Martha Beck’s insight changed my life and I hope it might change yours too.

If you find yourself faced with a major transition (cue losing your job, being served with divorce papers, or picking up the pieces after cancer), you might be tempted to lock yourself to your laptop until you come up with a elaborate 3-5 year Plan B. In our action-oriented society, we often attempt to bulldoze through uncertainty by setting goals and game plans to get us directly from the uncomfortable present into a more perfect future.

However, in this 2010 article, Goal-Setting-Strategies-from-Life-Coach-Martha-Beck, Beck turns conventional wisdom on its head when she encourages us to think about our goals based on how we want to feel instead of what we want to achieve.

For example, you might be determined to have a baby because your biological clock is ticking and you can’t wait to experience that elusive brand of unconditional love OR  you might want to start your own business because you crave freedom from the 9-5 slog. These are both fantastic life goals, but Beck reminds us to consider the by-product emotions that come packaged up with these “achievements”. (i.e. A baby might bring plenty of happiness, but your bundle of joy will also bring sleepless nights and increased expenses and being your own boss might mean you can keep whatever hours you’d like, but now you’ll be saddled with the stresses of figuring out how to cover your mortgage payments on a month-to-month basis.)

Beck suggests that we envision achieving one of our goals and then while we have that picture of success in our minds, we immediately choose three adjectives to describe how we feel in that moment. Then, she suggests dropping the goal and instead turning our attention to those three descriptive words.

It is those words describing how we want to feel that become the driving force for moving us forward in our lives. Beck’s logic is that by focusing on how we want to feel, we”ll be attracted to people and situations that help us feel that way. Although our future may look different than we could ever predict, we might end up happier than we could have ever imagined.

If you’re thinking, this all make sense in theory, but where do I start? Then, stay with me… First, I’ll tell you how this worked for me and then I’ll share an excerpt from the article if you want to try it yourself.

How Martha Beck’s Advice Impacted Me

On December 31, 2010, after reading the above mentioned article, I wrote a post called What Are Your Three Words where I proclaimed that in 2011, I wanted to feel healthy, loved, and inspired.

The next day I woke up more depressed than I had ever been in my life and if you’ve read My Story, you already know why. After a solid pity party about the shambles my post-cancer life had turned into, I pulled myself out of bed and slipped into my running shoes. As I followed the path by the ocean, I couldn’t get the word inspired out of my head. It was only day 1 of 2011 and I was already a failure.

I knew that if I truly wanted to feel inspired that year, I would have to do something BIG because I couldn’t imagine ever getting out of my current funk. Out of nowhere, the idea of volunteering in Africa popped into my head. It was immediately followed by a string of thoughts like, Don’t be ridiculous! and Have you lost your mind? Nothing about the idea seemed feasible. I hadn’t even finished my surgeries and I needed a plan for getting on with my life. I couldn’t just go galavanting off to Africa, in search of inspiration.

Or could I?

The more I thought about it, the more inspired I got. Volunteering in Africa would definitely be a bold step out of my cancer story and as I moved closer to making this dream a reality, everything in my life began to shift. As donations came in to help me cover my costs and I made plans to travel and connect with other survivors, I found myself feeling healthier and more loved than I had thought possible.

Since then, I have become a big believer in the power words have to change everything. Whenever I reach another cross-roads or feel lost about where to go from here, I come back to the exercise below.

How You Can Apply Martha Beck’s Advice to Your Life

Here is an excerpt from Martha Beck with some concrete steps for how you can put this idea into practice in your life:

“Step One: Pick a goal, any goal.

Think of a typical noun-verb goal, something for which you frequently hanker. Be honest rather than politically correct. Some people may have deep desires to establish world peace, stop global warming, and end poverty, but maybe you actually think more about, I dunno, reaching your target weight. And that’s okay. This is not a beauty pageant (those contestants can afford to wish for world peace; they’ve all reached their target weight). What I want you to do is fess up to your real desires. Now pick the biggest, most ambitious one.

