For my last birthday, I asked my parents for a Stand-Up Paddle Board (or as the cool kids call it, a SUP). As a Chicagoan, I knew that receiving a SUP in October meant waiting quite some time to try it so I was excited and ready when summer finally came and Lake Michigan seemed almost bearable.
I had asked for a SUP because I loved watching people paddle boarding across the lake front and how beautiful and effortless it appeared. Well, beautiful it is, effortless it is definitely not. I’m up to a challenge, but I’ve been surprised as to how difficult it has been for me! My friend and my husband both took turns and popped right up on it – and stayed up on it. Me? I tried, and tried and would stand and fall, get back up just to fall all over again. After the first few outings, I would try to stand on it once or twice and, when I fell, I would continue paddling around kneeling, instead of standing. Spoiler alert, that photo above isn’t me!
Regardless, I have loved it, we go out early in the morning and watch the sun rising over Lake Michigan. The water is calm, it’s quiet and it’s about as peaceful a place as I could ever imagine. I have seen areas of the lake and the shore I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. I’ve spent time with my breath letting only the sound of the water fill my mind. I’ve made the healthy choice to be out at the lake at 5:00 or 6:00am during the summer, enjoying the fresh air and the solitude. I’m exercising, I’m meditating, I’m in nature, it’s perfection. But as the summer begin to a close, I realized that I hadn’t actually stood and paddled on my Stand-up Paddle Board. And as I watched someone glide near me, standing stoically on their SUP, I started to feel like a failure. It is a Stand-up Paddle Board after all, could I even say I was doing it if I wasn’t standing?
That’s when I started to think about my goal with the SUP. The reason I asked for one was:
- I thought it would motivate me to get out to the lake early in the mornings. (Check!)
- It looked peaceful and would give me a unique place to be with my thoughts. (Yes!)
- It would give me another way to be active and connect with my body. (Definitely!)
- It was something new (something I’ve been working on the past few years!) (Absolutely!)
Turns out, while I had visioned standing on it, my goal has always been about the experience of connection and tranquility. And, standing or not, I was getting that experience. This got me thinking about how important it is to define our goals. Without a defined SUP goal, I felt like a failure. Once I stepped back and thought it through, I had accomplished my goal – and enjoyed doing it.
What happens when we don’t have goals? I often work with clients who feel “ungrounded” or “adrift”. I can relate to these feelings of “just going through life”, with no destinations in mind. Several years ago, when I first started thinking about this feeling of being untethered, I decided to make a list of goals. Some may call it a bucket list; I like to think of them as goals. Goals can be broken down, examined, organized, planned out – basically, goals are in my wheelhouse. I started to see how this list gave me a focus, various end points, things to plan, ways to engage and, in many ways, some purpose. The first several goals were fun and easy to come up with – like eating lobster on the coast of Maine, or they were accomplishment driven such as a family ancestry project I’ve always wanted to do. But similar to above, even in those “surface level” goals, I started to ask myself, “what’s the purpose?”. Why did I want goals and what did I want to get out of my goals?
To me, it comes back to getting curious and asking ourselves “what’s the why?”. Why do I want to eat lobster on the coast of Maine? The easy answer is because I love lobster, but beneath that I hear that I want adventure – I want more nature – I want new things – I want travel. And as I get curious about each of those, what do I find? Maybe that I’m in a rut, or I feel static, I feel stuck. You can see how this quickly expands, especially when you start breaking down deeper and longer-term goals.
For me, creating a list of goals helped ground me. When I got curious about my goals, I started to see larger areas of my life that I wanted to shake up. I could break those goals down into bit sized goals that gave my days, weeks, months, quarters and years a sense of purpose. I had a road map with destinations along the way. In my Eyes on the Stars and Feet on the Ground, that’s exactly what we do – we take one goal, we get curious about it and then we road map it into smaller goals. That curiosity is the most important element. Why this goal? What is it telling me? How do I define this goal? What outcome do I want from this goal? How do I break it down to make it manageable and obtainable? What’s the “why”?
What’s on your bucket list? How do you use goals to drive you forward?
Inquiry: What is really behind a goal that you’ve had for awhile?
