Do your own!

It is really tempting to let other people set our goals for us.  I get it.  I’m the “expert,” so I should know what it is my clients should do.

Yes, I do have expertise and education and experience.  Those things are useful.  But no matter how smart I am, I can’t know what is crucial to my clients without them telling me.

 

My ideas about what my clients should want don’t really matter.  What they want does.  My job is to apply what I know to what they want.  I show up with curiosity.  I watch.  I ask.  Given what I see and what I hear and what I am told, I adapt what we do to optimize for what my clients have their hearts set on.

 

A lot of us are so used to people telling us what to want (and what to do) that it can be a challenge to tease out what is important to my clients themselves.  It is worth the effort, however, because ultimately the only goals worth working for are the ones we choose for ourselves.

 

(On a related subject, positive goals along the lines of “I want to be able to dance all night” beat the heck out of “I don’t want to die immobile.”  We do best when motivated by love, excitement, joy.)

 

All goals present challenges.  We’re not going to sail, trouble-free, straight to what we want.  This is why it is so crucial to ensure that the goal is worth it to us.  That worthy goal keeps us working when things get hard.

 

Whatever my clients want, I am there to help them get it.