving way to go out about our goals, and a big part of it is not ever allowing our minds to convince us we have to wait till x happens, in order to experience the glory of ourselves, in order to bask in the incredible, overflowing blessings in each of our lives.
 
My wish for you in the new year is that you find that home within, and I hope that Wise Living can be a source of reminders, inspiration and anchoring that takes you there.
Love,
 
Tara