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Goals Are Garbage and They Never Lead to Well-being: The Real Secret to a Joyful, Loving, Peaceful, and Abundant Life

Updated: 6 days ago

Goals are expectations. And expectations make you miserable. William Shakespeare, the greatest author of all time, who was also a spiritual Master, wrote “Oft expectation fails, and most oft there where most it promises.”


Goals are garbage. Winners and losers have the same goals. Goals are mundane. Goals are just tasks. They come from a lower state of consciousness: A lower place of BEing. Neville Goddard wrote that "Man’s chief delusion is his conviction that there are causes other than his own state of consciousness”. If you want success and level ten outcomes, then you need to raise your awareness to level ten consciousness. Forget goals: Our job is to raise our consciousness to the level we want to achieve - then these outcomes will just happen.


Jesus said in John 14:12 "Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these." We each have the potential of the Christ within us. Jesus was a supercoach. Call this expansion of our consciousness, a 'flow state', manifestation, the 'Law of Attraction'; call it what you will: This is the process of alchemising life. It requires spiritual maturity; in other words, we need to practice acceptance and surrender in every moment of our lives: This is the path. This expanded consciousness creates infinite possibility: It creates miracles. You are a truly great BEing with unlimited potential. You are a divine emissary. Emissaries don’t need banal goals. Take consciousness and bring it inside. It will guide you through with intuition and clarity. Human consciousness is the most powerful force in the Universe. Don’t play small - it’s not you. Have dreams so big that you don’t even know how you will achieve them. Goals typically never aim high enough. The Japanese poet Ryunosuke Satoro wrote that you should “Let your dreams outgrow the shoes of your expectations.” You will be energised and inspired.


Don’t let others’ expectations of you define your worth. Bruce Lee said that "I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine.” You don't need external validation. Stevie Wonder said that “You can't base your life on other people's expectations.”


Understanding and practicing acceptance and surrender are not passive states: They are key to your outcomes. Michael J. Fox wrote that “My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.”


What you think you want is really not what you want. Figure what you truly want before creating a dream life. You will realise you already have everything you want inside of you. Focus on who you are BEing, and the doing follows as naturally as an oak grows from an acorn. Once you have done this, then create your business and work on your relationships. James Clear, the author of ‘Atomic Habits’, the New York Times bestselling book, wrote that "It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behaviour. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are." Your beliefs lead to your thoughts. Your thoughts lead to your feelings. Your feelings lead to your actions. Your actions lead to your results.


If your consciousness is abundance it’s impossible to experience scarcity. And the opposite is true.  


It is better to have no goals than to know goals. Love the process, not the goal. That is when the magic happens. Make every ceiling a new floor. Be epic. Meher Baba, the great spiritual Master and Yogic sage, said that "Man minus mind equals God." The mind is the ego, your false 'self' (note the lower case 's' to represent your ego), and lives in fear. Our fears become our limiting beliefs, which limit our possibility. They limit our Real Personal Power. How are you limiting your Self (note the capitalisation of the 'S', to represent your true Self, your Soul)?


When people come to me for coaching, they arrive with goals. Goals for their work or career. Goals for their relationships. Goals for material wealth, property, and cars. While they are chasing these goals, they are not OK because they don’t have them. If and when they achieve their goals, these people are transiently and conditionally happy. They believe that achieving these goals will make them feel OK. Goals never bring well-being, joy, love, peace, gratitude, or a feeling of abundance. If the object of their goals is lost, like a career or a relationship, they don’t feel OK and they are miserable, frustrated, and angry.


Don't focus on goals
Don't focus on goals

Introduction

The 18th century poet Alexander Pope wrote that “Blessed is he who expects nothing, for he shall never be disappointed.” This highlights the extent of the gift that detachment is. So many people are preoccupied with the cause and effect of things and the expectancy of results that it prevents them from being present in the moment, which is where real the real miracles and possibility reside. It causes people to be less engaged in the input, which is where moments live and life is experienced. When we’re too invested in the outcome and we fall short of achieving it; it’s disappointing. In order to live a more joyful and uplifting life it serves you to prevent emotions like anger, disappointment, and frustration. Understanding now that those emotions come when reality didn’t meet your expectations: You can curb their influence on you by not having set expectations in the first place. It might help you interrupt the ingrained pattern that you have and give you a new way of thinking about your relationship with generating results.


Eckhart Tolle wrote that “In the egoic state, your sense of self, your identity, is derived from your thinking mind - in other words, what your mind tells you about yourself: The storyline of you, the memories, the expectations, all the thoughts that go through your head continuously and the emotions that reflect those thoughts. All those things make up your sense of self.”


