The Burden of Goal Setting

We are bombarded with blog posts and books on how to set and achieve goals. Every year on New Year’s we see our friends, family and coworkers embark on new goals like losing weight, finding love and making more money. It’s only March. How is it going so far?

I usually ask myself what my 7-year-old self would do. This may explain some of my blurts but in general, I think my 7-year-old self was my untainted self. I did not know much about how the world worked but I knew what I liked, I did not worry about fitting in at school because I had a great group of friends, I was doing well in school, choreographing routines in the living room, begging my parents for a telescope and microscope, and loving the water. I believed I was a mermaid and if I spent enough time in the water, my fins would grow back. I dreamed, I believed, I had no self-doubt.

As I went through life, goals started piling up. Most of those goals weren’t even mine to really own but because I like challenges and a tad bit competitive, I chased dreams for the sake of chasing something I was told I couldn’t do just to prove a point.

About a decade ago, Oprah made vision boards popular. This was a new way to manifest your goals: find images that speak to you and visualize everyday that you are those things. Eventually your feelings and thoughts align and magic. Your wish is granted. Overdoing practically everything in my life, I ended up with four vision boards throughout the years. Every morning I would spend about 5–10 minutes looking at my board and changing things that no longer felt right. Then very recently I was looking at my vision board(s) and I felt completely overwhelmed. I had to do all of this in this lifetime? What if I never became these things? Would I just be disappointed?

Expectation is the root of all heartache. The vision boards were basically setting up all these expectations in my life, many which were not manifesting at all. I started to feel overwhelmed. My “ideal life” was just a prettier and skinner version of me running inside of a hamster wheel. I felt trapped. So I threw all the vision boards away and instantly felt a weight lifted from my shoulders.

I think having goals is healthy but goals without action are just dreams. But what if you set no goals and just focused on the present moment and tried to live in that moment as best you can? It seems to me that a person would be a whole lot happier and free, living this way. How can we live happily in the present if we are always looking to the future for our hope? I wonder what Oprah’s followers would say about this.