WHERE
ARE YOU GOING?
When you make a long trip by car it helps to
know where you are going. If you get a map and locate your stops
before the drive you may more easily find your way. If you have
a complicated trip and try to make it without a map, you are probably
going to have a hard time of it.
You may like to think of a journey as a metaphor
for life. Some journeys are very purposive - businesslike. On
these trips it may be important to take the most direct, easiest
route. Other parts of the same journey may be just for fun. The
only purpose of the drive may be the drive. It may be fun just
to see what's around the next corner. Sometimes you drive more
efficiently because you've loafed along for a bit.
This is a short course in finding yourself on
life's journey. It is an essay on orienteering. In the sport of
orienteering a group sets out, in a wilderness, or in a new city,
and the members find their way using maps, landmarks, compasses
and other guides. This course presumes that you are like me in
that you do better when you have a goal. You may be satisfied
to wander and look with no goal; but most people find life improves
if some of it is spent seeking goals. It seems to take more self
reliance and mental health to mosey along. Most of us need goals
and purposes. It is hard to be a happy beachcomber. Without goals
we just flounder around. We feel miserable and lost.
TODAY IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF
YOUR LIFE.
You cannot begin a new task any sooner than
right now. Yesterday's problems and mistakes cannot be undone.
Today is sufficient to itself. As that distinguished psychologist,
Satchel Paige, was wont to say "don't look back, you never know
what'sgaining on you."
No one enters life programmed with a set of
dreams. Every baby wants to be warm and snug and well fed and
safe from tigers; but no baby is born with a fixed tape of instructions.
We have to learn and to create. We are constantly about the job
of inventing who it is we are going to be.
Set aside an hour or more. Do not try to get
away with spending less than an hour.
Treat yourself as if you, yourself, were important.
Permit no interruptions. Send the kids to the movie, turn off
the telephone. Go off in your car if necessary. This is important
work.
Take a spiral notebook and begin your journal.
This document will help you make everything we do together more
effective for you. Think of this work as enhancing the value of
the hours we spend together. Each time you work in this journal
remind yourself that you are saving yourself at least three hours
in the office for every hour you spend on the journal by yourself.
The quality of the work you do in your journal will influence
how well you can enhance the quality of your life. Aim for the
best, the richest, the fullest experience possible for you.
EXPERIENCES
YOUR FIRST ASSIGNMENT is to write down a list
of all the things you ever have wanted to do and enjoy doing or
that you think you might enjoy doing. These are experiences for
their own sake, and have little to do with practicality. Want
to sky dive? Look at barns in New England? Visit the Amish Country?
Talk to an old friend? Be open, creative and impractical.
Head up a page "EXPERIENCES I want to have".
Write down as many experiences which seem attractive to you as
you can imagine. Continue writing down all the things you might
want to look back on when you are 20 or 40 years older and know
than that you have experienced all these events. Let out all the
stops on your organ of creativity and make as long and exhaustive
a list as you possibly can.
Be as impractical and unrealistic as you wish.
These are rough, first draft worksheets. This is a way to get
you started. Pretend you will have all the money and time in the
world.
This is an important task. Working conscientiously
on this job will help you reach the conscious and unconscious
goals which brought you to this office more quickly and effectively
than if you just talk to your therapist.
GROWTH: these are your goals for the maturing,
developing, personal achievements of moral worth to you. Start
another page with the heading, "Growth: Goals for My Personal
Development". These are attributes, or characteristics you do
have and want to intensify, or qualities you want to have much
more abundantly than you do now (loving, assertive, friendly,
outgoing, reliable ...).
The sum of these goals for personal development
or growth ought to be a description of the ideal, perfect you
as you imagine yourself becoming now. Don't get caught up in hair
splitting, niggling quibbles. Just go ahead and describe the perfect
you who may become.
WHO DO YOU LIKE? WHAT ARE THEY LIKE?
Continue by writing down every goal you think
that people you admire may have. Describe the qualities of people
you like, respect or look up to in some way. Don't worry if some
of these items seem as though they belong in the Experience list.
You are working on goals, not developing a category system.
It will be valuable for you to talk to someone
you admire. Ask each of them about some of their personal values
and goals. Write a letter asking about goals and values. Most
people, even very famous people, are flattered by this kind of
question. You may be surprised at the response you get. Even if
a famous person doesn't answer your letter, the exercise of writing
it will be valuable for you. At the very least, fantasize about
writing a letter - or write one and don't send it. Then day dream
about the answer you might get.
