There are two basic ways in which you can live your life. You can say, these are my aims, these are my goals and I’m going to go hell-for-leather to achieve them. This is the unexamined life. But, you know, there is an alternative approach. You can say instead, let’s have a look at where these aims have come from – how they originated – because they’ve taken me to a place in the here-and-now where I really don’t want to be. Once you stop aiming for will-o’-the-wisp goals in life, you can take a fresh and perceptive look at how you’ve arrived at where you are right now. You’re then free to see where your authentic nature will take you. Life then becomes a joyful journey, rather than a desperate dash up the fast lane of an endless motorway heading straight for la-la land.
The majority of life coaching approaches encourage blinkered goal-orientation. In other words, they say, you tell us whatever it is that you want and we’ll tell you how to get it. But in the long run, because they push you even harder towards striving to achieve your ‘perfect’ goal, all they do is defer the final disillusionment – that point later on in your life’s journey at which you inevitably will arrive, when you realise the futility of having wasted your precious time aiming for something that in reality has never existed.
Unitive™ coaching is different. It takes you on a journey back to your true self; through a deeper understanding of your attitudes and patterns of behaviour that are fixed in the past; through seeing that you perceive the world as you are; through an acceptance of your mortality and the discovery of the joy of living in the moment; and by re-connecting yourself with your intuition, that deep wellspring of authentic impulses and creativity.
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It seems to me that it is easy to be seduced into setting new goals that inevitably are about arriving somewhere, having something or doing something in the future – presumably in order to feel a certain way about ourselves and our lives. Yet when we get “there” we are then further seduced into setting some more goals! So we never arrive or “make it”, we just get to waypoints which are triggers for new goal-setting. So we are always future-focussed and never living in the present and enjoying that.
If we do feel that we have “arrived”, this feeling may not last long anyway, in part because we are not used to living in the here and now. Even worse we may come to realise that the long route we went on in order to “arrive” wasn’t worth the price, because it came at the expense of our authentic self.
We have arrived at a destination that is further away from ourselves than when we started. This may be because when we were setting our compass at the start of the journey we got influenced by interference and static from outside – eg from the expectations of others; from parents, peers, colleagues and society in general.
It seems to me that ultimately it is in being more ourselves – our authentic selves – that we will live a life of fulfilment, rather than living the life that others would have us live, even though their advice is well-meaning.