Farfetching

ONE OF THE PRINCIPLES which I’ve borrowed from narrative coaching is that the person who achieves a goal is not the same person who sets it. In the weeks or months or years between when you commit to a goal and when you arrive at it, you will have learned a great deal, encountered events you both did and did not anticipate, built up experiences you didn’t have before. You will have practiced new skills and new ways of being and you will have been changed by them. Such that when you eventually find yourself on the threshold of that goal, it will look quite different to you than it did when you first imagined it. Both because you are now seeing it for the first time—and the future has a way of diverging from our prophecies—but also because you are different.

This gives rise to one of the challenges of working with goals. While it appears to be broadly true that people who set goals are more likely to achieve them, there’s no accounting in that story of whether or not the person who arrives at the goal still wants it. Often—more often than I think we are wont to credit—the arrival is a let down. The hoped-for thing turns out to not be what we thought it was, turns out to be a plain old cup and not the magical chalice we had fantasized about.

In part, this is because a goal cuts off avenues for exploration. It welds you to what past-you wanted, effectively disenfranchising present- and future-you. That is, in fact, the point: by committing to a goal, you commit to not wandering off your chosen path. But that means that when things show up along that path—new opportunities or new knowledge, or simply changing conditions—you lack the license to veer off or head in another direction.

There are times when that welding is useful, of course, as when you commit yourself to a morning routine, knowing full well that the you who hears the alarm go off at 5 AM will be none-too-pleased but also knowing that the you who gets up and goes for the run will better for it. We are permitted to make decisions for our future selves, to choose to stay on track no matter what crosses it. But that means we are also permitted to change our minds, to change our stories, to discover and to be surprised, to spot another trail and make a choice with our feet and hearts and minds.

There are two framings I find useful when a goal presents itself. The first is to ask, what do you expect will be different when that goal is achieved? How will you change in becoming the person who can reach that goal? (And you will change, count on it.) Who do you expect to be when you get to the end of this road? Those questions (and others like them) can help you work out why this goal is the one you want to point yourself at; they can, at the same time, reveal to you if the goal you are contemplating is what you really want or is perhaps something you may have unconsciously adopted from others (your colleagues, or your boss, your parents, partner, friends, etc.). Importantly, it also gives you something to anchor on to when obstacles inevitably present themselves. In my own observations, a goal like “get that promotion” dulls in the time it takes to chase after it, losing some of its motivational strength; while something akin to “become the kind of person who can lead a team” can power you through many a storm.

The second framing flips things around and asks, what of that future goal can you drag into the present? How would you show up if you had already achieved that goal—if you were already leading that team, or had written that book, or run that marathon? What would your days look like? What habits would you have built and, importantly, which ones would you have discarded? What can you practice right now—not next quarter or next year, not even tomorrow, but today—that would bring that goal closer to hand?

This is where I like to talk about intentions rather than goals. An intention, as I’m using it here, is a kind of bending of the self towards something, a commitment not to a specific path but to a scope of attention or way of being. Rather than posit a potential reward in the future, an intention asks what you want to practice in the present. That is, rather than orienting you towards some deferred gratification, an intention directs some movement or shift in your awareness that’s already available. Instead of something you might achieve, it becomes something you do; instead of someone you could be, it becomes someone you are.

This also handily extracts you from the fact that, for many goals, getting to the summit simply isn’t entirely in your power. Whether or not you get that promotion depends in large part on your organization’s budget; whether or not you sell that book hinges on the judgement of editors and agents; something as tiny and capricious as a virus could block your path to the marathon. None of us knows what the future holds for us. None of us knows which paths may close down, what other paths may open up, what as-yet-unknown directions we may find ourselves intrigued by. An intention gets you moving but keeps space open to play and improvise, to skip and jump around the obstacles that present themselves, to accept that the only constant is change.

I think of setting intentions this way as a kind of farfetching, in the sense of bringing something from far away up close, where you can get a better look at it, where you can better understand its contours and shape. Where you can contemplate what it’s asking of you and what you are asking of it. Instead of wishing for a different future, farfetching invites you to haul that future into the present—in bits and pieces, if that’s what it takes. It trades an empty hand for one with a grip on what’s possible. All you have to do is pull.