Working towards goals

Visions of the Rewilding Renaissance Rewilding Mind & Heart
#1

I found this image today while reading one of my new favorite blogs, Modern Forager (about paleo- and paleo-ish diets):

…And it got me thinking about how people can rewild their conception of setting and achieving goals. What does it mean to set and achieve a goal? What would the process look like?

I thought the idea of a target and bulls-eye was a really interesting way of thinking about goals, and something that I want to try.

I don’t know about you guys, but in civ I didn’t learn to think about goals this way. My mental picture of a goal has looked something more like this:

I went and brainstormed a chart that makes distinctions between these two ways of thinking about goals:

Staircase / Bulls-eye

linear / center of circle
bipolar (up and down) / multidirectional
hierarchy / anarchy
result oriented / process oriented
(“where do I rank?”) (“how do I get there from here?”)
position along an axis/line / position in an environment
quantitative measurement / qualitative measurement
–>(# of stairs from top) -->(relationship to center)
places goal above person / places person around/next to goal
exertion, force / focus, intent
must come at goal along / can come at goal from any direction
predetermined trajectory or set of conditions
–>object outside of self -->inclusive of self, inter-subjective
“raising” activity / “centering” activity
(escalating) (grounding)
–>stakes increase -->self-knowledge increases
as you get closer as you get closer
–>puts a distance / puts a direction (subject to
between you & what your own condition) between you
you want & what you want
examining your status / examining your condition
“I want to lift 200 lb” / “I want to optimize my health while building strength”

#2

If any of those distinctions seem totally wack, I wanna know about it…

and also if you have additions to the list, please share them!

#3

Hmmm, I never really saw it that way. The stairs metaphor always seemed to me like the one that emerged from a set of goals, rather than a single one. You have a big goal, far off, with a number of intermediate goals, smaller goals, that you achieve in order to reach the ultimate goal. For that, I don’t know if I see much of a problem with the stairs metaphor. I don’t see a hierarchy in that, but a graduus (the root of “grail”). The problem with the idea of progress comes in because you can only really speak of progress towards something; it talks about a relationship between two people. That makes sense with a goal, though: you want to say something about the distance between the goal, and the person pursuing it.

For each individual step, I think most of the traits you noticed for the bull’s eye still apply, since you need to put forth the effort to move your foot from where it rests now, to the next step. That fulfills one goal, and moves you up towards the next goal, which you might not have had an easy time fulfilling before, but now you can.

#4

I don’t know about the metaphors or the list under the staircase but I realy like the list in the bulls eye column.
That looks like the more useful way for a rewilding person to approach moving towards the life they dream of.

The picture of “moving up” immediately puts me off.

#5

I was in a bit of a hurry when I posted here yesterday. This is the part that really has the most meaning for me.

must come at goal along / can come at goal from any direction
predetermined trajectory or set of conditions
–>object outside of self -->inclusive of self, inter-subjective

“raising” activity / “centering” activity
(escalating) (grounding)
–>stakes increase -->self-knowledge increases
as you get closer as you get closer

To me, the column on the left represents the goal/achievment oriented, single minded, tunnel vison that we are taught to approach things with in mainstream society. Climbing the staircase to success.

The column on the right is more about keeping an open mind, paying attention and alligning our selves with the natural order and flow of things.

Just the feelings I get from reading it. The column on the right is a lot like what I have been working on for a few years now.

#6

Yeah, the way I see that staircase is that we don’t necessarily gain anything for ourselves if we climb it. We could even lose ourselves in the process, because we focus on a point outside of ourselves.

But the way I see the target/bulls-eye is to look at where we are and how we are doing in relationship to what & where we want to be, and move ourselves into a state of mind that is in alignment (good word) with the goal. The target is more about focusing your state of mind. We refocus our “center” on the most fruitful, creative part of ourselves (the bullseye) so that we don’t pit our own energies against any work we do towards the goal. It’s more about self-examination and change.

