Goal Like a Woman

I set goals and then I stopped. And I set goals again when I added myself into the practice and rewrote the narrative. Because I can.

I have been thinking a lot about goal setting. The nature of goals and how goal setting can be so unique person to person. And how that uniqueness in goal setting seems trite these days. So many people I speak to want to know exactly how to get it ‘right’ and of course, how to get there faster. Goals seem to have been hijacked and interconnected with the hustle, capitalism, privilege, power and ego. We linger and have been taught to ask and only ask: how do I work for this goal?

I wonder if we really ever ask ourselves this question: how does this goal work for me, with me, in me? And then for my community, for the better?

Rewinding for a moment, the practice of goal setting really, really worked for me in my late teens into my 20s. Goals gave me clarity in a time that can feel really confusing. Goals gave me guideposts to keep me on track when I was easily influenced on to many different tracks or to even run backwards? Goals also called me out and then called me in to how I was living and even to how I was not living - like how I was doing so well in all my career goals and then my romantic and personal life was literally on a way back-back-burner. Truth was, the heat was not even turned on for those goals.

Also at that time in my life, goals were very much run by my ego. I wrote goals to impress others, climb a metaphorical ladder, and get myself a gold star. Any oldest daughters out there, you know what I mean?

And then, goals started to fall flat for me.

As I started to get really clear about what truly matters to me and with every turn of a year in my 30s, I cared so much less about what other people thought of me and actively released the grip of people pleasing. What are my goals now if they are not all about ego, impressing others and gold stars?

So I stopped setting goals for a while.

I tried it out, let me float here and see what happens. For some people, this is a great life. Floating and flowing. For me, I started to slip into a void and felt almost vacant.

I looked deeper at goal setting. Where had I been taught goals? Who is writing all the goal books in the self help section and leadership section that I so often frequented at my Barnes & Noble? As you could have guessed, it was and is a lot of men. Dare I say all men. What articles show up when you google ‘how to set goals’? Again, who is writing them? And in my own experience, I had categorized it all as performing. How do you categorize your goals practice?

I remember writing down a goal for when I wanted to get married. *sigh* I actually changed the date on this goal a lot. Backstory: I was born and raised in Texas, so a handful of people I knew from high school were getting married pretty early. I remember still to this day writing a goal that I would be married by age 24. WOW, way off. I was living in California at the time and it is a very different ballgame out there and people date and wait and wait and wait. So I did, too. And I moved the goal again and again. Even when I met my now husband, I moved the goal date so often year after year. My point in telling you this is that you can move goals. I don’t think I was taught this either so I make a point of it. And even more so, when the goal finally clicked for me and I cared about it was when I wrote it like this: My Grandmother dances at my wedding by June 13, 2015. In my youth, my sweet Gram would always ask for a favor and then your reward was that she promised to dance at your wedding. And I will tell you this, my Grandmother, who was my flower girl in my wedding and wore a lavender dress while throwing dried lavender out of her basket with a flower crown atop her 70 year old something head, tapped me on the shoulder and did ask me to dance. And that day, my goals felt different.

That goal made me feel.

Something.

Anything.

Everything.

That goal woke me up. Shook me out of a dull and stale practice. And I knew and know there is something here that still serves me, a woman with drive and craving inspiration with visions and desire to accomplish them. If the goal setting practice is going to work for me in this phase now, I need a new script. A new portal that overrides the human obsession with validation, my own obsession with validation and gold stars because patterns die hard. A new portal that asks me to feel, be in community, grieve and step beyond the box checking and the boxes created by time with so much more poetry and grace.

Can a different goal script work for me, for you, for us?

For your consideration:

ADD FEELINGS, ADD THE BODY

Goals are what you want to do in your future. Goals are the actions you want to take as you grow and become the person you will be in one year or five years. Goals can and will make us feel feelings, if we let them. Can you infuse a feeling into a goal and give it a frequency, a deeper connection? Can you add your senses to a written goal, make it smell like you and sound like you and have a unique texture that is so you?

This is adding the body into your goal practice. The place you live and breathe and feel every single day. Remember the first time you got butterflies? Were you ever scared of the dark? How about on the morning of your birthday? Your first time seeing the ocean or the mountains? Your first day of 4th grade? I have so many sensations galavanting through my body just writing about those moments.

The body invited to a goals practice might sound woo, woo, which by definition means dubiously or outlandishly mystical, supernatural, or unscientific. Could not be more natural to check your goals within your body, could not be more scientific to know that a sensation is responding to a feeling and/or a thought as the brain and body are in communication. We could even talk heart and feelings with goals, more science. If being in our body is mystical, we have some things backwards, right?

Feeling a goal has been a radical practice to bring goals back into a sustainable setting for me. Consider asking, how does this goal make me feel next time? Riveting conversation, I would bet on it.

IMPERFECT GOALS

Have you head the saying that healing is never linear? I believe goals are never linear, also. However, the way I was taught goals was logistical, linear and rigid. Embracing my goals as imperfect was a key for me to reclaim my goal practice. I realized that when I sit down to write my goals, I only know what I know at that time. And my goals set in the future will be laced with wisdom and experience that I have not had a moment to explore or integrate and thus, how could I write perfect goals about my future self or the future Earth when we haven’t met yet? How curious I can now be?How imperfect I can now be? Imperfection is key to allowing goals to be the guide but not the only way.

GOAL GRIEF

There will be missed goals. Derailed goals. Failed goals. Because we are human. And we don’t live in a vacuum. Befriending grief will be imperative to be able to stand back up again and make a new choice. You will be given the decision if you want to try the goal again or leave that goal right where it is, unfinished and yet complete for now.