Step Two: Gaze into the future.

You don’t need a crystal ball to see what’s up ahead; the three pounds of gray matter between your ears will do fine. Use your brainpower right now to imagine what your life would be like if you realized the goal you just identified. Create a detailed fantasy about it. Loiter there awhile, observing your dream-come-true with your mind’s eyes, ears, nose, skin. Then, clear your mind and your throat: It’s time for the magic words.

Step Three: Generate adjectives.

This is the heart of a really effective goal-spell. Begin listing adjectives that describe how you feel in your dream-come-true scenario. This is a simple task, but not an easy one. It requires that you translate holistic, right-brain sensations into specific, left-brain words. Author Craig Childs compares this to “trying to build the sky out of sticks.” Spend enough time in your imagined situation to let your brain leaf through its vocabulary, scouting out accurate adjectives. In goal setting as in fairy tales, the minimum magic number is three. Don’t stop until you have at least that many ways to describe those lovely feelings.

My clients frequently try to squirm out of the process by muttering, “It’s hard to explain,” or “Oh, I don’t know,” or “I can’t describe it.” Well, of course it’s hard to explain; yes, you do know; and if you keep trying, you can too describe it. Your adjectives don’t have to be eloquent; use simple words like energetic, focused, delighted, and fine. But you owe it to yourself to persevere until you’ve found some reasonably descriptive words. Three of ’em. Write them down:

1.____________________

2.____________________

3.____________________

Step Four: Focus on anything that can be described with your adjectives.

Drop the fantasy situation you imagined in step two and concentrate on those adjectives. You might notice that these three words bring your stated goal into sharper focus. For instance, if your New Year’s resolution is to lose ten pounds—a noun-verb goal—but your adjectives are strong, confident, and healthy, you might realize that your actual aim is to get fit. You would see that the strategy you came up with to diet (i.e., eating your weight in hydroponic cabbage) might leave you thinner but also recumbent on a couch without the energy to leave the house—which isn’t what you really want. Thanks to adjectives, you can fine-tune your strategy: Swap a fad diet for a meeting with a nutritionist, and sign up for weight training classes at the gym.

Sometimes tweaking isn’t enough. Your adjective goal might utterly contradict your stated goal. Time to rethink that original target. For example, if you think you want to win an Academy Award, you may imagine your Oscar acceptance speech, and feel “valued, satisfied, and unstoppable.” If you think that only a night at the Kodak Theatre will lead to those feelings, you might spend years obsessively pursuing movie stardom, ignoring everyone and everything except your ambition. Odds are you still wouldn’t win an Oscar, but you’d probably get a rapacious ego that could inhale all manner of rewards without even noticing them. On the other hand, if you immediately begin focusing on aspects of your present life that make you feel valued, satisfied, or unstoppable, you’ll feel an instant lift. All sorts of things may happen. Sure, you might win an Oscar. But if you don’t find yourself onstage, blurting out that the statue sure is heavy, you’ll be left with…a pretty good life. You might even find that as you follow the things that make you feel appreciated, you’ve tripped into an entirely different career. So starting now, survey your life for anything (I mean anything) that can be described with any of those three words. Putting all your attention on those aspects of your life will make you happier right now and help you create future situations that fulfill your true desires.”

To read the full article, click here: http://www.oprah.com/oprahs-lifeclass/Goal-Setting-Strategies-from-Life-Coach-Martha-Beck/2#ixzz2VC2PMCJk

Share Your Voice

I’d love to hear from you. Share your three words in the comments below OR tell me if you think this strategy might help you reframe your current situation.

Then, stay tuned. Next Monday, we’re featuring Pasha Hogan who wrote the book Third Time Lucky. We’ll be talking to her about how she had to let go of who she was in order to step into the life she craved. CLICK HERE if you want this and future posts delivered straight to your inbox.