James Clear says that "Prevailing wisdom claims that the best way to achieve what we want in life—getting into better shape, building a successful business, relaxing more and worrying less, spending more time with friends and family—is to set specific, actionable goals." He advises us to forget about setting goals. Clear wrote that “True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress." For most goals, people fall in love with the result, but not the path. It is like a marathon runner who dislikes running but craves the high of crossing the finish line in a good time. Clear continued "For many years, this was how I approached my habits too. Each one was a goal to be reached. I set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, for the profits I wanted to earn in business. I succeeded at a few, but I failed at a lot of them. Eventually, I began to realise that my results had very little to do with the goals I set and nearly everything to do with the systems I followed. Now for the interesting question: If you completely ignored your goals and focused only on your system, would you still succeed? For example, if you were a basketball coach and you ignored your goal to win a championship and focused only on what your team does at practice each day, would you still get results? I think you would." The goal in any sport is to finish with the best score, but it would be ridiculous to spend the whole game staring at the scoreboard. The only way to actually win is to get better each day. In the words of three-time Super Bowl winner Bill Walsh, “The score takes care of itself.” The same is true for other areas of life. If you want better results, then forget about setting goals. Focus on your system instead. So, what is the system? This article addresses exactly that.


Clear wrote that the main problem is that "The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness (joy) off until the next milestone." Goal setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We concentrate on the people who end up winning—the survivors—and mistakenly assume that ambitious goals led to their success while overlooking all of the people who had the same objective but didn’t succeed. Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Every candidate wants to get the job. And if successful and unsuccessful people share the same goals, then the goal cannot be what differentiates the winners from the losers. It wasn’t the goal of winning the Tour de France that propelled the British Cyclists to the top of the sport. Presumably, they had wanted to win the race every year before—just like every other professional team. The goal had always been there. It was only when they implemented a system of continuous small improvements that they achieved a different outcome.


Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. That’s the counterintuitive thing about improvement. We think we need to change our results, but the results are not the problem. What we really need to change are the systems that cause those results. When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. And your input is who you are. This is why to achieve total well-being and success, you first have to work on your Self.


It is unlikely that your actual path through life will match the exact journey you had in mind when you set out. It makes no sense to restrict your satisfaction to one scenario, when there are many paths to success.


A goal-oriented mind-set can create a 'yo-yo' effect. Many runners work hard for months, but as soon as they cross the finish line, they stop training. The race is no longer there to motivate them. When all of your hard work is focused on a particular goal, what is left to push you forward after you achieve it? This is why many people find themselves reverting to their old habits after accomplishing a goal.


The purpose of setting goals is to win the game. The purpose of building systems is to continue playing the game. True long-term thinking is goal-less thinking. It’s not about any single accomplishment. It is about the cycle of endless refinement and continuous improvement. Ultimately, it is your commitment to the process that will determine your progress. And that process is to work on you.


An outcome-focused approach counterintuitively makes it more difficult for you to achieve your goal. When Theodore Roosevelt was the police commissioner of New York, two journalists asked him if he was going to run for President some day. And he did become President. Roosevelt, who was not known for his ability to contain his emotions, blew up: “Don’t you dare ask me that. Don’t you put such ideas in my head.” He continued his rant “[Don’t] remind a man at work on a political job that he may be President. It almost always kills him politically. He loses his nerve; he can’t do his work; he gives up the very traits that are making him a possibility... I will begin to work for it, I’ll be careful, calculating, cautious in word and act, and so—I’ll beat myself... Go on away, now,” he added, “And don’t you ever mention that to me again.” Roosevelt would agree with the unwritten baseball rule that you don’t talk about a no-hitter or a perfect game with a pitcher who’s on the brink of one. This shifts the pitcher’s focus from the process of pitching to the outcome of a no-hitter and what it can mean for his career. That’s sufficient to throw the most-seasoned pitchers off their game. Stay present in the moment in every hit, in every shot. Maria Sharapova describes focus on outcomes as the worst mistake that beginning tennis players make. Watch the ball as long as you can, Sharapova cautions, and zero in on the process. Make every stroke, even a potentially championship winning one, your only focus. This is what differentiates champions from runners up. The desired outcome will always follow.


Remember, as Eleanor Roosevelt so eloquently put it, that “Happiness is not a goal. It's a by-product of a life well lived.”


A focus on outcomes inspires grandiose fantasies. We become mesmerised by the thought of achieving fame, getting a coveted job, or finding the perfect partner. So we begin searching for shortcuts, 'life hacks' (which are nonsense - there is no short-cut to success, otherwise everyone would be successful), and advice from self-proclaimed gurus who peddle myths. This is a recipe for failure. You can’t make a flower grow by tugging at it.


Take a look at any successful person’s biography and you’ll find that there is no magical 'it.' No overnight success. No one 'A-ha!' moment. A process-focused mind is the mark of anyone who has achieved anything extraordinary. The amateur focuses on outcomes and expects immediate results. The professional plays the long game and prioritises the process, perfecting it for years with no immediate payoff. Instead of setting goals and focusing on them, ask: What’s the process that might get me to this goal? Then obsessively focus on the process and forget about the goal. The results will surprise you. So, let's dive into the process...


Focus on your well-being, not on being 'OK'


Not being OK relates to our deepest fears including those of being unloved, unlovable, unworthy, or of being abandoned. We believe that avoiding these fears will make us feel OK.


Fear of being unworthy makes us be driven by a sense of lack. Emma Watson said “It's almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I'm just going, 'Any moment, someone's going to find out I'm a total fraud, and that I don't deserve any of what I've achieved. I can't possibly live up to what everyone thinks I am and what everyone's expectations of me are.'”


