If you have your own business, setting goals can be especially useful and if you are employed, then having some sort of outcome or focus for your desired trajectory can also be helpful.
However if you think that by setting goals and achieving those milestones your life will be a bed of roses and that when all your dreams come true, you will be at last able to relax you’re in for a surprise.
This will be difficult for anyone very young to understand, as they have ahead of them a lifetime of things to achieve, people to meet and places to go. It would take a very perceptive young child to understand that by getting all that your heart desires does not give real and abiding peace.
Children often are more perceptive than their parents because they can see that their parents say one thing and often do another. The young, fresh, innocent eyes of the child have a clarity that the poor adult has usually lost. That’s why there is often so much friction between the parents and the children unless the intelligence of the children has been scared out of them and the child has decided to toe the line.
Goals are very useful in the world of business to focus, get things done and achieve results that may not have come so quickly or at all, but there does come a time when you have looked into all motives and found them lacking; when you have gone through the whole round of desires, and discovered that you have been left empty handed.
At a certain age from early thirties perhaps, certainly early forties onwards, you can see quite easily that the motives and goals lead nowhere that you go on moving in circles and that YOU have not really changed, that you remain the same and that the happiness and peace you seek is still on the horizon.
You must have observed if you spend some quiet time with yourself –not an easy thing for most people- that the motives, goals and that long wish list go on driving you nuts, almost mad, as one achieved outcome or goal leads to yet another new goal as you begin to see the cycle of desire, action and result. It is faint but still observable that once one goal has been achieved a new one springs up in its place and this goal becomes the new one to achieve.
The important thing is not to condemn goal making and goal setting as I have also seen that a focus is usually required to get things done but it is important to remember that the goal is certainly not the journey, it is only a strategy to get what we think we want at a certain moment in time.
In the end we all want happiness, silence, peace, love, clarity and compassion and goals will never give us these things. Good to make goals but I try to keep them in perspective. If I am becoming too goal orientated I remind myself that the goals I achieved never ever brought me what I really needed.
Goals and motives are good as far as they go but we see eventually that the motives and goals only promise but that which is promised is never delivered. One goal is achieved and another goal or motive comes up again never leaving us with a moment’s peace.
So, let’s continue with the goal setting journey and do it with lightness of purpose, a smile on our face and a glint in our eye; in short let’s try and keep things in perspective.
Cheers
Chris Borrett
If by chance, you have not encountered my previous posts outside this blog, one of my favourites is about “A Woman’s Labour of Love”. You have the luxury of reading it by clicking here.
Image Credit: FreeImages.com/Carl Dwyer
If by chance, you have not encountered my previous posts outside this blog, one of my favourites is about “How To Make A Decision and Stick To It”. You have the luxury of reading it by clicking here.