GOALS SHMOALS!

We certainly aren’t born with this incessant FEAR OF MISSING OUT, but it’s so deeply rooted, it becomes woven in with our DNA.  I currently have exactly 13 projects outlined, many of which won’t come to fruition.  Our actions may express our priorities, but more accurately, they express our truest interests.  I, like many of you, write my goals and projects on flash cards and I pin them to a giant wall sized cork board.  There are always cards that fail to move for months.  Regardless of how seemingly important they may be, they’re the ones that ultimately don’t mean much to me and they’re probably not coming off the cork board any time soon.  Ignoring these dust collecting goals is far from inconsequential, however.  Their mere presence is like an anchor of distraction.

I’m a magnet for the creation of opportunity.   “I can’t help it, it comes to me naturally”…blah blah blah.    I always thought this was a gift.  Now I realize that the constant need to create opportunity is a ruse.  We have a tendency to say yes to everything because we’ve been fed the false belief that being busy is a carbon copy of being productive.  Before you start to differentiate yourself from me, remember that we share a genome.   Many of you PTO members, volunteers, entrepreneurs, caregivers, parents, athletes and dreamers swim in the same sea of self made opportunity and possibility as me.  Being busy is hard to resist because it deposits “worthiness”, “importance”,  “being visible” and “being needed” in our emotional bank account.  The problem is that our emotional abundance becomes dependent on what we’re doing instead of who we’re being.  

By falling for the bait of “there aren’t enough hours in the day”, or “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”, we risk becoming the rat that actually does win the rat race and then suddenly, the joke’s on us.

One of my coaches recently told me that “successful people say yes and they say yes quickly…but really successful people say no”.  In the book Hyperfocus, Chris Bailey says that the most highly successful people gracefully say NO to almost everything and say yes to almost nothing.  (It should be noted that success here is a measure of joy, health, well-being, love, relationships and purpose.)

My 16 year old son, Simon was born with laser sharp focus around his life’s purpose.  He’s so clear about what he wants that saying NO just comes naturally.  He unwaveringly draws the line in the sand between opportunities and distractions.  His level of clarity manifests future outcomes so palpable that they already exist.

Clarity, after all, is the great accelerator.  In creating our vision for 2020, Darin and I came to liberated ourselves by admitting that “goal setting” is BORING and TEDIOUS….this is why most of us don’t set goals.   Besides, goals usually end up sounding like a dry corporate report, entirely void of the real fruit that we bear from our hearts.

Instead of asking about goals, this year we spiced it up and simply asked ourselves to take a look at we’re inspired by.  Turns out that the view point of inspiration overlooks a much different vista than the whiteness of the dry erase board that our goals are parked on.

Goals are predictable and familiar, even when they’re lofty.  Goals are usually connected to fitness, health, planned travel, money (saving for college or retirement),  business growth or ventures, big purchases and house projects, all of which may be good and our lifestyles may very well necessitate them but they’re far from blissful.  

The fact that goal setting rarely works is evident in the number of people who don’t even bother with New Years resolutions because let’s face it…nobody wants to feel graced by failure.   We abandon our “goals” because we pick goals that we feel we should pick based on what everyone else is picking!   Comparison ensues and then we end up looking around at everyone who has their shit together more than we do.

INSPIRATION, on the other hand is something that’s already there, ready to be zeroed.  Asking ourselves what we’re inspired by is much less predictable, much less reasonable and often very unrealistic. But those very reasons, inspiration can’t attract comparison. Now we’re talking!  The ingredients of inspiration come from the heart, they’re more vulnerable and unquestionably more fun!  My honorary New Yorker then has to ask  “wat’s wrong wit Dat”?

The thing about inspiration though is that it requires unwavering honesty, it feels like looking at oneself naked.  It’s unabashed and brazen.

If it were woven out of my mosaic, it might look like…

Hike for 12 days with the kids in the Alps 

Make dinner for my family 6 nights per week

Have a wildly romantic year with my man

Learn how to surf bigger waves and maybe write about it (from a middle aged mom’s perspective) 

Dance more hip hop (take a class)

Take 10 weeks off

Plant a completely edible back yard

Get on the Ted Talk stage and inspire 10 million people

Learn to sail 

Become fluent in Spanish, 

Serve my community by bringing massive clarity about the chiropractic lifestyle 

Lead my team better than I ever have by focusing on the best wellness culture we can offer…

Finish a triathlon in under 2hrs and 45min

Swim in my first swim meet 

Even if what we end up with is wildly unrealistic,  action steps must be taken to move forward and they must be taken now.  An immediate action step has be taken for everything written, otherwise, as Tim Ferris writes, "tomorrow becomes never”.

Our vision and our inspiration are as unique as our fingerprints…we’d never expect for them to be identical to someone else’s.  We therefore have the freedom to never have to measure it up to anyone else’s standard or expectation.  Inspiration is born different.   In our great sea of opportunity, we just need to be willing to look under water and swim in the direction of what sets our souls on fire.