Michelle Obama said that “I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values - and follow my own moral compass - then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.” Bear Grylls wrote that “You can't live someone else's expectations in life. It's a recipe for disaster.” This the basis of the insatiable craving that is external validation.


Franchesca Ramsey wrote that “Social media, unfortunately, just makes it a lot easier to be jealous. It sets up false expectations of reality, so it's really easy to look at someone else's life online and assume that they have everything going great for them and that their life is perfect.” Social media has exacerbated our feelings of lack of self-worth. It is the fantasy land of the ego: It is not reality.


AngelList CEO Naval Ravikant had it right: “Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.” Except that even when we get what we want, the result isn’t as earth-shattering as expected. A temporary bump of dopamine might follow, but the high lasts for the briefest of moments. Behavioural research shows that human beings have a tendency to return to their pre-success level of happiness through a process called hedonic adaptation. The duration of a dopamine hit from success varies, but it's generally short-lived, lasting from minutes to hours, on average about seven minutes, even if you have spent years striving for success. While the initial surge provides a pleasurable feeling, it's followed by a return to baseline, potentially leading to cravings for more rewards. The brain is wired to seek balance, and high dopamine levels can be followed by a 'come-down' effect. 


That dream job, that coveted title, that lavish apartment quickly become the new normal. Much like a drug addict, we then up the ante and increase the required dosage. We quickly give ourselves a pat on the back and begin looking for a higher mountain to conquer. Unlike the high of success, which quickly dissipates, the sting of failure lingers. We’re conditioned to focus on negative feedback and criticism, so with an outcome-focused approach, we end up beating ourselves up when reality falls short of our soaring expectations. What’s more, when we focus on outcomes, activities that we normally love become chores.


When we switch to a process-focused mindset, we condition ourselves to derive intrinsic value out of the activity. The process becomes its own reward. We get into a state of flow and lose sense of time as the hypnotic power of process draws us in. The Hindu scripture 'Bhagavad Gita', or 'God's Song', the Hindu text which is dated to the second or first century BCE, which is in my 'Suggested Reading' list, says that we have a right to our labour, but not the fruits of our labour. If the accolades arrive, that’s icing on the cake. But even if they don’t, as long as you enjoyed the walk down the path, who cares if it led you nowhere?


There are two ways that you can act in this world. One is “I can't handle what happened; therefore, I'm going to interact with this world to make it so that I can handle it.” This is all about me. It's all about I'm doing this for me. It's pure ego. Because you are not OK. Because you can't handle it. Second, if you can handle it, then you can ask your Self “Is there something I can do to raise, and serve, this situation Dharmically (to serve the situation, not just to help yourself)?” If you can handle it and say “How can I help this situation?”, then you are helping the world. This requires acceptance and surrender. Acceptance because you can accept that it happened. And surrender by surrendering the part of you that cannot accept that it happened (the selfish ego). You surrender the part of you that cannot deal with it so that you can deal with it properly. So, this is the foundation of 'right action'. It's based on having the right motive. You never react based on your inability to handle what came in. Instead, you act based on the best clarity that you can come up with. So, what is my action at different times? So, what does this mean psychologically? If you have a way that you want things to be, and they are not being that way, then let go of you. You have to be able to accept and honour reasonable behaviour that is different from the one you wanted it to be. This is your ego. You can't handle what happened outside because of you. Because you can't handle it. This is a psychological problem that you have. You should be able to handle it. What do you do about life when it unfolds? When the world's is not behaving the way you want it to, you can use that for your spiritual growth. You look at that and say to yourself “I should be able to handle reality” The moment in front of you is not bothering you: You're bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. The driver in front of you is not bothering you. In fact, he doesn't even know you are there. You are bothering yourself about the driver in front of you.


Things are often not going to be the way you want. Therefore, you have spiritual growth to do. People ask “Why can't it be the way I want?” Things are the way that they are. It's not personal. They're just the result of cause and effect and how things manifest. Say if you're having difficulties at this level, surrender the part of you that is resisting. You should be able to handle reality. You have to accept that it happened and then be able to handle it. If you can't handle that it happened, you're not going to do anything fruitful. If you can handle that happened, then you will respond with clarity, rather than react with panic, which leads to confusion. Earth is the place that Souls are sent to evolve. We were sent to learn acceptance and surrender. We were sent to refine these inner states. You get to the point where things stop bothering you. This stops you from these experiences running your life.

