I heard a question this morning and really hit me how useful a question it was when thinking about goals.

What is your relationship to your goals?

To understand why, an explanation is in order.

Goals that are deeply personal, the ones that come from somewhere within us that we’ve never really shared with anyone else for fear that they might be ridiculed ort contaminated, or both, have two attributes that make them personal to us.

The first is that we thought of them.  It’s not that others don’t have something like it, but these goals have a unique flavour because it comes with or special view of the world.  It goes without saying that we can’t create anything that isn’t first thought of, but there is another quality about these types of goals, we have a burning desire to see it come to life.  These aren’t the ‘nice to haves’ pile, or the ‘keeping up with the Jones’ type where our goal is a cookie cutter of same thing everyone else does, these set your soul on fire.  It doesn’t have to be massive, or audacious, but something that if you got it would change the way you view yourself and what you believe is possible for you.

I firmly believe goals are a catalyst for growth.  If the thing you want is within your capabilities, then it’s not a goal, it’s a task, and you should get on with it.

But goals that give you butterflies and scare you a little, not the scared that you want to run away from, but the scared that is half excitement, half ‘am I mad, and can I really do this?’, that’s the type of goals I’m talking about.

The problem is, by the very nature of the goal we’ve set ourselves apart from the goal and created our first hurdle, we’re already questioning whether we can do it, or deserve it, or one of the many ways we distance ourselves from what we want.

But that is OK, knowledge is power.  When you understand that is what you have done, take the time to sit quietly and see what comes up for you when you think about what it would mean for you if you got your goal.  We’re looking to understand the relationship we have in our own minds with the end result, because that will tell us a lot about what we believe we can do and have.  Is it above you on some sort of pedestal?  Is it out of reach? Or impossible? or do you have another way of describing it?  The reason I pose the question is because how you relate will play a big part in how easy, or how hard it will be for you to achieve your goal.

It stands to reason, if you think it’s beyond your reach, or always in the future, you’ve created an unconscious barrier between you and what you want.  To be successful, you’re going to need to close that gap and until you change that perspective it’s going to be a challenge.  And that’s the point of the question, to make the unconscious conscious so you can close the gap as quickly as possible.