Confessions of a Goal Junkee

John Lennon is my poet.  His lyrics are the lyrics of my heart.  My teacher.  I never met him, but I have listened to his words all of my life, unravelling the message behind the music, which somehow told the stories of my life and informed my questions.  He is a great story teller who can capture the human experience, and express it in such a way that we say, "me too."

Inspired by the great poet John Lennon and my love of words, all my life I have only wanted one thing:  to be able to understand and express the human experience and write about it in a way that connects to a universal truth that we all share. 

Admittedly I took a left turn by circumstance.  I grew up in the 70's in Saskatchewan, so other than CJME 1300  and KTel records, my musical or literary influences in life were quite limited, unless you count the many summers of Waylin and Willy blasting as I was trapped in the middle back seat of my parent's car on the way to the farm at 60 miles/hour, windows open and my mother gripping the dash like we were going to die.  The only influence that music had on me was a commitment to avoid country music for the rest of my life, and I have successfully done so.

 I married a boy from down the street who introduced me to heavy metal and all the greats of the 70's, so I developed a deep appreciation for the poetry of Metallica, Zon, Led Zepplin and Rush.  

In university, I studied English where I read the book "Working" (Author name unknown), which peaked my interest about work, why we work and what is attached to work. Work is about purpose. It is about having a job. It is about getting a pay cheque and living. If you are lucky, work is about doing good things. if you are lucky, you are working.  

It became clear to me that we spend the majority of our lives working or wanting to work.  I began to see how powerful it would be for people to be connected through purpose at work, because then lives would be lived in purpose.

This quest to understand work and express its purpose became my work and my goal for more than 20 years. I went from my original aspiration of becoming a writer (which seemed like a long shot given my geographic reality) to being a corporate planner with a penchant for purpose and a flair for writing. I used words to tell the stories of large corporations so that their workers might find a purpose that was meaningful to their lives.

In my quest for purpose, goals were the language of connection.  Goals are tangible. They are something we can see, feel, touch and attain.  I spent every day thinking about goals, writing goals, explaining goals, developing goals, making goals, setting goals, achieving goals and doing it again.  I excelled at goals. It was my thing. My goal was to help guide the organization up the proverbial hill of vision toward the moment when the angels broke out in song and we were uplifted to the heavens, to a state of business enlightenment.

I even had a map. It was drawn as a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid was the vision (hear the sound of the angels sing?). Below that was intention. Good ones of course. The next level down was goals. Then there were objectives, measures and targets, initiatives and finally tactics to be carried out by the people who came to work every day. 

The angels never sang but they didn't have to.  Admittedly, the language of goal achievement in the corporate world is nothing short of genius because it works. It keeps us in the game. It inspires that competitive part of ourselves who wants to win, to be accepted and to be celebrated.  There is nothing like having a goal and achieving it.  Goals are measurable, and that's what we love most about them. (Cue Rocky).

Visions are different than goals, we used to say.  A vision, like world peace, is grander than a goal.  It cannot be attained by any one person, but by the collective effort of the whole. That also made sense to me, and so I worked tirelessly to harness the collective heart and soul of the working men and women, as we rallied up the stairs toward the vision to be the best whatever it was we wanted to be.

Each and every day that I planned corporations, set goals, explained goals, measured goals, reported goals and wrote goals until the last trek up the hill, I believed that it was work worth doing.  And it was. Because the simple fact is we all need money to live.  Empires can crumble. Profits can decline. Reputations are won and lost in a day, so it is a fine balance.  In the name of economic freedom, which we all enjoy in one way or another, I say, onward and upward Christian Soldiers.

But there is a problem in the goal setting world. It can become heartless and soulless. It can be without purpose. There can be failure.  It can drain the very life out of its flock. Egos run amok and become masters of our self esteem. We are nothing without our goal, and even less if we fail. We are failures. Sometimes people are fired. Others are personally devastated. Some feel a sense of loss and grief  overcomes us, having lost something that we believed was part of our being, because it was, and now it's gone. 

The Personal Realm

In the personal realm, setting goals is something we do as well because it is tangible. In yoga, we say we are going to conquer that pose and we so work like warriors to kill it.  We practice with the conviction of a yogi warrior, mastering the lineage of our bodies in order to levitate into a hand stand.

When choosing yoga as your goal replacement supplement, it's important to know that what you bring to it is what you receive. So if you bring an expectation of goal setting, then that will be your practice, and nothing will be gained.  If you bring a curiosity and a desire to explore and seek, then that is what you will find.  Like business, in yoga there is danger in the goal oriented practice.

What if you are just not made to bend that way?  You may say "I can't do yoga" and give up on a whole world of things you don't even know about yet. That would be tragic.  The yogi in me says, move on Yogi Soldier. Do not dwell on your tight hamstrings and flat feet. Trudge on. Accept this brief limitation and find a new hill and maybe a new asana. Or just breathe.

I am a goal junkee too, so I understand this questing that comes about when we fixate on random things that are not really a measure of anything more than what they are.  My yoga practice is where I practice letting go of my goal habit. Sometimes it's hard to just let go and see what happens.  But when I let go, I am always  amazed by what happens next, because it is honest. Not the manufactured outcome of a goal. (i.e. Set a goal to lose 10 pounds. Lose 10 pounds. Taddaa) 

Letting go of goals is not letting go of life or the quest for that next horizon.  Letting go of goals creates a wider road to travel.  It creates a wider realm of possibility where anything can happen.  Letting go of goals allows you to fall from time to time, and know that it's OK to fall. In fact, it's human to fall from time to time. We all do.

I think it's important to note that if you chose yoga as your goal replacement  (kind of like meal replacement), that you choose the kind of yoga and teacher that can help guide you. Freedom is important to me, so I practice and teach in an environment where there is freedom to explore the edges of my own yoga practice as a practioner and a teacher, where curiosity guides me as much as the freedom to explore new places through yoga.

I still help organizations plan and set goals. It's a fact of business. I did let go of the corporate goal attachment when I realized it was no longer serving me and that it could no longer be my master.  I found a new road to travel as the master of my own being, as a planning consultant,  magazine publisher, a yoga teacher and a writer. My quest is to understand and express the human experience and write the words that someone might read and say, "me too." And that will take the rest of my lifetime and beyond.