So, life is not about getting what you want. Life it's about letting go of the part of you that needs things. You are a great BEing: You are so filled with joy, love, and bliss pouring through your BEing all the time that you don't need anything. Now come out and share it. Life is not about “How do I get what I want to be OK?” Life will teach you that. It will keep hitting you until you learn the lesson. In the Bible it says in Job 1: 21 “Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” The Indian spiritual Master Meher Baba said that “Life is sandpaper” – it is sanding off your ego. He felt that the challenges and hardships he experienced throughout his life were often a necessary process of spiritual refinement and growth. Meher Baba's life was marked by periods of intense suffering, both physical and emotional, and by a deep connection to the struggles of humanity. The ‘sandpaper’ metaphor suggests that the hardships he encountered were like a necessary tool for polishing and refining his Soul, pushing him toward a higher state of awareness and compassion. Meher Baba's work with various individuals and his teachings emphasised the importance of facing challenges and learning from them as part of growth, evolution, and progress along the spiritual journey. You are not supposed to get what you want. You get what you need for your Soul’s growth. In fact, it is the part of you that loves you the most, that sends you challenges and obstacles to redirect the course of your life so that you evolve and grow maximally spiritually. Life is your teacher. There is no teacher that you will ever have that teaches you more than life does. The question is do you go through life experiences and get scarred by them? Or do you grow so they are way more capable of being loving, compassionate, and giving serving life? You went through it, you accepted and surrendered, and you learned from it. It is happening to you because you need to learn to handle it. Life is sending you a lesson. You do everything to try and protect yourself and to try and make things not be the way they are. Practice handling reality. Practice every moment, starting with the low hanging fruit, like not getting angry about the driver in front of you. This is how you find ways to raise yourself. This is how you avoid having a mind that is warped by past experiences.

 

So, how does this relate to goals? It’s because we can’t handle life that we are continually trying to change it. We don’t feel ok. We are conditioned to be focussed on setting external goals for career, relationships, and wealth, in other words, changing the world around us, but this does not always lead to satisfaction or joy. Even if we are able to change the world around us, which we aren’t because of the Law of cause and effect, it only leads at best to a transient, conditional, happiness. True well-being arises from working through internal disturbances rather than avoiding them through external compensation. This is achieved by surrendering past emotional blockages and being open to the richness of life’s experiences, both positive and challenging. Ultimately this path leads to a deeper state of well-being, consciousness, and liberation, fostering joy and harmony both within your Self and in your relationships with others. So, the real work involves using the lessons provided by life in the form of challenges to be able to accept and surrender and to learn to handle anything that comes.

 

In the traditional coaching setting, goals are described as being ‘SMART’, in that they should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. These are the key characteristics that are supposed to make a goal effective and actionable. And they do this, for very specific low-level goals. However, the drawback of such goals is that because they are so specific that, once the problem is solved or the goal achieved, then the person needs coaching again for whatever new goals or problems they might have. This makes them totally dependent on the coach, whereas the dependency on the coach should be time-limited. Also, not all goals are measurable. Although you can measure a bank account or the value of your house, things such as well-being and joy cannot be measured. If a goal is easily achievable, then it’s not a goal, it’s a task, and this makes the goals trivial. If the goals are to be significant, then they should require such things as wisdom and expanded consciousness. Goals may be time-bound for very uninspired things such as changing a relationship or job, but for greater things such as a lasting, profound sense of well-being, joy, or feeling unconditional love, we don’t want those things to be time-bound, we want them to be timeless, and to last for the rest of your life.

 

You’re taught in your society, by almost everybody, your parents, peers, teachers, and society that you are to set goals. What you want to achieve financially, relationship-wise, career-wise. So, you think "I have a choice; I have to choose where I want my career to be. Do I care about money more than may relationship?" You're encouraged to make your decisions within that bubble. This creates a lot of anxiety, a lot of uncertainty, and a lot of issues. Spirituality is not within that bubble. It's a whole paradigm shift In the way that you think about life and that you think about your Self: The way you think about the time between your birth and your death in other words, the dash on your tombstone between your date of birth and the date of your death. Spirituality is not about renouncing the other. It's about reintegrating your entire life into intention. This is way past any goal. You can have a wonderful relationship and not be happy. This happens all the time. You can be very wealthy and not be satisfied. You can be respected by thousands of people all over the world and feel insecure, not feel whole, or complete. What's a midlife crisis? You spend the first half of your life trying to achieve what you wanted, such as happiness, joy, inspiration, fulfilment, building an ego and the second-half of your life dismantling it. You take a breath saying oh I spent all this time doing what I thought would get me there and I wouldn't tell anybody but it ain't done squat. I still don't feel complete or whole. I still feel worry and anxiety, I have insecurities and fears. There must be something greater, and there is. There's something greater, that people are afraid of. There is another way to be. There is a solution. Some people call it spirituality, but it could be called that which is greater. What does that mean? You have to understand more deeply what it is that you're looking for. There is no question what everyone is looking for. We're looking for joy, love, lack of fear, and lack of anxiety. In other words, well-being. Health is your body not bothering you. What does it mean to be fulfilled? What does it mean to be full of joy? What does it mean to feel love? It means your psyche is not bothering you. Just like your body is not bothering you, your psyche is not bothering you. What is your psyche? It's your mind and your heart. You have a mind and you have a heart. Your mind creates thoughts and your heart creates emotions. How are you doing with all that? On a minute to minute, day-to-day basis? If your body had that type of health that your psyche doesn't have, you would be in the hospital all the time. You would be telling the doctors that you are not OK. You are not OK because you are trying to be OK, aren't you? You are trying to have a relationship to make you feel OK. You are trying to have finances that make you feel OK. You're trying to have a career that makes you feel important. Why? Because you don't feel worthy or important. You feel that you are not OK because you don't feel love. So, you feel that you somehow need to find things outside that make you feel good inside. That is what you have been doing for your entire life so far. You try to find people, places, things, and circumstances, that when they come in through your senses, they make you feel better inside. You want to know why you're doing that? It's because you don't feel good inside. So, you are trying to do the things that make you feel good inside. The natural state of your mind and body is wellbeing - it's built in. It's trying to be healthy. It doesn't mean that it's always healthy or that things can't go wrong. But the natural state of the human body is health. It knows how to do it. The body adjusts and adapts in order to maintain health. Your psyche, you don't realise, is the same. Your mind and your heart both want to be healthy. You want to feel whole, you want to feel joy, and you want to feel it naturally. Not having to compensate for the fact that they don't feel good. This is one of the most important parts of wanting to understand spirituality. Do you know, this is not about getting what you want, to make you feel OK. It is about understanding why you don't feel good to begin with and dealing with that.


