What if you could create your goals with soul in four easy steps? It sounds crazy, right?
Setting goals has never been easy for me. As an Aquarius, I’m often future-minded and have lots of dreams, visions, and aspirations. Yet, I seldom put them on paper. All these future-minded things would often be left to float inside my head without gaining any traction. Then, we have the times that I did write down my goals and they would lack feeling and meaning for me. It was like I was striving, trying to attain, and going after things that didn’t resonate with me. From the view over here though, it seemed like every other successful person had these goals.
This would lead to me just letting my goals slide because I felt uninspired and disconnected from them.
Then I picked up a book and it shook me!
Author Danielle Laporte, and creator of “The Desire Map – A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul” has a new way to connect you with your goals and says it’s not about the goal itself. It is about how you want to feel when you have arrived at your goal.
Her book provides a framework for goal setting with feeling. As a Reiki practitioner, an empath and mom this resonated with me SO MUCH!
The core concept of the Desire Map is identifying your core desired feelings. The book has five or six areas to look at in your life. She starts with three points in our lives: Lifestyle/Livelihood, Body/Wellness, Relationships/Society. Then the books lead you to follow four basic steps to create goals with soul.
These steps resonated with me so much that they inspired me to write this blog post to help my fellow readers!
To break it down here are the four steps to creating goals with soul
Step 1 – Feel What Feels Good
So take out your fave writing pen and your journal or even just a piece of paper. When sitting comfortably and relaxed, start to do a stream of consciousness writing about how you want to feel.
Don’t hold back here. Some examples are wanting to feel energized, connected, and alive. Want to feel fresh, light and joyful. Tap into your heart here and see what it’s telling you. You could even think back to some recent events where you felt awful and find the feelings you want to feel instead.
Step 2 – Recognize Patterns
When you recognize your patterns you can eliminate what doesn’t resonate with you anymore.
Now you have this list of how you want to feel, go through all the outpouring of feelings you wrote down and narrow it to three, four or perhaps even five core desired feelings
What is a core desired feeling? (Taken from the book): They are your preferred states of being.
Laporte encourages people during the “honing in” phase to stay away from the big, audacious words like “confidence” and “success” because she says it has become an epidemic that we’ve bought into other people’s version and vision of success. All I thought when I read this was FACTS!
When I read that I came to recognize this is one of the reasons that we are disconnected from our core desired feelings. She says we are living other people’s dreams and doing what we think other people are doing, “keeping up with the Joneses”. It serves us no good!
So, let’s break it down further here and I’m going to use my train of thought. Success has a feeling underneath. If you wrote that word dig deep into it. So I say success is about respect. Let’s Dig deeper, respect is about confidence. Dig even deeper, what is underneath that? to me it’s self-love. Alas, one of the core desired feelings is self-love.
How crazy is that to just keep digging to find the feeling!
One more refinement she adds is not to rely on outside forces to inform your reality. In other words, it’s about becoming a more intentional creator of your life. You can’t choose what happens to you, but you can choose how you feel about it. If you sit with the word “respect” that you’ve identified with, just let it be respect or respectful but not respected. You can likely feel the difference in the energy of the words as you sit with them. You will put respect out into the world, and don’t put the onus on the outside forces which are out of your control.
You can practice asking yourself, “How can I bring more respect into this situation?”
Laporte suggests when you’re digging down into the words to get to the core feeling, you can look up the definitions of the word, and the ontology of a word. You can find some fascinating things by doing this!
Step 3 – Declare Your Core Desired Feelings
Ok, so you’ve identified your three to seven core desired feelings. It can take some people a weekend to create their Desire Map and work with their core desired feelings, for others it may take months. Whatever the amount of time is, is based upon you, there is no rush here.
Step three here is where you match your soul with your goals.
Time to go through the lifestyle areas that you listed, Livelihood/Lifestyle, Body/Wellness, Relationships/Society. Match up those core desired feelings to each of these areas. What feelings do you want to match for each one?
Step 4 – Ask yourself: What do I want to do, have or experience to create my Core Desired Feelings?
Last but not least, because once you start it will be with you forever! Look at what’s pulling at you, and then narrow it down to one or two, maybe three goals of the year.
The book dives deeper into other layers and helps you go even deeper in helping you narrow down your Core Desired Feelings. Tip: remember to come back to your desired feeling, “how do I want to feel?”
She stresses that the goal is to feel good. She reminds us that life is going to happen, and you may have to switch directions from time to time, but if you follow your Core Desired Feelings, then even in difficult circumstances, where you are feeling negative emotions, you can stop, breathe and ask yourself “Is this really how I want to feel?” and then, “what I want to feel is….”(insert your core desired feelings).
For example, if you are feeling angry, and your Core Desired Feeling is to feel love, a question you could also ask yourself is, “What do I need to do now to feel the love?”
A huge benefit of declaring your Core Desired Feelings, is you start to see different possibilities, options, and solutions that you might not have before. Helping you to make decisions about your life more efficiently.
So, what are your goals for 2022?