Goalkeeping or being focused in the present
Brachey wasn’t persuaded enough by Velocey’s jokes, “I want to run 10k miles in 25 mins!” he said. Velocey – “Even I can’t achieve a 10k in that time. That’s an ambitious goal! Since when did you start worrying about goals, for as long as I know you, you were just happy being your slow self?” When Brachey didn’t respond to that, Velocey added “You know what! How about going to the Mindfulness support group?” A grin broke upon Brachey’s face. Immediately he said, “Let’s do it!”.
At the support group session both Sauruses learnt a lot. Brachey started discovering that he had other strengths and didn’t need to run at all, running was tiring. Deep down at heart he was a nice guy and caring was what he did. Velocey on the other hand thought he was too goal focused and prescriptive. He kept a new goal- to be more fun loving and not be such a hard worker. He also thought he didn’t really know how to be mindful, he was just goal-centric. After a few sessions they started keeping a list of new goals they added to their list everyday, eventually deleting most and finding only one goal (that they had never set in their whole life) that was meaningful and rewarding- “Learning to be present!”
Keeping goals vs being present
Planning and goal keeping is such an inherent part of our lives that we often forget to think about the impact of these and whether they are really required. Or is some better option (way of life) available?
According to mindfulness the complete and absolute power is in full awareness of the present moment.
Attention fully absorbed in the present moment gives us everything we need for a wonderful near and distant future. In fact we may be able to make better decisions if we focus on the present moment rather than on the future. Goals and planning are only needed because we don’t have such fully present minds. However they can be useful if there are used in “short term missions” rather than long term projects.
As we can see the whole corporate world has now been using Agile methodologies which teaches us to be more focused in the present and be more agile to change rather than be focused on a single pointed result in the future as in Waterfall models. Of course if the projects are very predictable we can go for the latter. But in today’s work culture, we are learning to focus in the present moment. We ship software daily. We make code checkins daily. We have daily meetings to see if anything new has come up between yesterday and today that needs attention. The goal just evolves by itself.
Instead what one can have is a vision, a broad idea or general trajectory we need to follow. The daily details can take care of themselves if we work with attention. A fully present mind sees in a whole way and is not biased towards a particular idea or result. So it can do all that is needed to make sure we get the right results. Not the results we want, because that can change. But the right results. We all know of the anxiety we get by getting attached to results anyways. And how often is it that we see that our goals or plans keep shifting or changing? Hence, the best way is to be focused on the present moment and forget about how things will shape in the future. A strong intention with a concentrated mind is all we need.
The idea is to walk up the hill knowing we have to reach the hill top while being completely aware of the surroundings, the hike, enjoying the scenery as we trudge along, paying attention to little things on the way. Not filling our mind with anxious thoughts and hurrying upwards on set paths. A whole mind has expansive awareness and looks at everything with no bias and full detail. Hence it equips the mind to be better prepared for the next moment automatically. The next moment then similarly gives birth to the next moment and finally we arrive at a result. It is like a series of best moments leading to something. Planning for goals is different because there we already build a strong bias towards the goal and resultantly we might not be able to notice things just because of that reason and then unexpected things happen.
A few thoughts on Goal apps–
A few years back I designed a simple goal keeping app for use in a goal groups session- users were mental health patients attending the session, goals were discussed in the presence of a facilitator (a trained mental health expert). This was part of an organization’s digital transformation. Sitting in a group the facilitator would call out the names of each individual and ask them to talk about which goals they did well in, which they didn’t and peers showed support by applauding effort or giving advice to those who found difficulty in progressing.
App design: Once logged into the app you could add or delete goals, make comments and note progress as well as mark goals as ongoing or complete at any time. The phone screen-length was considered to decide about the max no of goals that could be listed. Too many goals were discouraged especially in light of the context of mental health, so there was a small scroll available and total no of goals were set to 5.
I also excitedly added Goal meter as an additional feature to the app but it was discouraged due to the possibility of feeling of competition or pressure due to ‘not achieving’ or ‘not feeling enough’ publicly if the goal progress wasn’t sufficient. I sometimes wonder if the whole effort of building an app made any sense within the above context. Goals can add pressure to healthy minds also unless the planning and execution follows scrupulously. Would we need a planner with each goal then for such apps? It seems the whole idea of keeping goals can only be beneficial if we can map future into present (like through a plan of daily activities).