Compensating for the fact that something is wrong, like finding a relationship because you feel lonely, does not work in the long term. That is not why you are lonely. You're not lonely because you don't have somebody. You want somebody because you're lonely. Buddhists say to “Work at the root”. So, the solution of the fact that you're lonely and insecure is not by compensating for your loneliness and insecurity by finding someone that loves you conditionally. The problem is why don't you feel whole naturally? There are things that you are doing there are preventing you from feeling whole, overwhelmed with love and feeling filled with joy and inspiration all the time. There are things that you have done that have made the psyche sick. Because your natural state is well-being. And that is what a spiritual person finds out. Your natural state is whole and complete This doesn't mean that you don't have relationships, careers, or work to have financial wealth. It means that you're not doing it in order to be OK. You are doing it to express your okayness. Your natural state is to be filled with love. So, why are you seeking a relationship to replace that perceived lack of love? How were you before you found that relationship? You were filled with love. How will you be after that relationship breaks up? You will be filled with love. Your natural state is healthy, and you don't need anything. It doesn't mean that you don't have relationships - it's just very different from ego wants. There are no psychological needs. You have some very basic physiological needs as set out in Maslow's ‘Hierarchy of Needs’, feed, security, and shelter. But there are no psychological needs. You are whole and complete within your Self. You are filled with waves of love and energy. You are filled with inspiration. That is your natural state of a healthy mind and a healthy heart. You do not use your mind to try to figure out what to do to be OK. Use your mind to do the mundane tasks such as solving equations or flying to the moon or to create music. But instead, you use your mind to try to manipulate the situation to work out how you're going to get what you want because you're not OK. The same goes for your heart. So, this is the paradigm shift that we are discussing. What are you doing with your life to bring about that state? No one ever told you that state existed.


There is another way. I hope that this is a pleasant surprise to you. Until we take up the spiritual path, most of us are asleep and oblivious to it. Most commonly, we find it through life’s challenges, or when we lose what we want, or we get what we don’t want. It is usually a seismic shift. So, what you're doing is staying within a bubble. Why don’t they teach you about that natural state in your childhood? That you are totally OK and that you don't need anything? Because people don't know. Your teachers didn't know that, so they taught you that you are a social creature that must fit in with society’s expectations of you: That you had to achieve all these things that were expected of you for people to be proud of you and for you to be happy. Expectations are toxic to your well-being and your Soul. We are social creatures; that’s how we survived as hunter-gatherers, so we believe them. They can only teach us what they know. Most people are asleep and not aware of the spiritual path to well-being. Yet, the great Yogis sat in a cave, with nothing, and lived in a state of spiritual bliss.


So, the basic question becomes then, what do you need to do and are you doing it, not to temporarily be OK? That’s the level you are functioning at right now. What do you need to do to instead in order to achieve total well-being? Your goals and aims need to be higher. Your goals should be part of your BEing that is aiming above your humanness. Love and joy are inside experiences, but instead, we seek external validation, as that is what we were conditioned to do. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote “We are spiritual BEings having a human experience; not human BEings having a spiritual experience.” You are not human: You are consciousness; you are awareness. And you are noticing that the human part of you has needs, because it always has problems and issues and is trying desperately to be OK in a chaotic, dysfunctional, dystopian world full of conflict, by using outside people, accolades, achievements, events, or material things to feel ok.


You have so far devoted your Self to the lowest part of your BEing. How is that working out for you? You spend your life chasing these external things. You must make sure that you realise that you are in there and that what you are looking at when you are in there is not doing so well. It's not a criticism, it’s the Truth. The highest part of your BEing is consciousness. If you were not conscious, you wouldn’t know anything. You are conscious of your thoughts, emotions, your body, and the outside world. If you take away any of these you are still you: For example, in deep meditation, you get rid of your thoughts and achieve stillness, but you are still you. So, you are not your thoughts or any of those other things. You are not your emotions. You are not external things such as accolades, achievements, events, or material things. They do not define who you are.


