Goal Setting the Embodied Feminine Way
What if we changed the narrative from what we want to achieve to how we desire to feel?
For example, I may long and set goals to purchase a dreamier house, set my budget to purchase that comfier couch, and start pursuing overflowing workshops and a booked-out calendar… but is this really what I’m seeking? Well…they seem pretty great on the surface - like I’d love that, truly!!! But what is it that I’m actually chasing?
It’s an important realisation to understand that I’m actually chasing the feelings that I think these goals will give me
i.e. Spaciousness, security, comfort, recognition, and validation that what I do is needed and matters... the actual outcome is secondary.
Now that becomes a whole lot more interesting doesn’t it?
We humans are emotionally driven.
Yet we seem to have forgotten this, swept along in the capitalist, consumerism lifestyle that we can’t help but lead. It's so normal to base our self-worth against each checkmark against the to-do list. Often leading to frantic over functioning, and often desperate habitual patterns of planning and doing. This comes with the very real risk of becoming depleted in the process of aiming for what we think will fill us.
We can get so caught up in the frenzy of doing, attaining, and achieving because this is what everyone around us is doing, fed by advertising, because it’s the norm.
We’re left ever hungrier for more as what we thought would satiates our needs does so but temporarily, and we are soon to fixate on the next prize.
Sound familiar?
The list never ends, it simply grows. And I don’t know about you, but this is something I’m very keen to leave behind.
The attainment of our goals give us a sense of accomplishment, connection, pleasure, and validation– and it is the feelings that we’re chasing, not the things. Not really.
Core desired feelings invite you to re-engage in the experience of life
If we were to focus on our desired feelings - such as feeling more alive, wild, and loving for example - then life opens beyond the material and superficial and we find ourselves engaged in experiencing life as it unfolds, rather than chasing what’s next.
Your core desired feelings become an internal barometer guiding you to who want to be and what you want to do.
They become your sat-nav for life, directing you away from societal pressures to achieve things that don't matter to you, that don’t actually fill you, that you’ve just been sold that they should.
What’s more the refocus to feeling-centred goals is a practice that is brought into our DAILY life, rather than being dependent on the achievement of a goal to get it.
Goals aren’t wrong.
Indeed they lead to momentum and direction - both fabulous things when we do have a drive to achieve something, or to complete a project.
So you don’t have to throw the tangible to-do's get thrown out the window all together, but rather set these goals while keeping your core desired feelings front and centred. And you will find in setting them there comes less attachment to the specific outcome, which brings about a certain sense of playfulness and freedom in whatever we choose to pursue.
All of the doing is without purpose if we don’t check in with how we really want to feel.
As Danielle LaPorte, the advocate of core desired feelings and the author of the Desire Map says
"Knowing how you actually want to feel is the most potent form of clarity you can have. Generating those feelings is the most powerfully creative thing you can do with your life."
How do you want to feel?
This is my invitation to you
Get clear on what perhaps is missing, emotionally, from your life, what are you longing for?
Hone in on those times when you feel most expansive - what are you doing and how are you feeling in those moments?
What are your core desired feelings?
Revisit any goals you have set for yourself, do these goals contribute to your core desired feelings? If not, how could you re-jig them so they did?
What can you do to imbue your life with your core desired feelings?
Allow your core desired feelings to lay the foundation and direct the path of your year, and every day within it.
Simply asking these questions feels so good in my body, so very nourishing and deeply rooted in who I am, clarity and spaciousness appears, and instead of feeling swept along by what society may subconsciously be directing me towards, I’m more attuned to what I desire to give and receive from life.
For me in this moment it’s playfulness, freedom, and ease. YUM.
I’d love to know what are your core desired feelings for the year ahead? What will be your guiding compass points as you set your intentions, mark your calendars and choose which projects to pursue, or not?
xox
Jess