On Goals and Struggle

I've spent a good deal of time over the past several years pursuing goals--willing myself into doing things, aspiring to do things better, etc. And boy are there a lot of people out there with strategies to help you change your life and achieve your goals.

Generally these strategies involve big money words like courage, determination, heart--and what all of that implies: struggle. And the people who are promoting them generally have lots of positive things to say about struggle and how it is healthy for us to do the work, face our fears, develop our emotional fitness, etc.

Before I go further, let me be clear: it is a hugely valuable thing to know how to persevere in challenging situations and extra bonus points to you if you have a good attitude while doing it.

But if this becomes our normal operating procedure for life--if we're always on some quest, always turning dreams into goals so we can chip nobly away at them--well, for one thing, that's not very much fun.

It's becoming clear to me that there's a much better way. Mark calls it doing what feels good.

Here's an example. As I was riding Gracie, I was having trouble with finding softness at the walk. Mark asked if any part of me was tense. Lo and behold my legs were, from a long-time habit of believing that I needed that tension in them to keep forward movement.

As our ride continued I had a choice. I could say to myself, "I need to change that habit and create a positive new pattern. I need to have constant vigilance on this and do it better." Or, I could just carry on riding and when things weren't going quite right, I could check in with how I felt inside. Could I feel better in myself? Why yes, I could let go of that tension. Which of course made things better with Gracie too. And then carry on.

A more mundane example is my late-night Facebook habit. I can set a goal of getting off FB and going to bed by a certain time and do all sorts of external things to make this more likely and then stay up anyway and berate myself for it. Or I could just pay attention to whether I feel good staying on FB when I'm exhausted and do what would feel much better: go to bed. But, of course, I have to be willing to listen to what my insides tell me and not over-ride them.

And this is true of larger dreams as well. At one point my goal was to do an externship with Parelli. But a big part of me wasn't having it. I thought I was being lazy and fearful about hauling my horse to Colorado and that I needed to get to work on my attitude and confronting my fears. But a friend finally helped me see that actually, I just didn't want to do it that much.

Conversely, at the end of one clinic, Mark thanked us all for making the effort to come to the clinic and all I could think was, "What effort?" I dreamed about studying with Mark for years and it is all I hoped it would be and more and all I feel at the prospect of going to a clinic with him is happiness. "Effort" in this context seems irrelevant.

Now, I'm not saying this to either bash Parelli or make a plug for Mark. Different things feel good to different people. I'm just saying that maybe, just maybe, doing what feels good is the answer. And dreams coming true might maybe should feel good most of the way through and not just at the end.