When you dream, you are conscious of your dream. In the Yoga Sutras of the sage Pitanjali, compiled in India in the early centuries CE by the sage Patanjali, who collected and organised knowledge about yoga from Samkhya, Buddhism, and older Yoga traditions, he described the sutras as culminating in 'samadhi', which means stillness. He described the ‘dreamless state’. In this state Patanjali wrote that “When you go into the deep dreamless state you are not not conscious. You are conscious of nothing.”  This is a very peaceful state. This is a very spiritual experience. It’s the same consciousness as when you are awake and noticing the outside world. Most people are so conscious of what they are conscious of, that they don't pay attention that they are conscious. They don't pay attention to what is the source of consciousness. This is the essence of spirituality: You are aware that you are conscious. So, where are you in there? You look down at your thoughts, emotions, your body and the world. Where are you watching them from? You are sitting in a place looking at something. Have you ever thought where that place is? Where are you looking from? That is meditation. That is spirituality. That is the source of consciousness. You know that you are conscious. You are a conscious BEing. So you get to a point, when you have gone much deeper, where you ask what are you doing with your life? You start wondering who you are. You start wondering what is consciousness? What is the essence of your BEing? It’s awareness. The spiritual Masters considered these questions. This becomes the meaning of your life. You know that you are in there. That is called witness consciousness or mindfulness (which actually means getting out of your mind.) Sometimes it's really nice and the other times you think “I can't handle it.” Thoughts are bothering you. They are distracting you. As you develop spiritually these thoughts stop pulling you out of your seat of Self, peace, and well-being. This is your centre. You are the Self, at the core of your BEing. You get so distracted by thoughts that you are never aware of who is in there looking at the thoughts. They are trying to change the thoughts, change their emotions, and change the world. If you develop spiritually you get to the point where you're simply aware of the thoughts. And you notice them like passing clouds. The world is not made-up of the world, it is made of what you are conscious of. Even when you're caught up in thoughts and emotions, you are still back there in the seat of consciousness. The seat of consciousness is Satchitananda, a Sanskrit term describing the ultimate reality or Brahman in Hindu philosophy, especially Vedanta. It is often translated as "Existence, consciousness, and bliss" or "Truth, consciousness, bliss". It represents the essential nature of Brahman, encompassing perfect BEing, consciousness, and spiritual bliss or ecstasy. What is higher than witness consciousness? You are still trying to find the things that make you feel better and avoiding the things that make you feel bad or not ok. Basically, you get to the point where you think that is not much of a life: Not being OK and trying to be OK. There are higher ‘goals’ in your life. Consciousness itself is the greatest thing in the Universe. This makes you a very great BEing, if you are conscious. When you get back to the seat of consciousness, you don't have all these problems anymore. You start experiencing the nature of consciousness, which is the same as awareness. This is where love comes from. When you feel love, it is inside of you. Just like joy and peace. You feel love in your heart. It feels like an uplifting energy. You melt back into the love. Why don't you feel it all the time? Because you closed to it. You close your heart to protect your Self. This creates negativity. You stop experiencing love. Your consciousness is on the other side of the blockages that you put there. If you go deep enough inside you will feel the love inside. You are closing your heart. And then you are wondering where the love is. It has nothing to do with relationships. As you closed off the love you now feel that you need something from outside to find the love that was always inside you. But external things can't do that. All of these things are conditional and don't result in feeling real love, joy, or energy. The Yogis call this Shakti. This is an energy flow. But you are in there blocking your energy and complaining about not getting what you want or getting what you don't want: These things can distract your consciousness from focusing on your Soul, your Self. What you have done over the course of your life is to have experiences that when they came in they either turned you on or turned you off. They felt good or bad. They brought peace or they brought fear. Why? When things come into you, and they are not a nice vibration you try to push them away as it’s uncomfortable. Not wanting to feel it, through will, is called, by Sigmund Freud, denial, suppression, or repression in psychology, so that you don't have to feel it even though you experienced it. You can marginalise the experience by keeping it at a distance from your consciousness. For example, this happens when the driver in front of you is not driving at the speed you want to drive. And it happens with bigger things too such as unrequited love or losing a job. When you push things away, they do not dissipate; they get stored in your mind and your heart. You have created a blockage on top of the energy flow that is your natural state. And all of a sudden you don't feel so good. It keeps coming back up. This is teaching you something.


You have stored the garbage, and it needs to come back up: It’s trying to and you keep pushing it back down. That’s why you don’t feel love all the time. This is why you try to control people, places, things, and events because of your past experiences. Things that you really like screw up your life as much as the things that you don’t want to happen. Why is this the case? Because you ‘cling’ (as Buddhists say) to positive feelings too. You try to hold onto them. For example, in relationships, you try to control the other person so that they don’t leave you. This causes you to miss the rest of life that is unfolding in front of you. Maybe there were even better things that you missed. You clinged to the experience because you want it to happen again and again. Now you can't have new experiences because they are all relative to the one you've already had. There is a higher life than this. Why don't you just open up and have the experiences that you're going through in life and not suppress or cling to them and be so open that every experience can wash over you all the way back there in the seat of your Soul?