#7

I fear none of this has yet to really resonate with me. Can’t you go up or down stairs? Stairs can wind about or go off to one side or the other. But particularly since you establish a goal as something you want, moving “up,” as a metaphor for moving in a positive direction, makes sense. Without reference to two points, and without a value judgment, naturally, neither “positive” nor “negative” make any sense. That gives you the basic problem of “progress.” But when you’ve defined a goal, you’ve defined it as something you want for yourself, so you have all of those elements–the distance between where you currently stand, and where the goal stands, and the value judgment of movement towards that goal as “good.” But that inheres to the very meaning of a goal, doesn’t it?

#8

The bullseye/steps thing reminds me of something.

Someone, a techie guru somewhere, once made fun of the “maverick”-seeming Agile team process (a process which merely consists of things that everybody knows works for teams, and they’ve known this for decades in business circles, it has always just scared them to put into action nonhierarchical “teams” for obvious reasons), by saying, “instead of 'ready, aim, fire’, like we do in the normal project management world, agile people say ‘ready, fire, aim!’.”

This refers to the fact that agile (the teamwork process) works without a concrete fixed plan. An agile-process user replied to this idea of ‘ready, fire, aim!’ as pretty close (in good humor and all that), but then they remarked that you would hit it spot on if you say it works like this:

“READY…FIRE…AIM!..AIM!..AIM!..AIM!..AIM!..AIM!”

This metaphor seems to contain both the bullseye and the steps (in a certain sense, anyway).

It also compares well to migrating geese, if you think about it. It also works well in the context of cyclical time. Maybe the “ready…fire…” means your birth, and then the 'aim!..aim!..aim!" means the rest of your life?

Anyway. A funny perspective from the agile teamwork world. :slight_smile:

#9

BlueHeron,
“Yeah, the way I see that staircase is that we don’t necessarily gain anything for ourselves if we climb it. We could even lose ourselves in the process, because we focus on a point outside of ourselves.”

Oh yeah, happens all the time.

#10

Willem, I’ve never heard of Agile but what your saying sounds a lot like how I tend to do things. I think it is a natural way. Maybe there is a goal or desired outcome to start with but it’s really more about the journey than the destination isn’t it?

I like that, Fire…Aim…Aim…Aim

#11

Criminy! Really, more and more, I think my rewilding comes down to this. This one act, of fundamentally reorienting myself to the present moment (rather than the heavenly future that will someday happen after I’ve earned it), does more to screw over civilization than anything else. :slight_smile:

And really, it all comes down to what will screw civ, right? Ha ha. On my angry days, anyway.

In any case, I think the goals and the journey dance together, magically. No goal, no journey. No journey, no goal. Sure, I love wandering too, IN CONTEXT.

My dear, brilliant friend Julie plans and plans everything, to a degree that stuns most people. Someone once criticized her for it, saying “can’t you just live in the moment?”. She said…

I plan as much as I do, so I can fully live in the moment. One enables, rather than contradicts, the other.

This still messes with my head. I still learn from it!

#12

I’m finding at this point in my life my “goals” tend to look more like a “direction” rather than a point I want to arrive at.

Does that make any sense?

It’s like I have decided the direction I want to move and I will see how far I can go.

Maybe instead of deciding to go to China, I’ll just go west. Maybe I’ll go so far west I’ll come back to where I am now.

#13

That makes a lot of sense to me … but I also put a lot of value on precision in language. I think our domestication thrives on us never quite saying what we mean. I think “direction” describes that much better than “goals.” That gives us a much better question: should we value a goal more highly than a direction? I don’t think we should!

#14

That reminds me of me to some kind of nes. I mean, I do the exact thing similarily I think, from hydration to warming, to scatting to tracking to bed/clothe crafting to bed maintaining, etc. Eternal world, eh?

I enjoy and plan a grip from first light to night light which has pressured me to start tracking/planning myself to t observe and play what I enjoy most, to fill my time with everything I enjoy, to refrain from missing a thing, to plan my life with goals, to have something to do/to go to, to have ways/options to treat moments when a one way for people to live has never existed, to reach/grasp/tend/utilize abundantly full human and man independent status and our moving away from dependancy.