Late 2024, I embarked on setting a new objective that was relevant and important for my personal growth. Early this spring, I even took a course related to this objective. One could say that this new course was the right opportunity at the right time for me and my plans. It helped me with further refining my vision, my long-term goal and the intermediate goals I needed to achieve to reach my long term goal.
Classic coaching goal setting approach up to this point. But the one thing that differentiated this approach from other goal setting and achieving approaches I used in the past is that it insisted on the importance of reviewing and writing down the goals daily. Why? Because, as I would come to experience it recently, it is so damn easy to lose track of the what and the why of our goals and get pulled back right into the mentality and habits of the past where the goal was not a priority. I had to spend time with myself to figure out what happened. And I know now: I thought I had gotten lost on my way to my goal and wanted to go back home. Because reaching a goal is a journey in itself.
While drafting this article, I realized I was inspired by Cambell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. My intention is to fully honor his work so here is a quote that is often attributed to Joseph Campbell, consistent with the conclusions of this article:
“If your path is clear, you’re probably on someone else’s.”
This article is not about goals per se but about a specific step – a place during our journeys – where many of us get stuck when we set a bold audacious goal that stretches us outside of our frame of reference.
So somewhere along the journey to my goal, I noticed I was devoting less of the time I knew I had to put in to see my vision and long-term goal through. I was still doing some of the things that were related to intermediate goals but in a more automated way, with less heart in it. I noticed I had switched from I want to to I have to. Observing myself, I was so puzzled, that I found myself asking questions like: “Don’t you want this anymore?” “Don’t you believe you can achieve it?” “Are you losing trust in yourself?” and “What’s wrong?” Needless to say it felt discouraging.
The Journey through Barren Land
“Keep going” did not mean much to me anymore. With every single day that passed I felt more and more estranged from the initial enthusiasm, the vision, and the plan. It all seemed extremely far from me. Why should I keep going? For what?
So, on this journey I found myself in the middle of nowhere, and I could barely remember why I decided to go there to begin with. And that is exactly where my answers came from, from the nothing that I was experiencing. Because you see, inescapably, every human worthwhile endeavor seems to go through two important phases. The first phase is a honey moon-like phase where everything comes easy: clarity, motivation, enthusiasm, willingness, energy, courage, passion, the right situations, and the right people —everything seems to fall into place. But once we pass that wonderland, we seem to reach a barren land filled with uncertainty and doubt. This is the second phase. It seems such a strange place to be, even dangerous, that the first thing we want to do is to leave barren land and go back to where we came from. But this barren land, although nothing seems to exist beyond it, is simply a threshold, a frontier we must go through to reach something greater. As if it were a “rite of passage” the Universe nudges us and asks, “Are you for real?” “Will you go beyond your doubt?” “Are you willing to put in the necessary effort?” “Are you ready to decide, to opt for the right actions to go beyond, and do it?”
And yes, in this barren land life does not show us what lies beyond the emptiness, we can only choose to remember for ourselves what can lie ahead. And it is not that we are being tricked or punished by life, it’s because what lies beyond doesn’t exist. Yet. We haven’t created it. Yet. We know what we want, but we do not know how it will show up.
In a sense, if we can anticipate every step, every place we reach, chances are this is nothing new. It might feel we are in the right place because we know it and we feel safe, but something is off. The enthusiasm is off. We might have the realization we were lying to ourselves: we have never left home or we might have switched to someone else’s home.
Keep Going
Indeed, the moment we feel stuck in barren land we are most probably much further ahead on the path than we think—we are creating something new. The game of life has changed. Instead of hoping and wishing for life to work out the way we want; instead of going through life as if it were a supermarket where the isles are filled with products that others created for consumption and we simply choose what catches our attention, we are now the creators of our lives.
You see, barren land is in fact fertile. It is just waiting for us to sow the seeds of our visions and dreams. Therefore, it is certainly not a place to run from!
All that life expects from us is to choose the seeds: a direction, a clear idea of what we want to achieve, to live, to experience – our objectives; to sow the seeds: meaning to keep taking steps in the direction of our dreams and objectives; and to nourish those seeds: to trust that there is path that can get us there – an inner state characterized by enthusiasm and courage, and the anticipation of the joy and gratitude we will feel when we have arrived where we want to be.
In NLP we work with setting goals and defining actionable steps, checking progress and adjusting if needed, and the conscious management of our inner states to support us in our endeavors.