You become a greater BEing because of the experience. All experiences teach you and guide your transformation. What most people are doing is meaningless. They're trying to get what they want and avoid what they don't want. The alternative is to be open, not store your negative stuff, so that now everything that comes in is new. If they have a failed relationship, then this guards them against opening their hearts and feeling love for all subsequent relationships. So, what would you rather do, protect yourself from getting hurt, or fail in love? Because believe it or not that is your choice. A great BEing feels love unconditionally. It is flowing all the time because they did not close their heart. Do they get hurt? They just have experiences: Be they thoughts or emotions and they come and they go, and they get to keep the love. They get to live a life that is rich and whole. It is a life that is full of joy, love, and peace. They have experiences that touch them to the depth of their BEing. Every moment of your life can do this. Are you willing to let life flow over the core of your BEing? This removes all your fears. You are capable of reaching that state by not resisting. You are learning how to be open. You are setting the goal of your life to live in spiritual bliss and ecstasy. But instead, you are sitting here limiting the number of times where you experience life fully. This is setting the goal higher, so that it's more than a goal. This is how you avoid the trap of craving insatiable, conditional validation through an obsession for external goals for career, relationships, and wealth, in other words, changing the world around you. There is nothing wrong with those things, but your life will be so much more full of joy if you do the spiritual work and add these things afterwards. The order of play is BE, do, have; not have, do, BE.


You have to have awareness first if you want to have a life filled with joy, as having or not having those things will become secondary to who you are, and they no longer define you. You no longer must have them to have unconditional well-being and feel bliss. This is another way to live your life, with richness, being open, and without the need to try and control everything. Carl Jung, the brilliant Swiss psychiatrist and spiritual Master, said that “The first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego, the second half is going inward and letting go of it.” Most of us waste our lives chasing events that we think will make us feel OK. We have been doing that since childhood. We need to let go of the blockages that are stopping us from feeling well-being. They will come up by themselves. Welcome them. That's your work. You don't want them in there as they're ruining your life and limiting your life. This is what leads to fear and anxiety. Stop having preferences about the moment in front of you. As the Buddha said “The root of all suffering is desire.” In other words, having desire, or preferences, about the direction of your life. The beginning of the ‘Third Chinese Patriarch’ of Zen, written by Sengstan Hsin Hsin Ming, blending together Buddhist and Taoist teachings, reads “The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and Heaven and Earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the Truth then hold no opinion for or against. The struggle of what one likes and what one dislikes is the disease of the mind.”


Start practising with the low hanging fruit in every moment of your day. The moment in front of you is not bothering you: You are bothering yourself about the moment in front of you. You learn to let go instead of clinging and become an open BEing. Practice letting go inside. Relax through it. This prepares you for letting go of the bigger stuff. You end up feeling joy and love all the time. Life. Don't waste it on not being OK because you haven't met the expectations of others. Don't set arbitrary goals. Eventually you have such well-being inside that you would not trade it for what is going on outside. This is true liberation. Before you were out there hurting everybody by taking, manipulating, and grabbing to get what you want to feel OK. And now you have unconditional well-being and you are a gift to everyone around you.


Acceptance and surrender are the spiritual keys to building the process of your success

Acceptance and surrender are the essence of spirituality. But people regularly misunderstand what acceptance and surrender are. In physics, Newton and Einstein taught us that there is the Law of cause and effect. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Physical Laws are reflected in Natural Laws. The Natural Law of Karma follows the same principles as the Law of cause and effect. Nobody by themselves is causing things to happen. Physics, psychology, material sciences, biology, and chemistry, and other sciences are at play.


Anything that you did, there were millions of causes prior to that of which your action was one of them. For you to say that you are the doer, and the cause of the Universe is totally unscientific. Every other person is doing things too. The world has existed for billions of years, and every single cause and effect contributes to life unfolding as it does. You are part of it, but you are a very small part of it. Anything you do there are reasons why you did it. There are no good or bad reasons, just reasons. Things happened because of the things that made them happen. Your past experiences affected the way that you acted. Experiences are your teacher. They teach you to evolve and grow. There is no single thing that anyone did that caused things to be the way they are. You have the right to learn from your mistakes. You did your best, based on what you knew. If you had known better, you would have done better. The results of the best that you can do are holy. There should be no guilt or shame. There is no such thing as bad Karma for the rest of your life.


You are a very great BEing. Start with reality. Reality is what unfolds in front of you because of all the forces that caused it to do that. Reality is what has already happened. No one can affect the past. Why? Because it already happened. Can you accept that? It just is. So, what will you do about what has happened? You have only two choices. Accept or resist. Acceptance doesn't mean that you like it or dislike it or that it is good or bad. Acceptance starts with - can you accept that it happened? If you can't accept reality that causes a lot of trouble, including for all those around you. The human mind (the ego) can't differentiate between liking or not liking it from accepting it. Acceptance happens prior to like or dislike. Spirituality means that you can accept that it happened. Just because you can accept that it happened doesn't mean that you don't want to do something about it. But if you can't accept that it happened you will try to have made it not happen, which is impossible as it has already happened. This is when you become stuck in psychological denial, repression, suppression, or rationalisation. The fundamental basis of spirituality is that reality comes in and you accept it. That's what acceptance is. Carl Jung wrote that “What you deny subdues you. What you accept transforms you.” He continued that it's not just about accepting situations, it is also about accepting your Self, saying that “The most terrifying thing is to accept oneself completely.”


