Achieving Goals That Are TRUE

For years now I have worked with clients who come for coaching to achieve certain goals. They may want to lose weight, find love, leave a relationship, do better at work, leave a job, manage anxiety, recover from burnout….essentially, everyone who comes for coaching wants help in making changes that will make them happy. Because we all want to be happy, don’t we? And we all can be happy – as long as we are honest about what we need to do to get there.

The difficulty comes in when there is a conflict between what we think will make us happy and what we know will. Martha Beck describes it a conflict between our Social Self and our Essential Self. Our Social Self pushes us to do what we think we ‘should’ do (often in an attempt to keep other people happy) while our Essential Self asks us to do what is right for us.

Let’s take weight loss as an example: your Social Self may tell you that only people who are thin, trim and toned deserve to or are capable of being happy. Your Essential Self, however, knows that a) it is actually perfectly possible to be very happy even without being thin, trim and toned, and, b) the constant effort and fight to stay thin, trim and toned may well be what is making you unhappy.

Love relationships are another area of ambivalence for many. Society and your Social Self may lead you to believe that you ‘have’ to be in a relationship, while your Essential Self may not be ready for that. You may be mourning the end of previous relationship, or healing from an abusive relationship, or needing time to make sense of what happened in the last relationship. Or you may even be enjoying being in a relationship with yourself.

If there is any ambivalence at all – any doubt, or fear, or lack of conviction – the path to achieving that goal will be a dead end. Unless your Essential Self is fully on board, your Social Self goals are going to be a real challenge to realise. But when there is coherence and agreement between your Social And Essential Selves’ goals – that is when the path opens up and allows the goal to be reached.

I don’t know why we keep putting ourselves under pressure to achieve goals that don’t feel authentic and true to us, but here’s what I do know for sure: unless we are totally convinced that we want to achieve a goal, we will struggle to achieve it.

Next time you set yourself a goal, make sure it is TRUE:

• Tangible (specific and concrete)
• Right for you (not right for someone else)
• Unambivalent (no mixed or conflicted feelings)
• Essential (in line with your Essential Self)

If you’d like to be supported and guided to identify and set your TRUE goals for 2018, sign up for my Design Your Year eCourse starting on 1 December 2017 or anytime after that.

I will also be running a Plan with Purpose for 2018 workshop in late January 2018, please email me if you would like to be added to the communication list.

Tags: authenticity | be yourself | essential self | goals | social self | trust the process