When they've achieved every goal...

Today was a beautiful chilly day in Washington, and since I had the day off, I decided to walk my errands and appointments.  I relished the wind blowing in my hair and walking through several different neighborhoods, each with its own distinct character, as I wended my way through the city. From the dentist to coffee to brunch at the gluten-free bakery and then to a massage and eventually home, I revelled in the present.

Yet even as I was in the present, I think there were reflections playing unconsciously in the back of my mind.  In the complete relaxation of the massage and the peaceful, sunny walk home, the ideas made their way into consciousness.  What started as a seed from yesterday's blog post "Celebration" had sprouted into a fully formed thought.

Goals rob us of the present. They leave us feeling as we don't have enough or aren't enough. Implicit in having goals is the dissatisfaction with where we are. If we just reach that goal, then everything will be wonderful.  At least, until we reach it, and then we will need another goal to chase. If I'd been trying to achieve something today, I would have missed the wonder of the day.

Almost as I had the thought, I recalled a conversation that I'd had with a marketing consultant in the depths of the dot.com bust, who was trying to help me jump-start my consulting firm after the devastation that the economy had wrought on it.  When we were attempting to define the "sweet spot" of my coaching to communicate what made my work different, I'd said, "My clients have achieved every goal they ever set and still feel empty."  That was just not a suitable response with which she could work.

"Why," she asked, "would someone want to hire a coach if they've achieve every goal they ever set?"

Smiling to myself, I replied, "Because they feel empty."

I'm sure I've had similar thoughts before, but today they connected differently.  I'm not certain that I've ever communicated that I coach people on being present, but I believe that is what I do.  As I look back over my intentional living intensives, three-day coaching intensives that I guided in the 1990s and early 2000s, every unique activity designed for each client was somehow helping him or her come home to the present.  To be happy in the "just being."

Suddenly, I wanted to do the happy dance.  At once I knew why I've often so bristled at goal-setting, even when clients often expected goals.  My sweet spot is helping people be present to the miracles that present themselves when we are just being in the present. I want to help them, and by extension, myself, be awake to what the Universe is offering up when we let go of our goals.  Today I was delighted that I had no goals.

When I have a relatively unstructured agenda, gorgeous weather, and no expectations of me, I am really pretty good at being in the present and taking in the everyday miracles.  My spiritual journey at this point in my life seems to be learning how I do that when I have a half dozen very senior executives with expectations on my time and back-to-back meetings for eight to nine hours in each day. But, that is for another day.  Today I loved the miracle that was my day.