Are your goals poisoning you?

Like many senior executives who have been through the good-to-great type trainings that are popular today, you may have been encouraged to create a BHAG—a big hairy ass goal—for your life and work. Most of us impose self-limiting beliefs on what is possible. So reaching beyond such limits by creating big stretch goals can help people open to their full potential.

Likely you are not actually achieving the goal but at least you are pushing yourself further than you might otherwise do. Or so you think.

I sometimes ask people to model what their lives would be like with their big hairy ass goals fulfilled. As the glittery portrayal of fame and fortune comes forward, more often than not it becomes clear that the person does not in fact want that life at all.

It is as if there is a perverse element inside each of us that takes pleasure in failure. “See. I knew you didn’t have it in you.” This dynamic of reaching for the impossible and tolerating noble failure is actually more comfortable for many people than the experience of success. It feels deserved, feels like home or something like that.

We may think we are pushing ourselves further than we might otherwise do but in fact we are sapping energy.

Once the glittery portrayal of fame and fortune—or whatever it is for you—is exposed as a false ideal, something remarkable happens. It becomes possible for the person to admit to his or her true nature. Authentic self has its own authentic sense of mission.

Time and again I find this: the innate destiny inherent in a person’s true nature is many times more remarkable, a much more meaningful contribution in the world, than their original BHAG. But to the person, it does not feel like such a huge deal because it is who and what they already are.

I suggest this meditation. Create a stretch goal for your life and work. Flesh it out and adorn it as fully as you can. Imagine yourself becoming that person. Envision fulfilling all the steps it would take to be that successful. Feel how you would be in the world, how you would relate to your current friends and to yourself as you are now.

You might find that you really don’t like that person much.

In the wake of that realization, the space opens up for you to discover your NHAD—your natural hairy ass destiny!