Goal-setting can feel like you are trapped in the movie Groundhog Day: repetitious. Every year, many of us set some version of the same tired goals and likely achieve some, but not all, of them. Many people start to make peace with the monotony of the process, and it gets progressively less exciting every time.
But practicing enlightened goal-setting can help reduce the distance between setting the goal and achieving it. It eliminates the monotony and sets you up to experience a renewed energy in the process. It creates the potential to experience joy, peace of mind and fulfillment.
Enlightened Goal-Setting
When you are relating to the world from an enlightened perspective, your mind goes quiet and you feel peaceful. That's because an enlightened perspective assumes that all is well.
The process we are about to go through helps you connect with an enlightened perspective on goal-setting. When you connect with an enlightened perspective, you enter into the present moment, and life feels whole, complete and perfect exactly as it is. No change is necessary.
When you relate to your life from the perspective that all is well, your creativity, inspiration and enthusiasm are naturally activated. This accelerates the transformation you want to create in your life with your goals. Think about it like this: If you already feel like all is well in your world, then there's nowhere else to go, and you can create from a deeply authentic place.
Your Future Is An Experience, Not A Result
To start, you must adopt an enlightened perspective about the future. The future you are trying to create with your goals exists in your imagination. It's not tangible; it's not an exact place or an activity. Your future is an idea that shapes the way you behave and what you feel today. The future you are trying to create with your goals will drive you to change your experience now.
Your goals represent the experiences you are hoping to have in the future. The results are just your current hypothesis on what changes need to happen for you to have your desired experience.
Once you know what your ultimate experience is, you can change the way you relate to your life to create that experience right now. Using this process, you can dramatically shorten the distance between goals set and goals achieved. I believe this is a life-changing perspective. When you feel fulfilled right now, you are free to create your ideal life unbound by the greedy feelings created by necessity.
Below is the process of defining the future you are creating from an enlightened perspective:
Enlightened Goal-Setting Questions
1. If my life were as good as it gets, what would be happening? Write down your answer to this question in detail. Everything is on the table. Do not consider what your life is like right now. Just write what is in your heart. How you make it happen is not relevant at this point. The answer to this question helps you to get a baseline read on the conditions that you believe will create the experience of your dream life.
2. What's important about the answer to question No. 1? In other words, why is answer No. 1 important to you? Write this answer down, and use it as a basis for the next two questions.
3. What will the answer to question No. 2 do for you? How will answer No. 2 affect you or change your life? Write this answer down in detail because it is the key to answering the next question.
Looking at all three answers above, be honest with yourself.
4. Ultimately, what will all that you have written down do for you? Go up 40,000 feet, and see if you can define the experience you think this will create for you. What is that ultimate experience? It might be something similar to happiness, peace, joy, fun, certainty, etc.
The answer to question No. 4 is your fundamental desire. It is your true “why” that people talk so much about. This is the result you are actually looking for in your life. This is what you are actually trying to create in the future. It's not a place. It's not an outcome. It's an experience.
The outcomes you wrote down in the first three questions are what you hypothesize will create the experience you defined in question No. 4. With radical honesty, you can begin to admit that none of the outcomes you defined in the first three questions are necessary to create that experience.
No Accomplishment Necessary
Look around in your life today. With critical thinking, you can admit that you already have that experience in your life right now. You "feel" that experience in the smallest ways in many areas of your life.
You don’t need to achieve anything more to have that experience. You can have that experience any time you choose because it is not dependent upon changes in the outside world. It only depends on the context that you are holding about the various aspects of your world.
Acknowledgment Exercise
Begin to acknowledge those people, places and circumstances that give you this experience. Notice that you are living your proverbial “why” all the time. Sometimes it's very present. Other times it feels distant. But it is there, in your life, right now.
Notice what creates that experience for you now. Begin to do more of what creates your ultimate experience as much as possible. As you do that, I've found you will feel more fulfilled, experience more joy and gain peace of mind. You will feel like you have already arrived.
From the perspective that you have already arrived, take the final step: Begin to craft a future that has no attachments, no urgency, and no have to, need to, must or should. Craft a future that is authentic and deeply meaningful to you.
