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I’ve been wanting to write this post for a while and a series of recent synchronicities forced my hand.
In my last business Troops we’d always do end of quarter retrospectives. These exercises are structured reflections used to evaluate your performance against your goals and identify key learnings. In conjunction with the annual company plan, the outcomes of retrospectives are used to help inform goals and strategies for the next quarter.
During most of my mid-twenties and early thirties, I’d also perform these type of structured reflections and goal setting across all vectors of my life using things like Tony Robbin’s Wheel of Life. This all was part of a larger obsession with self-improvement.
As my focus became redirected inward, there came a time where I started to see the context of these exercises contained a lot of hyper-vigilance and striving. I was desperately trying to free myself from this militance so I stopped doing these retros all together. In addition to the striving, I also had a strong pattern of polarity that caused me to perceive things on one extreme or the other.
During this liminal period, there was all kinds of confusion around accomplishment in general. It was hard to read all these texts that called reality a big illusion, championed surrendering to everything, and pushed me to question who is this I that needs to accomplish? I found myself sitting down at my desk each morning and not knowing what to do. So do I just sit here? Apathy began to set in around many of the things I once obsessed over like professional success.
I see this pendulum swing I went on happen quite often. Someone who is intensely externally oriented has their reality blown up, which then causes them to be intensely inward oriented. Eventually, you come back into balance learning how to harmonize the inner and outer worlds.
After a few years of being on this seesaw, I finally felt a big shift in my perceived dissonance between spiritual evolution and accomplishment towards the end of last year. I became excited to step back into my “person in the world suit” and contribute from a new context of inspiration and service. As a part of this, I decided to experiment with reintroducing quarterly goal-setting and retrospectives early this year.
My outlook on goals had evolved beyond the polarity I felt before. I learned that you can use goals to set direction while still also be committed to following the flow of your energy and inner guidance as it arises. So long as you are clear on what part of your life leads and you approach your goals without attachment, I think goals can be useful.
Using the Past To Define The Future
Leading up to my most recent retro something inside of me felt awry. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was, but there was this feeling of “why are you continuing to play these games” in my being.
I decided to go for a bike ride. I was closing out windows on my browser before I was about to leave and this video popped up on my youtube feed. For some reason I just knew that I was supposed to watch it. This wouldn’t be the first time Universe was working through the youtube algorithm like that for me.
Alberto Villodo is a scientist and shaman. I had second-hand familiarity with him because my friend Zach trained with him and led me through some of his energy work techniques. The day before I had spoken to a new acquaintance that was also training with him.
I popped the video on the Youtube app and went on a bike ride.
The main message in the video is about stepping into your power to create a new life story. Alberto eloquently put into words something I’ve been seeing emerge in my own experience for awhile.
He discussed how when we are caught up in the story of our past, we limit the possibility of the future. For example, from the reference point of Scott who has been a tech entrepreneur and did XYZ over the last 6 months, there is a very predictable future story that will come out of this. When we’re attached to the past instead of creating a new story, we likely create a derivative that feels very realistic.He went on to describe how only when we move beyond our identity and all the debris from our past, do we have the ability to start writing the story on an entirely new page.
Getting to this point is no easy task. It requires a tremendous amount of housecleaning to create space for a deeper, more formless identity to emerge. Many people call this shadow work. It’s my experience that many seekers go through an obsessed with shadow work phase. I was in the throes of this for about 3 years. This can be very fruitful, but at a certain point, Alberto illuminates how we need to move beyond it. It’s not that we stop the housecleaning as things come up, but that the emphasis expands to include stepping into your loving power in order to take authorship of your life.
This really resonated with me. I’m not saying I don’t have more clean up to do, but it feels like I continue to get guidance from all directions of life that are saying:
“It’s okay. Own your power. It’s coming from the right place now.”
Linear Goals
Throughout this bike ride, I started to get all sorts of downloads which is quite common for me during cardiovascular exercise these days. Steady state cardio can almost feel like a mini psychedelic experience sometimes where I just get these rapid downloads one after another.
One of the downloads was about how the retrospective exercise is a double edge sword. It’s useful to reflect back and get some learning, but it’s also precarious in that it grounds future pursuits in the past context. This can manifest in realistic aims. For example, if my goal was to teach 100 people last quarter and I taught only 50, then perhaps this quarter I’d shoot for 75.
Thinking back to my startup experience, this type of modeling is how I’d approach setting “stretch goals.” This type of thinking would usually create incremental goals, followed by incremental outcomes.
Linear Accomplishment vs. Non Linear Accomplishment
This is a very linear way to approach what you strive to create in the world. I believe the linear goal setting complex has to do with how your perceive reality.
The predominant view of reality is the newtonian-spacetime paradigm, where everything is oriented around cause and effect:
If I do A, then B happens.
So in the context of my example, if I wrote one blog post a week and got 50 clients, maybe this quarter, I would write 1.5 blog posts and be able to get 75 to 100 clients. This model of accomplishment assumes causality between actions and semi-predictable outcomes.
This is how most people think the world works and how I did for most of my life.