Image by Benjamin Lehman courtesy of Unsplash
Why goal-setting can feel heinous - and how to change that
Excitement ripples round the room… I look around me at faces everywhere, lit up with possibility. It’s like Christmas morning. “Ooooh lovely!” is the general tone, but I sit with a belly full of lead.
…….
It was my first taste of the Vision Quest - aka long term goal setting/vision boarding etc.. It involved mapping out a desired future. And I knew I couldn’t do it.
It was 2000, and I was in the heart of Brandon Bays’ Journey Therapist training. I loved the learning. I loved her. But the Vision Quest propelled me to the nearest small, sealable space - I vaguely remember a cloakroom. Closing the door and barring it, I promptly burst into tears.
Thus began two decades of wrestling with a mental minotaur. Visioning and goal-setting were things I could facilitate really well for others, catalysing great results for clients. But I couldn’t do the same for myself.
I spent years asking how it could be that for some of us, future-designing feels internally prohibited. What primal perils could trigger such powerful subconscious barring?
For the first decade or so, I was sure it was a huge flaw in me. Failure to apply coaching principle #1 to my own life did wonders for my Imposter Syndrome and accrued significant compound interest, fermenting in the hypocrisy vault in my mind.
I watched others work through goal-setting programmes. And achieve their desired outcomes. Ta da… It was all about relentless pursuit of the goal and having the discipline to Do The Work.
But I couldn’t come up with the goal.
Of course, if you can’t set some kind of destination or goal, life is likely to feel like a pinball bouncing sequence of events, a reactive squandering of anima. We are the rat in a maze.
Decade two started to bring a few insights. Maybe it wasn’t just a deep-seated flaw in my make-up. Maybe there were reasons why my inner workings prevented me so fiercely from articulating dreams.
For me, receiving coaching had started out so well, I started to make progress and I did manage to identify small, immediate things I wanted to change. I did experience the power of intention and was thrilled when some things really started to happen.
But it wasn’t long before that progress forward seemed to run aground. Once the small and immediate tasks were tackled, it left me with the big questions of who I was and where I really wanted to be. When it came to a Vision Quest, I couldn’t say what I wanted because my beliefs would not allow it.
Beliefs are the big players in the game of life
What kind of beliefs prevented my forward motion?
Tons of them, from all kinds of places.
From church teachings there were beliefs about how sinful it was to serve oneself. The ‘good’ people were self-sacrificing, walking resolutely through the valley of torture and death. It was wrong to even want to want stuff.
From my parents’ physical and mental ill health, with addiction to alcohol and tranquillisers thrown in, I learnt the folly of wanting anything; you sure weren’t going to get it.
There were plenty of sources of limiting beliefs. You’ll have your own. You know what that’s like.
Then came the real breakthrough.
My inability to map out goals and Vision Quest the future wasn’t just about not having the courage and grit to brave disappointment or ‘Do the Work’. It wasn’t even just about the limiting beliefs that made me ‘bad’ for having desires.
It was about having no sense of self.
As an Enneagram 9, with some strong experiences of contrast/challenge early in life, I was prone to have less sense of self than others. My mother called me a ‘nothing thing’ — many 9s describe feeling invisible or without substance. Our drive to keep the peace can lead us to become so adaptive to others’ wants and needs that we lose all sense of our own desires.
Many 9s are like Julia Roberts in ‘The Runaway Bride’ who claims to prefer eggs cooked in the same way that her fiancée loves best. A series of fiancées later, when challenged by her true love, she discovers that she doesn’t know if she even likes eggs. She has been morphing her tastes to match the likes and wants of her partners…
No wonder I couldn’t articulate goals. I didn’t know who I was. I also struggled to imagine that I had any self efficacy. Again, an experience many 9s share, to a greater or lesser extent. So used to ‘going with the flow’, we can wind up feeling that we have no power to steer our own canoe. We may well struggle with any attempt to do so; we’ve never flexed those muscles, we feel we don’t know how.
Now, some twenty years after that first encounter with a Vision Quest… forward motion is a joy. I’ve spent a lifetime moving away from the unwanted. Now, I savour the possibilities of a future that is mine for the making. When the change first took effect in me, I felt like a released prisoner, stumbling blinking into the light.
These days I have plans. Big ones. Scary, but delicious ones. I have dreams. I have interests. There are things I really want to achieve. I love looking to the future and imagining the joy all this will bring. I’m thoroughly enjoying plotting things out ahead of me and I thrill to the sense of goal-setting putting a stake in the ground. This is a game I can now enter with pizzazz.
I know I am not the only one to struggle with goal-setting and moving forward towards desires fulfilled. I see this difficulty in coaching clients, often. I see it playing out in the lives of so many women I meet.
My own experiences with the challenge of taking charge of life, are a gift to me now. I can so appreciate why some clients resist coaching altogether to begin with — I did. Many people hate the idea of goal-setting, as I did. Trying to reach for a desired future can be daunting. It can feel impossible. I know. I get it.
The bottom line is, if your dreams are set in the concrete of debilitating past conditioning, until that’s addressed, you’re not going to be able to access them.
Take Heart
If you’re resonating with any of this or you know others who just can’t get their imaginative envisioning energy flowing, take heart. The concrete block of bad beliefs is not as solid as it seems. This too can be dissolved in the presence of the truth of who we are.
So many things have contributed to freeing this up for me and enabling me to move forward towards the experiences and achievements that thrill and delight me.
The following would be my first recommendations:
I found James Clear’s exploration of goal-setting in ‘Atomic Habits’ reassuring and helpful. He spoke about setting goals around who we want to be, rather than what we want to do or have.
Working specifically on beliefs, releasing causal traumas with therapists working with EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) and DTO (Do The Opposite*) has been invaluable.
Noah St John’s ‘Afformations’ makes it much easier to start reprogramming a brain that just can’t handle affirmations. St John teaches us to use questions, rather than positive, present tense statements. ‘I am confidently setting goals for the future,’ becomes: ‘Why am I setting goals so confidently for the future?’ Try it, it’s a cool brain-hack.
Creating my inner champion, Amelie, has been the absolute clincher for me. This was my route to a strong and delightful sense of self. It’s a simple approach, using the imagination to create a powerful inner advocate.
P.S. Whatever you make of the words you’ve read, if you’ve struggled to take the reins of your life, allow yourself hope. If it’s hard to imagine finding a way to a life you love, don’t give up. The internal world of belief and emotion is more malleable than it appears.
If you are struggling, reach out. Find a coach or therapist, a skilled guide to help you find your way. You will find it worth the courage it takes to ask.
(*DTO is a new approach to thought/belief reversal developed by Jonathan Shaw of www.thedtosystem.com)