Goals. The benchmarks you want to achieve, the heights you want to climb, the accomplishments that will provide you with a certain sense of pride: these are not bad things. Without attention and intention, big things would never get accomplished. If goals run your life, though, you may sit in an imbalance that is hard to fathom.
I have a very 1980’s self-help-style aversion to traditional “goals” because they seem to be a source of demise for my clients, my friends and my own self. If you are living in pure want, you likely won’t really get anything good.
The old-school notion of goals works something like this: To “achieve” you make a list of what you want, you sacrifice everything you have in the name of this desire and pour every ounce of yourself into getting these things. You become like a montage of fight training in a Rocky movie. No space exists for anything else but these goals. You are a machine. All you can see is how far you are from the finish line and the rest of your life can’t continue until you have achieved what you wrote down and decided upon. Once you conquer the impossible tasks, you find yourself frolicking on a yacht or standing in a penthouse looking out over the world, having achieved something big. It’s no wonder to me that so many people did cocaine in their 1980’s goal-getting heyday, as it’s extremely hard to be naturally motivated when your life is that far out of balance. There is nothing even remotely good about achievement if the rest of your life is a shambles. Even if you get your goal, it’s rare to feel it was worth it.
Intention is much different than frantic pushing toward achievement. Living with intention doesn’t involve tearing apart your life in the name of achievement. Intention is the resolve to live your life in a certain way; invested in the idea of intention is purpose and importance. Intention is living to follow your bliss. With intention, you won’t do “just about anything” to get what you want. Rather, you can follow your energy and roll with life, all the while directing your energy toward your purpose. Intention allows you to see more than just how far you are from a named objective in the distance. Intention focuses energy so that you can have much, much more than just what you initially set out to “achieve” because in the flow of life all sorts of options and ideas appear.
In feng shui- speak, driving yourself toward “goals” at the expense of the rest of your life is a massive Yang imbalance. Yang is the hard-driving, aggressive energy, the active, passionate and vertical motion that moves things outward. All that pushing will deplete your body, mind and soul if you don’t allow yourself the quietude of Yin. Even if you “get what you want” in a hard-driving Yang way, by the time you “achieve” what you want, you may be a shred of a person, if that day ever comes. With only Yang energy dominating your life, you have a sure-fire recipe for a flameout.
When you take a more balanced approach to life, it may seem less “hardcore” and less “passionate” than your achievement-drive-toward-goals. That said, you have far greater power in balance. Those who respect the balance of life (if you need examples, check all the superpower people who do daily meditation HERE and the yogis who are pretty dynamic celebrities in the world HERE as a good start) tend to have a fuller life, greater resilience and vitality and they always seem…happy.
I don’t suggest you start wandering aimlessly through life. Rather, try infusing your days with more purpose. Rest well. Tune into that which makes you feel more like yourself. Stay very grounded (more on this here) and don’t “force” life. See what happens when you can live with resolve and stay open to to what comes rather than beating yourself up for not hitting some imaginary milestone that is miles ahead of you. Lean into life, don’t smash up against it. Don’t sacrifice your world for an abstract goal… move toward your purpose with the openness of intention and the awareness that life is much more than a checklist!
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