MonicaWB

Goal setting like you’ve never done before {with Danielle LaPorte}

Posted on 07. Feb, 2012 by MonicaWB in goals

Goal setting can can be a powerful exercise. Goals help us narrow our attention, focus our efforts, and strive with tremendous purpose. Knowing what we want to achieve is the first step in going after our desires with everything we’ve got. Goal setting is a prerequisite to dreaming big.

But goal setting can also be an empty exercise. Too often, it’s nothing more than list writing, inventory making, and approval seeking. We focus on racking up outward evidence that we’ve accomplished something – material object buying and congratulations seeking.

To stretch into a more radiant future, let’s scratch the surface of traditional goal setting. As you think of your ‘someday’ job or ‘someday’ business, just over the horizon, how do you want it to feel?

Let’s dig deeper into our desires and get cozier with our intentions. And let’s do this with a little help from Danielle LaPorte.

I discovered Danielle online a few years ago when I was just getting serious about designing a business around my strengths. From the start, I could see that she was someone who could teach me a thing or two about revealing more of myself in my work. She’s like an image in a hand mirror steamed up with the white hot truth of my future. As I move closer to letting go of the old and moving into the new, I continue to be inspired by her unconventional advice.

Ever the evocator, Danielle added a new series to her blog, which she calls The Burning Question. Her inaugural post asks,

“how do you want it all to feel? sensuous goal refinement + emotional magnetizing.

Feelings are magnetic. So it goes that if you generate certain feelings — and you have the power to create any feeling you desire — then you increase the power of your emotional magnetism. But we need to limber up, loosen the images and adjectives encrusted on our goals and most-desired states. It helps to get poetic, lyrical, and abstract. Go there with me…”

{her prompt my answers}

I want my day to feel like sailing off the shores of Key West with the wind in my hair
I want kissing to feel like questions and answers
I want my next success to feel like a season premier, just a teaser of what’s to come
I want my body to feel like a belly dancer on a nature hike
I want smiling to feel like a lifeline for a desperate someone slipping into cynicism
I want my friendships to feel like cosmic reunions though infinite time and space
I want my nervous system to feel like free falling out of a perfectly good airplane with a reliable parachute
I want my gigs to feel like jam sessions with all the greats from all the genres
I want my neighborhood to feel like a buzzy bohemian earthy urban village on a mountainside by the sea
I want my integrity to feel like the only thing that matters
I want my money-making to feel like a money-giving, dream-granting powwow
I want my word to feel like bond, like ‘word is bond, yo’
I want my laughter to feel like breathless surrender
I want the end of the day to feel like stillness
I want being of service to feel like love, like a mother’s love
I want my philanthropy to feel like passing out bowls of existential crises to the masters of greed
I want my challenges to feel like stretching a sore muscle: pushing through the pain for soothing pleasure
I want my love to feel like eternity – deep and strong and sacred and open
I want my writing to feel like trance dancing from my finger tips
I want my ideas to feel like liberation

Reconnect with your feelings. Practice feeling. The next time you’re setting goals, scratch the surface to make it a more powerful experience. You want that big promotion? Well, how do you want it to feel? You want to launch your dream business? How do you want it to feel?

Head over to Danielle’s blog to answer her burning question. If you choose to write about it on your blog, be sure to post your link below here as well.