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Are your goals big enough? Try this instead when setting your goals
A guest post by Natalia Walker, Inner Creative.
When we set ourselves goals, we often think too small, afraid that we will fail or that it’s too hard.
Not dreaming big enough about your future can limit what you can achieve in life.
Do your dreams seem vague, misaligned with your values or impossible?
It can be hard knowing exactly what we want.
We might have a general idea – I want to travel; I want to have a nice house and a car; I want to earn more money; I want to live and work how I like; I want to enjoy life; I want to retire early.
But can you hold this type of goal so clearly in your mind that you can almost feel it and know what step to take next?
If you can, great!
But what about the rest of us? Do we just give up, keep our fingers crossed and put up with whatever we get?
Getting the right balance when setting our goals
Sometimes, our dreams can feel so big that we don’t feel tethered to them. We put off doing anything about them because they feel a bit too far off. We’re not specific enough to be able to focus on what action we need to take to get there.
Or sometimes we can go the other way. We’re so specific with our goals that we become blinkered about what else is possible or what might actually make us happier.
Goal setting can be a tricky business. Especially when we’ve been trained to use a linear approach in how we set goals. Usually, we forecast based on our history or what we see around us.
We look at what we’ve achieved in the past, maybe what others expect of us or what others have done.
We use that to forecast what’s possible for us. If we’re ambitious we may stretch it a little further – we’ll aim for a higher target number or to do it faster.
Using this linear approach, we’re more likely to get more of the same in the direction we’re already trending, perhaps just a little quicker. Which is fine, if you want more of the same.
Also, we can be limited by our imagination and what we believe is possible for us. We sometimes blindly follow the paths of those around us – our parents, grandparents, friends, or colleagues – without considering whether their path is right for us.
How can we set goals without falling into these common traps?
The easiest way to open up our imagination and connect to what truly inspires us (and not someone else) is to tap into our right brain thinking mode.
When we engage this part of our brain and thinking we’re tapping into a perspective that is more expansive and sees our greater potential and what’s possible for us beyond our current circumstances.
Our right brain has a more holistic outlook. It sees the bigger picture and how things fit and connect together.
The right brain also thinks experientially and in pictures (as opposed to the linear and language preference of our left-brain hemisphere). This gives you a clue as to how we can best access these different modes of thinking.
We create more exciting, vivid and expansive goals when we use approaches based on imagery, colour, symbols, and metaphor, as well as other information that we collect through our senses.
For instance, when we use collage and drawing, build with LEGO, or tell a descriptive story. Also, when we get out of our analytical, linear ways of thinking we get past all of the ‘shoulds’, fears and limiting beliefs about what’s possible.
Using Vision Boarding for goal setting success
This is why vision boarding is such a powerful visioning and goal setting tool.
The process involves selecting pictures that we’re drawn to from magazines and then arranging them onto a board. You then use the vision ‘picture’ you create to articulate a more focused vision statement (that engages our left-brain thinking).
Vision Boarding is also great for us that have visual and kinaesthetic processing strengths (for instance, if you find easier to remember something if you’ve seen it or had a ‘hands on’ experience with it).
While the pictures on a vision board are a visual representation of our goals, they are not necessarily a literal interpretation. Sometimes they evoke a mood or feeling.
One of my clients felt compelled to put a picture of a dog on her vision board. She didn’t really want a dog. But on reflection, she said that she associates dogs with home. (By the way, that year her family bought a new house and when they moved in she saw that her next-door neighbour had the same type of dog as on her vision board. Spooky!)
Using this non-linear visioning approach means that we may not get the answers in a way that we expect.
A businesswoman came to me feeling stuck and in a rut about her business. She wanted to take a different direction but didn’t know what or how. She created a vision board filled with images of palm trees and the beach. It definitely wasn’t the answer she was expecting. And she had no intention of suddenly reorienting her business towards the beach.
However, she realised that maybe she needed to take a sabbatical before making any major changes. She headed off to Hawaii for a holiday and came back feeling excited about some new business ideas that had occurred to her on the trip. Also, because she felt recharged and rejuvenated after the trip, she had the energy and focus to implement them.
Similarly, another client had been looking for a job around 6 months. She wanted clarity about the type of work she should be pursuing. The images on her vision board spoke about her becoming a strong and powerful like an amazon woman.
Once she embraced this idea about herself and made changes to support this, she quickly found a job that she enjoyed and played to her strengths.
Dare to dream big
We have so much more potential and opportunity available to us than we ordinarily think. When we use goal setting processes, like vision boarding, that use colour, imagery, metaphor and symbols we tap into our right brain thinking that sees a much bigger picture.
We then create goals that feel more exciting and often go beyond what we may have initially dared to dream. It also means that we’re more likely to be committed and motivated in taking the action to make these big dreams come true.
About Natalia Walker
Natalia Walker, founder of Inner Creative, offers a more creative and holistic approach to goal setting, business planning and accountability support. For more information about Natalia’s vision boarding and other creative goal setting services, go to https://innercreative.com.au.
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