Why chasing goals doesn't always work - and what you can do differently

Posted on April 21, 2023 by Vishad Doshi, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

What do you think is the most common resolution people make on New Year’s Eve, albeit maybe after a few drinks propped on their best friend’s shoulder?

It’s to exercise more, according to 47% of respondents in a recent survey.

So, to address this, they do things like resolving to join their local gym, getting up early in the morning for runs and attending fitness classes/hiring a personal trainer.

And they attack this resolution with initial gusto. Then after a month or so, the enthusiasm and effort may start to fade. They start to go to the gym every other day instead of every day. Then every other week. Then every month. Their 6am starts turns into 7am, 8am until the snooze button gives up.

Then they wonder why they couldn’t keep the momentum up and beat themselves up for not sticking to their resolution, and thus fuel the self hate cycle even more.

What’s happened is that they resorted to their old defaults, choosing to do instead of be – an example of doing vs being.

Doing is what you do. It’s the actions you take. It’s the decisions you make. It’s your behavior and all its visible manifestations.

Being is who you are. It’s what’s underneath all of the doing. It’s your qualities, your thought patterns, and your conditioning. It’s the pattern of beliefs that you hold about yourself and your environment. It’s your world view.

When we set out to make a change in our lives, we usually attempt it on the doing level. We try to do new things, or we try to do things differently. But in most cases, we haven’t updated the being level. So what ends up happening is that we revert to our old defaults. The change doesn’t stick.

It’s like constructing a building on a wobbly foundation. Or like trying to stick a magnet to a fridge that’s built entirely of wood. It’s bound to fail. Your assumptions of how the world works, your beliefs about what’s right and wrong. All of these determine what you do in the world. Your worldview is your incentive structure for action. It’s your embodied rulebook for life. And so you can either try to break your own rules, or you can rewrite your rulebook entirely and play a different game.

Let’s take an example to illustrate this: Say you start off by saying you want to be more relaxed and less stressed. Symptoms-wise, you feel like you’re running around at 100mph. Your head is exploding with ideas, to-dos, and next steps. You can’t just chill out or ‘take a chill pill’ (is that a saying still used today?) — and you’re not sure you even want to. You’re always in motion, but now you can sense that you’re approaching the breaking point.

Your immediate ‘doing’ solution is the next to do things like meditate, write in your journal, and do yoga. To help you chill out – as all of these are what you’ve seen other people do/recommend or is the latest fad/hack on social media.

But despite this, you have the nagging sensation that you should be doing more, something more productive.

That’s because below the surface, your sense of identity is tied up with productivity. In an attempt to shield your inner-most sensitive self from the world (and yourself), you’ve created a shell that’s all about action, struggle and movement. And so you feel like you have to prove yourself in every situation that you face.

But deep down you’re scared of what you’ll find if you stop to take a breath; you’re resentful of what you’ll see in the mirror when you allow yourself to feel what you really feel. That fear then shows up as guilt when you’re not working hard. To avoid that guilt, you struggle forward like your life depends on it.

In summary:

The doing problem is feeling/experiencing stress, fatigue and burnout.

The being problem is an unconscious need to struggle.

So what can we do to uncover the being solution?

We become kind to ourselves.

This includes things like

· We reconnect with our values and ask ourselves what is important to you and what we’re about

· To be OK with who you are right now, and to be ok not knowing the future

· That while transforming, to be ok with not moving fast

· And to be ok with not always struggling ahead

All of this requires patience and diligence, as they’re all simple but not easy. This is where the work with me comes in…

On the surface, we state the problem/goal we have. When we try and address the problem/goal with an action without the thought behind it, we don’t find the treasure i.e. the outcome that satiates us or the true reason behind what we’re feeling.

It’s only by doing that work on ourselves that we can dig further and see the problem/goal for what it is really is. When you work with me, we conduct the search together, and thus approach goals from a position of higher self worth, so that we’re not orientated by their outcome – and even catering for a change of mind along the way, as we are all prone to doing.

My coach called it a guaranteed treasure hunt. In that the treasure is definitely there, you just need to keep digging. If you don’t find it, keep digging.

Feel supersonic.