It’s time to talk about your feelings… Your emotions… Your hormones… call them what you will, but always remember that they aren’t facts, and that they are as easy for you to change as your underwear. Yesterday you identified your why, and you probably realized that the only goals worth reaching are the ones that will keep you in alignment with how you want to feel.
So… how do you want to feel?
yesterday we discovered one your major foundational driver–your WHY.
Today let’s get clear about another major foundational driver–HOW you want to FEEL.
Answer the following questions:
- What are the 3 to 5 feelings, emotions, and experiences that you are craving in life? The feelings that make you feel alive, awake, and purposeful?
- Does your goal check at least some of the desired emotions off from the list above? (These feelings will be our anchor points for how we choose our goals from here on out… from this goal to every goal going forward, if it doesn’t check one (or many) of the boxes of how you want to feel then it doesn’t make the grade as a goal worth spending time on in your life)
- IF Yes (Great work!)
- IF Not (If not, how can you change or improve your goal?)
- My improved goal is: ___________________________________________________
“The only thing that matters is how you feel.”
A very dear friend said this to me once… My first thought was, “She’s sweet, and that’s a bunch of bullshit.” Of course, not everyday is going to be sunshine and rainbows but making choices and decisions in alignment with how we want to feel will keep us pointed in the direction of feeling whole.
As achievers, we’ve long created a story for ourselves about our worth. We’ve decided that our worth is determined by our output. Output can be defined as our accomplishments, our bank account, our resume, our execution, our ability to cross t’s and dot i’s.
Basically it comes down to this–we’ve determined our worth by the pile of stuff we’ve accumulated rather than by our own internal compass.
We’ve long been taught that who we are is determined by what we can produce, achieve or collect. Think about the messages: Do good in school, get good grades, score the goal, make the dean’s list, get the job, buy the house/car/thing that projects an external indication that we’ve arrived somewhere… anywhere in our lives.
This was me–FOR SURE. At no point was I asked, “How do you feel about that?” but rather the question was, “What did you do?”
These are two very different questions and since we are shifting the whole paradigm on goal setting, we’re going to need to introduce the concept of HOW we want to FEEL into how we decide and define our goals.
This is sideways or backward thinking for most of us, but it is time to do things differently. The way you did it before isn’t going to be the way that takes you to where we are going next.
In order to achieve our goals: we need to set the goal ✅, then we need to attach our WHY ✅ to our goal, and next is the HOW we want to feel.
It’s not enough to just say you want to feel a certain way, and then be going back to the regularly scheduled programming of your life. You’ve got to create check points along this journey of life. A check point can be created as a daily routine such as morning journaling, affirmations, or meditation or it could be a weekly practice that is scheduled on your calendar that is as non-negotiable to miss as the dentist.
Without checkpoints or pit stops, inevitably we run out of fuel or have veered so far off course because we didn’t create the time to reflect. Reflection time allows us to pivot, to make small tweaks and changes that keep us in alignment with our bigger picture.
How can you approach this task with the energy of how you want to feel rather than what you “HAVE TO” get done today? Trying on a new lens to task accomplishment allows us to sustain our energy, focus, and efforts toward seeing our goals to the finish line.
