Feeling Your Goals
How much more do you know about issues you really care about than ones you don’t? What do you always pay attention to when it’s in the news? What would you campaign for? What can you discuss at length, and always find the strength and energy to support?
That is the power of feeling.
No matter how logical you are, you are still an emotional being (sorry!). Your biology is geared towards keeping you alive, and feelings are a great way of helping that cause. We don’t go places we are scared of or repeat things that hurt us - makes good biological sense, right?
The same goes for moving towards outcomes. Evolution has equipped you with a multitude of feel-good hormones for when you do the things that keep your genes alive, like eating, sleeping, and getting laid. Oxytocin, anyone?
I'll bet this image stirred some feelings. Did you want to jump in, or put another jumper on?
Feelings are fundamental forces in our lives, but we’ve all had feelings that we struggle to articulate*. There’s a good reason for this - your brain processes emotion and language in different regions. Translating your emotions and the emotions of others is a multi-step process, subject to errors and the constraints of language (Kotz and Paulmann, 2011). That means, stating your goals in plain language isn’t often the best way of exploring, identifying and achieving what we want. SMART is not the road to an emotive, motivating, and powerful goal!
If language isn’t the way to work out what we really feel strongly about… what should we do? Work with images, my friend.
Images speak to our emotions, and they do so without us ‘getting used to it’ (Harald et al, 2006). That means images are a great way to identify the emotional element of your goals, and a great way to remind your brain why you are working towards your goal - but what does that mean in practical terms?
It means vision boarding - and yep, this stuff really works!
This is one of the images from my pre-traveling the UK vision board. No secrets about the feeling this one brought up!
How to Create Your Vision Board
Vision boards are representations of your goal that speak directly to your emotions and create a ‘feel’ for your ideal outcomes. This is a great way to explore what really lights your fire, and a perfect reference when motivation is running low on the path to achieving your goal. Making your vision board is pretty simple too…
Brainstorm where you’d like to be and how you’d like to feel in 12 months. Take your time and have as many tangents and questions as you need, as you find related images you will find more clarity!
Find images that represent your goal and really speak to you. Well, make you feel something. We know language isn’t the one for this job already! The more meaningful and feeling-stirring the better!
Arrange your images and test layouts on one sheet. You may find you have too many, or that some layouts feel better than others. Play with layouts, and create a board that feels like it would be fricking amazing to be living in!
Stick it all down and put it somewhere you can keep seeing it. Your eyes may stop looking at it after a while, but it only takes a little reminder to get a boost of the emotions in your board. On the slow days this will remind you why you are really doing The Hard Thing™️!
Now you have a visual representation of your goal… but I know that feels vague. It’s hard to tell people what you’re doing if all you have is a picture, and we do live in a world of language, after all. So let’s reverse engineer a goal with wording that makes sense for your subconscious (another powerful part of your goal-getting neuro-architecture!)…
Realising my wild and free vibes from my vision board at Ffynone Waterfall in Wales!
Translating Your Vision Board
To word your goal in line with your vision board, write a draft sentence or two then run through this checklist:
Your goal uses ‘towards’ language. Goals that tell you what you do want speak to your subconscious mind more clearly. If your goal is to stop something, try and think of an outcome that will happen after you have stopped and use that instead!
It is a goal YOU want. You’ve just gone through your vision board, so this isn’t a likely issue, but you’d be amazed how powerful our expectations and societal ‘duties’ are! If it’s not sitting quite right, check if it’s what you really want, or if it’s what you think you should want. Amend your goal if needed!
You can feel this outcome. There are so many ways to interpret your vision board, and some will just hit different. Let your mind wander until you find The One!
This goal fits with the rest of your life. Whether you are thinking of a fitness goal, or a goal in another part of your life, you still have other responsibilities that you can’t drop just for this goal. Make sure this goal is possible in your current set up, the more achievable the better!
There is more than one way to achieve your goal. I don’t need to tell anyone the world can be turned upside down in a heart beat (March 2020, I’m looking at you!). Having alternative routes increases the chances of absorbing changes in your life and staying on track!
This goal increases the choices available to you. This is essentially a ‘do no harm’ clause. Ask yourself if this goal leads you towards a bigger life, and trust your gut!
You can outline your first step. If not, see if you can make a plan that bridges the gap. Can you ask for help? Can you book a class or coaching session? Can you buy a book? Make sure you can take your first step, and there you have it!
Now you have a goal with the full support of your emotional machinery and that you can tell your friends about - how great is that?
If you’ve worked through this process, let me know what goals you are working towards in the comments! I’d love to hear about your experiences and how you find working with your emotions in this way! 😁
Where are your goals going to take you?
*Being able to identify and describe the emotions we experience is such a key component of our lives and functioning that the inability to do so is called alexithymia. Treatments for alexithymia are in their infancy, but this condition is linked to increased relationship troubles, depression and suicide - not great outcomes! You may have seen this in real life at sub-clinical levels if you’ve spoken to a ‘traditionally’ raised man who identifies sadness as feminine, and assures you that anger is not an emotion - some researchers even call this normative male alexithymia!
References
Kotz, S. and Paulmann, S., 2011. Emotion, Language, and the Brain. Language and Linguistics Compass, 5(3), pp.108-125.
Schupp, H., Stockburger, J., Codispoti, M., Junghöfer, M., Weike, A. and Hamm, A., 2006. Stimulus novelty and emotion perception: the near absence of habituation in the visual cortex. NeuroReport, 17(4), pp.365-369.
