“If what you are doing is not moving you towards your goals, then it’s moving you away from your goals.”

-Brian Tracy

In goal-setting programs, you learn that very few people actually write down their goals… much less take solid action steps towards them…

We feel like we are ahead of the game after we study Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, the Law of Attraction, NLP, etc. and write our own goals down.

And this is a very powerful process…

When you write down your goals, you have already taken a huge step toward achieving them!

But have you taken a huge step toward real happiness?

Even after we achieve them… are we any closer to any long-lasting satisfaction?

Whether you write them down or not… we all have goals… things we are consciously or unconsciously aiming for…

But are any of these goals even good for us?

Can your typical goals really make you happy?

And if getting our worldly goals won’t do it… then what will make us truly happy?

A Course in Miracles:  Day 24

The game for Day 24 is:

I do not perceive my own best interests.

This one is very challenging.  We are definitely taught to believe that material things will make us happy… and many of us start to recognize the hollow nature of what is typically called ’success’ after being disappointed by materialism.

But do we really recognize things of value when we start to go beyond the material?

For today’s exercise, you will want to set aside 5 practice periods of about 2 minutes each.

1. Consider any situation that arises in your mind, and then think of all the outcomes you would like to achieve in and around the situation.  Acknowledge ’sensible’ possibilities as well as those that just pop into your head.  It should be something like “In the situation involving ‘X’, I would like ‘Y’ to happen, and ‘Z’ to happen”
2. After considering all the goals you would like to achieve in the situation, say to yourself “I do not perceive my own best interests in this situation.”
3. Then think of the next situation and apply the game to it.
4. Continue until the 2 minute session is up

Throughout your day, you can also relax and repeat this idea to yourself whenever you start thinking about goals, or how you would like a situation to go.  You can do this around sincere planning as well as pure fantasizing.  After you state the idea, accept whatever thoughts or feelings arise.

From ACIM:

In no situation that arises do you realize the outcome that would make you happy.  Therefore, you have no guide to appropriate action, and no way of judging the result.  What you do is determined by your perception of the situation, and that perception is wrong… If you realized that you do not perceive your own best interest, you could be taught what they are.  But in the presence of your conviction that you do know what they are, you cannot learn.

Final Thoughts…

I have lots of goals.

They pull me in quite a few different directions.

I’m not certain that the majority of them truly serve me or other people.

I suspect a few of them do.

Yet I am open to seeing… and experiencing true happiness for myself… and my sincere hope is that this openness and the happiness will positively impact others as well.

If I have to let go of all of my goals in order to do this… then so be it.

Can you set aside the trappings of the ego long enough to see?

keep smiling,

Ben

Tagged as: A Course in Miracles, goals