Forget about your goals

Forget about goals, and instead, lean into your intentions.

I'm assuming, and I think it's a pretty accurate assumption, that there are things that you want. And that these things include a little (or a lot) of everything - material, emotive, experiential, relational, spiritual… all of it. 

Try this for a few moments: see if you can list the things that you want. Give it a try. 

What happened when you were coming up with your list? 

Did you find it easier to list the material things? The things that cost money? The things that look like they mean you've had success? 

I find it really easy to list things like: 

Shoes, clothes, and skincare products. 
Massages and doctors' appointments, and chiropractic care.
Success and achievements and awards.
Houses and cars and holidays and expensive dinners out on the town. 

And it's also easy to list the macro things, big picture things, too, like: 

A life partner, a healthy family, a healthy body, caring relationships, good friends, kids, no kids...

These are all great goals. No disputing that. But they are also things that can seem so far out in the distance, unattainable like it would be a mission and a challenge to get there, one day, if you're able, if you're lucky. You hope. And pray. And cross all your fingers and toes. 

Sometimes our goals end up being a projection of our ache for belonging and all the hoops we think we need to jump through to find it. 

Often our goals, and what we believe to be our purpose, feels so out of body, so beyond where we are right now, so far off in the distance and in the future and perhaps even in the past if this and that didn't happen the way that it did, that we either start to push and strive and work ourselves up into some kind of burn-out ending frenzy; we take too much on all at once in an effort to propel ourselves forward; we become overwhelmed and confounded with the amount of work that needs to be done to get there; we don't know where to start and what to do first… 

Listen, everything that you want comes from who you are and how you are wired. Your purpose and, therefore, your goals are deeply embedded in you. It works for me to think of them as treasures I'm excavating from myself rather than things outside of me that I'm striving to reach. 

Perhaps like me, you grew up in a fundamentalist faith community and tradition where purpose was preached at every opportunity, and you too have a fear or get triggered by thoughts of not fulfilling your purpose, that everything rides on your achieving it and being it and living in a way that's worthy of it. 

SIDE NOTE: "living a life worthy of the call" is just another way of saying, "live a life that's worthy of your soul."

There is a difference between a goal and an intention. 
There's a way to think about purpose that brings it back to earth, freed from the airs of obligation and significance and grounded into the fabric of your soul. We'll explore it this week and see if we can't create a more holistic list of wants and desires for ourselves. 

I'll leave you with this today: A goal is something you tick off a list, and an intention is something deeper…

A goal is something outside of you that you're hoping to get to one day, and that you want to achieve. An intention lives deep inside of you, and you birth that intention into reality through gestation, labour, and delivery. It's within you, not beyond you. 

MINDFUL MOMENT: "Only when our intent comes from a place of love rather than a place of fear do we create peace in the world and in ourselves." Don Miguel Ruiz. 

Written by Liz Milani
Instagram: @thepracticeco

From this week’s series, "Forget About Goals", with a subscription, in the App.