Something happens so that they just don’t seem to be as compelling anymore. They lose their shine and slowly, day-by-day we get pulled back to our everyday life and before we know it, the goals have died and we are back to the status quo. Why is this the case?
What are goals?
Goals are statements or descriptions of the future state of the world that we would like to make reality. “I want to visit the Serengeti”, or “I want to lose 20 pounds”, or “I want to start my own business”. Such statements describe a future world in which we want these statements to have become true. The trouble with this is that they are words or thoughts, and words and thoughts are merely the empty shadows of emotion.
By themselves words are nothing but a pale and insubstantial shadow of an underlying emotion. The mistake many of us make is that they become the main representation of our goals, when in fact they cannot carry much at all. Words can inspire us, but only if they contact something else deep inside, and the link from words to emotion is difficult, not well understood, and prone to failure.
We’re often told to write down our goals so that we can see them regularly in the hope they have an affirmatory effect on us. Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve written goals down before and they tend to end up becoming stale and meaningless to me a few weeks later - it doesn’t work!
What then can we do to keep our goals alive? As we have seen, if we focus on the words we use to describe our goals (repeating them to ourselves or writing them down for regular review), this is a surefire way to let them fade and wither. Instead the focus has to be on maintaining or re-activating the emotion that gave rise to those goals in the first place. It’s not a process of using words to active the emotion, it the other way round, we have to find better ways to contact the emotion behind the goal, then words can be used to represent that feeling or aspiration.
Goal Work
What I think is lacking is an understanding that keeping goals alive is something that requires creative work. It takes more than simply writing your goals down or occasionally remembering them. What is needed is a regular (weekly perhaps) piece of time that you can set aside to really go into a goal. You need to give yourself enough time to really delve into the goal, imagine it, see yourself having achieved it, and fully contemplate the consequences of it if you are ever going to stand a chance of re-activating the emotion behind it. It is also important to do this in different ways each time. Your goal work has to be a multi-dimensional, multi-media recollection of the goal. This is the real reason words and simple remembrance of goals is a sure fire way to kill them - they are one dimensional.
The route they originally gave you back to the emotion underlying the goal very quickly becomes inert. In psychology it is well understood that we stop noticing things that don’t change - we become blind to them. If the way you represent your goals doesn’t change, they too will become invisible to you, which is why it is important to re-enliven your goals with imagination, visualization and ever more detailed plans for their realization.
