Goals, Achievement and Failure

“What you get by achieving your goals is not as important as what you become by achieving your goals.”
~ Zig Ziglar

Do you set goals for yourself? Do you write them down or just know them in your mind or in your heart? Studies have shown it’s actually beneficial to write them down, and while I do that for my professional goals, I definitely have some that are just so intrinsically bound to who I believe I am that they are always within me.

It’s my birthday week, and it’s a big one. A decade milestone. I have mixed feelings about this, but it’s coming, whether I like it or not. So in true coach-y form, I’ve been delving into my feelings and the thoughts behind them.

On the one hand, I am happy to celebrate. First of all, I think it’s always fun to have a day to celebrate YOU just for being you. I always make it a point of telling the people I love and care about how much they mean to me on their birthdays. I like the idea of a celebration just because. Not because of any accomplishment or achievement, just for being alive. And while I’m not THAT old yet, I have outlived some of my friends. Thinking of their too-short lives makes me grateful for each of my years.

BUT…then there’s the other thoughts. The not-so-excited-to-be-FORTY thoughts. As a coach who trained in a class of amazing coaches, I’ve been self-coaching and been a practice client for my colleagues on many of these thoughts. These thoughts are dirty pain — as opposed to clean pain like grief, dirty pain is the thoughts about it that you have like “it’s my fault he left” or “I will never find another job/partner/friend like him again.” Dirty pain thoughts are nasty, and definitely painful, but they can be dismantled.

The biggest resistance I have about turning FORTY (it’s big…it deserves all caps) is that I haven’t achieved some of my personal goals that I thought I would have by now. I could explain this in two ways: 1) it’s out of my control, there are circumstances and others involved and there’s nothing I can do about it, or…2) I have made choices, for good reasons, that have led me to this point, and even though it’s not where I want to be, I honor and value the choices I have made. The first explanation puts me in the role of the victim or the martyr, and that doesn’t feel good to me. The second explanation puts me back in the driver’s seat of my own life, and I like that more. While I have yet to reach my desired destination, I do feel good about the journey.

If you have goals for yourself, and you don’t meet them (for whatever reasons), I invite you to explore what you’re telling yourself about not achieving the goal. You get to craft the story in your head, so make it a good one! Use goals as motivators to keep striving towards, but don’t use the goals as sticks to beat yourself up with.