The Art of Goal Setting – “Creating Resolutions that Work”

In gaining an understanding of how we manifest as a personal process that utilizes the willful use of our mind, we can create a new way of looking at an age old tradition of making a resolution as a means of consciously self-creating and imposing a desired direction on our life. Creating comes by choosing what you will create as apposed to just existing in the current pattern that’s running your life. In order to work within the laws of the mind, we need to transform it from the idea of a goal as a statement, to a well-formed outcome as an actual experience. By creating a goal as a holistic idea that embraces the psychology involved in creating, we can learn skills at working more proficiently with our “whole mind” instead of fragmented parts. While the language of the conscious mind is words as abstract and conveying only personal meaning, the language of the subconscious mind is feelings, emotions, images, impressions, and actual experiences. The subconscious mind which builds and maintains the body while also producing automatic behaviors, is programmed through imagining goals as actual experiences. While the conscious mind can be perceived as having the ability to “choose”, the subconscious mind can be thought of as the “will” that serves to act out the choice by producing the behavior of its fulfillment.

The other immediate mistake people make, is they set goals that are negative in nature, and then use the creative power of their mind to create the very thing they don’t want. The mind can’t process a negative command. It doesn’t work by forming mental impressions around what “not” to do, or of what you “don’t” want. It works by interjecting a suggestion as an idea that’s imagined as a reality in the mind, while forming feelings around it or in response to it that creates a pattern as an actual experience that serves as a program for the subconscious mind to produce as an outer experience that matches the internal experience. We first create inwardly what we want as an imagined reality, which becomes the template as a perceptual filter that forms our outer experience as a correspondence to the inner. A goal must be stated in positive terms. Not in terms of what you don’t want, but in terms of what you do want. You form the goal or wish into an actual reality as an outcome or as an actual experience.

For example, if your goal is to lose 20 pounds, then the mind has to picture the 20 pounds you want to lose. Keep in mind, anything we can lose, we can also find again. Because you are not providing it with an image of the desired result, it sees the 20 pounds and the meaning you give it (fat, ugly, unattractive, unhealthy, sloppy, etc.) as the reason you want to lose it, as the actual emotional reason for creating it. The negative command literally says, picture this, feel this way about what you’re picturing, and give me more of it as a means of making me feel the same way. The emotion we attach to the image, is also speaking in the language of the subconscious which it sees as a request for “more” as a pattern for fulfillment. This is why as soon as you profess the need to “diet” as a means of losing weight, you simultaneously form irresistible compulsions around eating more, or eating the things you say you want to “resist”. Behavior is emotionally driven and is how the subconscious mind creates. You don’t focus on the fat that you want to lose, but instead you create an idea of how you’ll look and feel when 20 pounds lighter. You imagine your body in the shape you want it, how you’ll look, how your clothes will fit, what you’ll be telling yourself about how you look and feel, what others will be saying, and so on. You create the desired outcome the goal is intended to produce as an actual reality. You imagine it “within” the experience of it.

When we use language to define a goal, it’s abstract in the sense that it doesn’t always have behavior attached to it. It doesn’t indicate an experience or the process necessary to achieve it. It’s not creative unless it serves to direct our behavior, that is to say, give the subconscious mind a pattern for producing the actual reality. Our mind creates by an understanding of how the conscious mind has the ability to direct and command the subconscious mind by giving it directives in its own language. Words as ideas must be transformed into feelings as imagined experience of the desired outcome and what you will feel as a result in order to give the subconscious mind an “experience” as a pattern for fulfillment. The mind works by creating a perceivable and therefore believable reality as a means of fulfillment by associating an experience to a desired feeling. In order to produce change, language must be converted into experience. We have to look at what the language indicates, see it as an analogy or symbolic of a desired feeling, and create the experience of it as an actual reality, then while holding this in mind, embellish it with strong emotions of desire, adoration, admiration, respect, honor, and so on, and allow these emotions as they escalate to form feelings of gratitude and appreciation which sets an expectation for them. What we expect and look for . . . we find and get.

Dr. Linda Gadbois
Integrative Health Consultant and Spiritual Mentor

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