Surrender is that if something comes up in you and there is resistance to it you let go of that. Surrender is non-resistance. You have to surrender the part of you, the ego, that cannot accept reality, So that you can accept reality.

 

So, acceptance and surrender are transformative inner states; not outer actions.


Expectations versus agreements

Expectations of us are created through conditioning when we are children and are set by our parents (often playing out success following their failures to meet their own parents’ expectations), teachers, and by society (typically material expectations). They create an inner critic as part of our psyche which says that “I will be proud of you if you achieve this or that”. It is a form of conditional love. It runs the rest of our lives both consciously and subconsciously, until we become aware. We become driven by imperious desires and wants, which, if we don’t fulfil, are the root cause of suffering. Expectations are based on ego. Agreements are based on our Higher Power.


Expectations are toxic and they ruin relationships. They create resentment as most expectations are unachievable - this gives a morale crisis, with missed deadlines. People rebel against expectations. Expectations lead to anxiety, depression, and resentment, and they are cowardly and fear based. It puts the expectation on others. They feel betrayed. They might not live up to it: Then there is disappointment. If they live up to it, then it might be ‘so what’. They feel mild anxiety and boredom. Expectations are not necessary. It’s possible just to have agreements with no expectations. This is true of both business and personal relationships. Negative thoughts about family members are because they had expectations. If you have no expectations, then anything that happens is a pleasant surprise. No expectations is a way of life. It leads to a forgiving attitude. People think that hurting others takes the hurt out of them. Expectations are cowardly and toxic. They show a lack of leadership. Its ego! They are chasing life away. Expectations never work. They never bring people closer together - they causes terrible damage. Expectations are like cancer and they rob people of life. People who have expectations expect others to make them feel the way they want: People who have expectations are the most unhappy people in the world. They have no self-esteem and they are nervous wrecks. As a child we are given expectations - that’s societal conditioning. What they are saying is “Be this or I won’t love you.”

 

Agreements are something we agree on. These are based on discussion about what you can do for sure and what you need to be able to do that: How your consciousness needs to expand as detailed above. They are so much stronger than expectations. Human beings love to keep an agreement that is agreed upon. This is the basis of the highest level of coaching: It’s Transformative Life Coaching (TLC), Deep Coaching, or Supercoaching. Wonderful things happen. You don’t have to fix and resent - you can ask what they need to do it. It is also creative and courageous. Agreements give a much better feeling - ‘this is great’ and higher self-esteem. There is kindness in communication about agreements. Use the same approach in business, with friends, and in relationships. No criticism, no negative judgement. We don’t have to hurt the other person. There will never be a fight. Agreements are about the Higher Self. Human beings have a free spirit in them. We are not put on Earth to live up to others’ expectations.


Tell people how valuable they are in the team. Make agreements when the mood and atmosphere are good. Human beings do not like breaking their own word. People keep their word, but do not meet expectations. If you break an agreement - you have another powerful conversation about keeping your word. It works in the same way in families and business. It is more charged in families as expectations are higher: ‘I expect you to love me.’ If you don’t like a situation, do not simmer in toxicity, create an agreement that changes it. It gives unexpected pleasure. Do not simmer in the toxic cancerous juices of your own expectations.  You might have an unexpectedly joyful life. The great news is that no expectation is necessary. With agreements, we shift away from being at the mercy of everyone else. We take full responsibility for all of our lives. It’s not on the other person anymore. I am the only one I can really work on anyway. You can’t fix or work on other people. If either one of you expects the other person to change, then the relationship won’t work. This is true in marriage or business.


Conclusions

Instead of obsessing over specific goals, focussing on building good habits, processes, and ways of BEing, with expanded consciousness, can be infinitely more effective in achieving desired outcomes. This approach emphasises the inner, spiritual journey of improvement, development, growth, evolution, and transformation, rather than solely fixating on the final destination. Just make sure you don't score an own goal!


Namaste.


Sending you love, light, and blessings brothers.


Olly


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Hello,

I am delighted and enchanted to meet you. I coach men with 'Deep Coaching', 'Supercoaching', and Transformative Life Coaching (TLC). Thank you for reading this far. I very much look forward to connecting with the highest version of you, to seeing your highest possibility, and to our conversations. Please do contact me via my email for a free connection call and a free experience of coaching on Zoom or in person. 


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I have a Bachelor's degree in Natural Sciences from Trinity College, Cambridge; a Master's Degree in Philosophy from Trinity College, Cambridge; a PhD Doctorate in Scientific Research from University College London (UCL); a Medical Degree (MD/MBBS) from The Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London and have been a doctor and reconstructive trauma and cancer surgeon in London for 20 years. I have a number of other higher qualifications in science and surgery. I have published over 50 peer reviewed PubMed cited scientific journal articles, have been an associate editor and frequent scientific faculty member, and am the author of several scientific books. I have been awarded my Diploma in Transformative Life Coaching in London, which has International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accreditation, as well as the UK Association for Coaching (AC), and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC). I have been on my own transformative journey full time for over five years and I am ready to be your guide to you finding out who you really are and how the world works.




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