Write down all the things you can think of that
are important to you. Write all the things you think are truly
important, or that need to be done in this life or for the world.
For example, food for the hungry; peace on earth; getting closer
to God; being good; making money; etc.). Try to keep the statements
short and to the point. Use one word. Use one trenchant sentence
at the most.
ACHIEVEMENT
THE NEXT HEADING goes above a list of all the
practical, professional, vocational, educational and social goals
you want to achieve.
Look back over the other goals you have listed
and see if some of them can be put under Achievment. Don't worry
about practicality. It doesn't matter if the achievement may really
be an experience. Write down as many things as you can imagine
wanting or needing yourself to achieve.
Be certain you think about these things:
- ways you make money;
- your profession, trade or job;
- your property and home;
- your total assets, estate, money in the bank;
- relationships - family, spouse, mate, partner;
- leisure skills: (think of the things you want
to learn, like a better backstroke, or how to play the flute);
- health, fitness, appearance;
- education.
METAGOALS
START ANOTHER LIST with the name METAGOALS.
Metagoals are all those goals you have in everything
you do. If you are a maximum Christian you want to make everything
you do a witness to Christ. This is a metagoal. You may want to
achieve health in all you do - that is a metagoal.
If you want to exemplify an ideal, or serve
a cause these are metagoals.
And yet another list - CHANGES I WANT TO MAKE
IN MYSELF
Put down all those things you want to change.
Stop smoking. Lose weight. Be optimistic. Wake up feeling good.
Be healthy. Successful treatment of my diabetes. Be impractical.
Dream. If you really think you want to be 7 feet tall and not
5'11", write down "grow to 7 feet tall".
It may be that after you have done all this
work you will want to rest. If you recess having made up these
five lists make a specific conscious commitment to yourself for
your unconscious mind to dream on these lists. Come back to the
lists again to add to them after sleeping on them. If you are
just taking a short break, commit the lists consciously to your
unconscious mind to work on them. Come back and add to the lists.
REFINING AND DEFINING
Be certain you are satisfied you have made the
lists as long as you can.
Your job of editing the lists, refining and
defining your goals, is as important as making up the lists of
goals. Go off in the car. Put out the cat. Turn off the fone.
No kids. No interruptions. Make this task for yourself as serious
as a job interview.
You will benefit by talking about the lists.
Tell your spouse about the job. Talk about the thoughts making
up these lists has brought to mind. Ask several people to read
the lists. Ask them what comes to their minds as a frivolous goal,
a goal as serious as a train wreck, an imaginative goal. Stimulate
all your own minds, consciously and unconsciously, to think of
more happy directions and pleasurable destinations for your journey
through life.
RANK YOUR GOALS BY COST
"Experiences I want to
have, costwise." Put the free and cheapest experiences at the
top of the page. Don't get caught in finiken detail and niggling
aadjustments. Guess if you don't know. Put the most impractical
and expensive experience toward the bottom. This is the place
for a space liner holiday around Jupiter.
CLARIFYING PERSONAL GROWTH
Head this new page "GOALS FOR PERSONAL GROWTH".
Express your goals for personal growth in positive, short phrases.
Use one word or a terse phrase. For example, Outgoing; Loving;
Assertive; Happy. Use these positive forms rather than "less inhibited;
less hateful; less withdrawn, less depressed". Leave five lines
between each separate word or phrase, and keep the list down only
the left side of the page. Use lots of paper.
FOCUSING ON THE CHANGES YOU WANT TO MAKE
Write down on a new page "Changes For Me To
Make." and put all the changes in positive language. Be brief.
- Happy
- Calm
- Drink ONLY soft drinks, water, coffee, tea
or milk.
- Be calm in social situations.
- Mr. Cool
- Put into my body only healthful substances
- Lively
- Listen regularly to tapes for positive habits
- Start smoking again when I have my 90th birthday
RETHINK METAGOALS
MAKE A NEW LIST of your metagoals. Make them
more terse and always positive. "I want to be appreciated in all
I do." translates as "Appreciated."
"I want never to harm
anyone through any of my actions." becomes "Beneficent."
FIND OUT WHAT GROWTH REALLY MEANS
Read over your new list of Goals for Personal
Growth, and down the right side of the page list the specific
actions you must take to move toward your goal.
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