Super-Food for Goals

2020 dramatically highlighted the missing ingredient in most goals and visions. With this ingredient, your goals won't depend on the world playing along nicely. It will keep you awake to potential, and expand rather than limit your world. What Super-Food is to a Mac&Fries.

Your goals reveal what you value.

The Super-Food in your Goal-setting is the awareness that behind every vision or goal lies deeper values wanting to be expressed. These longings are part of your authentic self and capable of enriching and nourishing your life. Focusing on external measures and accomplishments only can be a bit like junk food. Tastes good in the moment but leaves you strangely unsatisfied. What do you do once you have got that car, new position or certificate? Once the glow wears off, it's likely the deeper need behind it is still not met and dissatisfaction sets off the process again. Maybe THIS time I will feel complete, full, enough?

Find the emotional value behind the goal.

For each goal ask "why does this matter to me?" and "how will I feel when I have this?" until you get to an emotional state that really lights you up. "Energised", "Creative", "Powerful", "Enough", "Connected" - for example. 

Emotions that light you up create new neural pathways of possibility.

Don't ditch the tangible measures and goals. They give focus, a sense of achievement and move you forward in a very real way. But the place of magic, where the neural pathways light up and life becoms technicolour, exists at the crossroads of the measurable and the emotional. Let this guide you.

Values-based goals are resilient

When we follow what lights us up, we can be agile when the world pulls the rug from under us.

Values-based goals keep us open to opportunity

Everyday, all around us are opportunities to nourish our authentic values. Best of all, this is completely within your sphere of control. It is your inner state of being, your authentic self. 

My planned holiday to France was scuppered by the pandemic that was 2020. I had to reflect on the real longing. “I want to travel because in experiencing new places I can see the world with fresh eyes. Every moment is filled with delight and magic. I am open to life.” The emotion with real energy for me was being open to life. Not much of a gardener, I explored the garden as a fascinated newcomer. I spent hours getting to know the small forgotten pathways, the slow cycles of nature and being delighted by the unfolding patterns of growth that gifted me with the magic of flowers. Not a trip to France, but a beautiful openness to life in my back yard.

You might find the external thing you desire shifts completely when you align with what your soul is thirsty for.