Ways I have befriended my grief are: 1) taking time 2) a grief altar 3) working with a somatic therapist on grief 4) learning from my grief and letting it in versus running from it or numbing it 5) writing about my grief 6) letting my husband love me in my grief and then realizing, I can love me in my grief, too 7) grieving with others, we are never meant to grieve fully alone, and 8) all the books on grief like from author Frances Weller and poetry and fictional stories that create lines of connection.

EMBRACING UNCERTAINTY

I laugh thinking about all the ways I thought a goal would happen and then seeing how it actually happened. As humans, we love idea of control. And goals can have a sideways approach to giving us a sense of control over our lives and dare I say, a sense of power.

Everyday you wake up with uncertainty and instead of muscling or ego-ing your way into goals, you could choose to embrace uncertainty as a part of the goal process which would then allow you to remain open to different pathways you would not have seen with your control blinders on.

My favorite book about uncertainty is Pema Chödrön’s ‘Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change” when she quoted Agnes De Mille and shared:

“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know how, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark. —AGNES DE MILLE”

THE COMMUNITY RIPPLE

When you set goals, you start a ripple effect in your community. Goals are not accomplished alone. I have a goal of becoming stronger in my body and have been exploring approaches to add weightlifting. This morning, I drove myself to the gym and I did a weight lifting workout solo. And then drove back home. Sounds like I did the goal alone and that would be the farthest from the truth. Someone had to have a goal to open that specific gym I went to. And my husband found that gym and joined it months ago asking on and off if I wanted to join on a family pass? And finally last weekend, I went. And I liked it. So I joined and I swiped my card this morning and I did a workout from my teen years I used to do when I was an athlete. And that workout I did not make up, a trainer named Bill made it up and wrote a book about it which my Uncle bought and read and started doing who then told my mama who then got our family excited about it. So we did those workouts so then some 25ish years later, I could do it again. And then call her after and tell her about it and reminisce a bit together. Because goals have a ripple like that.

The other ripple in your community is when you consider community when setting goals? You can ask what your community needs and how you can be of service? I had a client last year who lived on an island with her family. An elder in the community asked her after they had settled in, what are you going to contribute to be a part of this community and support the health of the island? And I cannot stop thinking about how far removed we must feel from that question tap-tap-tapping away on our computers and working from home and rarely knowing our neighbors or the teachers at our kids’ schools or librarians. A tether back into community can be your goals. What you want for your community matters to you and to them and thus, to our society.

One more thing, when you are living your goals and offering your services in any way you see those showing up, that in and of itself will have a ripple in community. There is an energy. There is inspiration. Goals are rarely done alone, so there will be people. And the community will feel you in a goal, support you in a goal and then, in time, might set a goal themselves, too. How beautiful and communal of goals.

CELEBRATE

You know what I so love? A ribbon cutting ceremony. Look at this goal, let’s put a bow on it. And then cut it together and you all can clap and then come in. I find we as humans are not amazing at celebrating ourselves. How do you even know a goal is complete if you don’t take the time to celebrate and feel into how it all went down and how you got to this moment here and what you learned? A goal can be celebrated whether achieved or not because often times, the choice and who you became along the way to a goal is what is meant to be celebrated. More ribbon cutting!

TIMING

I live next to a large clock tower that is beautiful and landmark-like and maybe twice a day, is set to the right time. I find goals have their own timing kind of like the clock tower. And humans have their own timing, too. I live for the memes that speak to the people that started a goal at 40, 50 or 70. Martha Stewart started her company, Martha Stewart Living at age 50!

I do enjoy a time stamp to operate in society. Time creates energy, movement, fire and possibility as well as disappointment and failure - all experiences you learn from.

And I also love that when people say age is just a number. Because what if time is just a number on your oven, car dashboard, clocktower?

So how do you trust the timing when thinking in goals?

You don’t.

You trust yourself.

You feel around. You cry. Or celebrate. And reflect. And then revisit time again as a tether to reality when writing goals but not the only thing that makes them real, you make them real.

POETRY

Poetry seems to flip any notion of goal setting I had upside down. The stanzas that weave a story to entice a feeling, an art form. What if goal setting is an art form? What if your goals weave a story and entice a feeling now?

Goals are poetry. Let is be so.

GOAL GRACE

Less judgment. More acceptance.

That is goal grace.

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I figure I could continue with different scripts and I will one day. This might be the outline of a future book so that the shelves at the local bookstore have different view points available.

For now, I want to say this: there are parts of traditional goal setting that I believe can stay the same(ish). I do like being specific when I can be. And I love speaking about resiliency when choosing a goal again and after failure or procrastination or off timing. I like that the word ‘go’ is in goals as by nature, goals are activating. I don’t love realistic goal setting because reality feels constrictive and creates more of the same and can keep us small because we love to be certain. Wait woops, wrong direction. Back to what can stay the same(ish), I was taught to set goals across different categories in my life, like health and personal and career. This was huge for me in learning or starting to have access to how to even know what balance means. Lastly, while ego was a part of my goal setting - so was bravery. My goals made me brave and even bold to be so focused on what I wanted. I like that and I do believe, ego is still allowed in moderation.

So here is to goals changing and growing up with us. Because they can.

Here is to goals with feelings, go invite your poetic sad and joyful and rage-y and fun self writing your goals.

Here is to the goals that make you go.

Here is to goals set with the body.

Here is to the goals that create, grow and support community

Here is to the goals that shaped you and that you celebrate.

Here is to the goals you grieve. And the goals that helped you to learn grace.

Here is to all the goals written and practiced your unique way.

Here is to the goals that so imperfectly guiding you to choose again and again.

To goals, here here.