Toxic goals vs. healthy goals
Written by Alex Poeter
When you think about your most important goals right now, why would you say those goals are important to you? What are the deeper benefits of achieving those goals to you as a person or as a professional? And I’d invite you to go deeper than just “I want to grow as a person”, “I want to take my career to the next level”, or “I want to have a better life”. How are those goals impacting you on a personal level? Are you pursuing them because you feel the need to fill a void? Or are they an expression of your innate greatness and potential, and a celebration of your unique gifts?
It took me years to understand how some of the goals I was pursuing, as honorable as they may have appeared on the surface, were an attempt to prove to myself and others that I was worthy and good enough. In other words, those goals came from a place of deficit, fear, and scarcity. But I didn’t know that because I hadn’t asked myself those deeper questions to find out the deepest motivation behind them. Once I did, I came to understand that because of the negative motivation behind my goals, I was experiencing tremendous resistance and struggle. And that’s when I learned the important difference between “toxic” and “healthy” goals.
When we’re pursuing a goal to prove our worthiness, we don’t feel good about ourselves – we feel inadequate. And instead of looking within so we can discover our innate value, we keep looking externally. And the more we seek external sources of validation through pursuing our goals, the more we feed the misunderstanding that there is something wrong with us that we need to fix. That’s why I call these types of goals “toxic” – they prolong our sense of scarcity and deficit.
Healthy goals, on the other hand, come from a deep understanding that our sense of worthiness is innate and always available to us. What’s more is that if we can feel good about ourselves and about who we are as we’re pursuing our goals, we tend to experience a deeper sense of inspiration, purpose, and abundance as well. That’s because instead of showing up from a perceived need to cover up a deficit, we feel inspired to serve a high purpose or cause. Also, we become aware that what we’ve been looking for outside of us and in the achievement of our goals has been present and available to us all along. Pursuing a goal from this place gives us much greater power to create the experience we want to have because we are being the source.
I want to invite you to check in with yourself to find out if you’re pursuing any of your goals from a place of needing to fill a void. And if so, I’d encourage you to replace them with “healthy” goals – goals that are rooted in your innate sense of worthiness, and that come from a feeling of joy, purpose, and abundance.