There are different kinds of goals we can set for our life. These are: ‘having’ goals, ‘doing’ goals, and ‘being’ goals. It is important to recognize these types of goals because satisfying a bunch of one type of goal doesn’t give us everything we really need out of life. Let’s talk about it.
The most common goals people set are ‘having’ goals. We want to have a better job, more status, a Hawaiian vacation, a new car, or financial freedom. This would even include things of more meaning like having a family or grandchildren. In our culture, we sometimes label many of these goals as shallow, but there’s nothing wrong with them. However these rarely satisfy the deeper longings of our heart.
The second most common type of goal is the ‘doing goal’. With this type of goal we set benchmarks for ourself. For example, we’d like to complete the Boston Marathon, lose 10 lbs, write a book, or trick out our car. At the more meaningful end of the spectrum, wanting to live with significance and make a difference in the world is also a ‘doing’ type of goal.
The third and least common type of goal is the ‘being’ goal. This is where we set to bring out qualities in ourself. For example, we set out to be more courageous, more compassionate, more vulnerable or more attentive. These goals tend to be more generative which means that if we accomplish these types of goals, we have greater capacity to accomplish the other goals in our life.
All goals aren’t equal, and we need to be aware of the context around the goal setting. When your financial advisor asks you what your goals are, you’re probably thinking about ‘having’ type goals. When your pastor or church asks you what your goals are, your probably thinking about ‘doing’ type goals (or perhaps ‘not doing’ goals).
We get into trouble when we focus only on one type of goal setting for ourself and/or we don’t dig deep enough to uncover what really matters to us. At the end of our life we can have an abundance of goal accomplishments and still be deeply regretting that we neglected things of great value to us. For example, we could have run the Boston marathon, climbed mount Everest, won employee of the month, visited Hawaii and still have an “oh crap!” moment, deeply regretting that we didn’t do anything about child abuse; and now that our time’s up, we don’t have a chance to change.
At the end of life, you won’t be glad that you played it safe and reduced your risk. Instead, you’ll be regretting that you settled for the lesser things and didn’t really go after what you value most. At Simply Great Lives we think this is a critical problem. We only get one shot at this thing called life. Make it count.
Live life to the full. Make your life matter.
