The weekend can be a time of reflection. Of getting away.  Sometimes, my best insights come on the weekend.

I’ve been reflecting on a question I have all my clients ask themselves.

“What do I want?”

I ask it knowing that it might be the hardest question there is to answer.

But I’m coming to understand that it is hard because it tends to lead us astray. It points away from where we actually should be looking. It points us toward our experience, and away from the source of our experience.

It does this in at least three ways, with three different words.

“What.” Our first impulse here is often to think of things, but when we go deeper, we often find that what we really want is feelings.

Peace. Equanimity. Purpose. Alignment. Connection. Joy.

Yet we tend to answer with things like, “A promotion. A business. A car. A house. A partner.” The things that we hope will generate those feelings, even as we realize they don’t. As we look more closely at this, we realize we are the source of those feelings. We really don’t have to “get” anything to have joy, for example.

“I.” What do “I” want? Who is the “I” in that statement? The “I” that I habitually think of myself as? The stories that I have made up about that person, that identity? The characteristics and qualities that I describe myself as having? That “I” might look solid, but when I look, I’m not very solid, and neither are you. I seem to change from day to day, even from moment to moment. I can be nice, a jerk, hardworking, lazy, kind, and selfish. If there is a solid “I,” it seems to be whatever is looking through this body’s eyes. Not my thoughts, but wherever my thoughts come from. It is formless, mysterious, silent, yet everything in my world emerges from it.

“Want.” Again, does this bigger I want things or feelings? What is this want? This desire? Is it just for stuff? Or even feelings? Is it what I want, or what I think I should want? What I think others expect me to provide for them? The thing that I, the bigger I, most seem to want is to create. I even seem to create “want!” There is great joy in the act of creation. In fact I seem to get more from the creating than from what I have created. And yet, it seems like the creating is happening all the time, whether I want to or not. I seem to be this process of constant creation.

“What do I want?”

The you who is wanting is also creating everything else in your world. It can create anything, including the idea that there is something outside of you, something to want, that if you get it, will somehow complete you.

This you is the creator of your life. You think you are in the world, but, as a matter of biology, of neuroscience, the world (or at least your world) is in you.

Sit with this. Take a walk this weekend. See what arises for you. See what comes from the silence.

It might not be huge. It might just be a hint.

But a door is opening. Will you walk through?

I was on a podcast yesterday and the topic of goals came up.

I’ve been thinking about goals a lot. Because they are so central to the way many of us think about the corporate world, and so antithetical to the way I typically work with people.

To me, if you’re really on the right track, goals are unnecessary. You will do whatever it is you need to, simply because you love it and are determined to succeed.

And if you aren’t meeting your goals, it might be a sign you’re not on the right track. That you are focusing on things that you think you should do, that you think you have to do, rather than focusing on what will actually work for you.

Most people use goals to try to make themselves do things they really don’t want to.

Think about that for a second.

If you don’t want to do something, why are you doing it?

What is on that list of “have to’s” for you?

Reaching out to potential customers? Creating a business plan? Determining the direction of the company? Writing a budget?

If you really don’t want to do it, how good a job do you think you will do?

My coaching business took off as soon as I saw that I could really help people. Once I got the impact I was having, I enjoyed reaching out to people. I was excited to talk about them, to explore the transformation that we could create together.

Do you ever talk to people trying to sell you something, but you can tell they really don’t want to be there? How did that go? How did that feel?

If you don’t enjoy a task, it might be a sign that you don’t really need to do it, or that someone else on your team should be doing it instead.

If you’re not meeting your goals, in other words, you might have the wrong goals. You might be focused on things you think you should want, rather than what you actually want.

Spend as much time as you can doing the things you love to do, that only you can do. The things that are part of your superpowers. Delegate, or maybe even ignore, the rest.

So all that said, when are goals helpful?

When you do have a path, when you know what you specifically need to do, when you know the tangible steps that must be taken, goals are a great way to track progress.

If you are working on a project with a specific deliverable and due date, goals and milestones are perfectly appropriate.

But most of the rest of the time, my experience is that goals can actually do more harm than good.

What’s your experience?

I gave a talk to a group of local leaders yesterday and I explained how my coaching had changed over the years.

At first, when a leader came to me asking for help around delegation, or stress, or executive presence, I would respond with techniques, or with models of development.

We would identify where that leader was on the developmental path and create strategies and techniques to get them to the next level.

It was all very heady. Sometimes, it was effective.

It was effective enough that we both wanted to continue. But over time, I realized that something felt amiss. I realized that there were so many things that leaders came to me with that were symptoms of a larger problem.

And that the problem is a simple and yet profound misunderstanding.

Let’s take stress as an example. It’s easy to add breathing techniques or yoga or exercise as a prescription for stress. But while stress can be managed with those techniques, it returns as soon as the techniques are no longer applied.

Stop meditating or running for a few days and you will be just as stressed out as you were before.

But what if you saw what creates the experience of stress? What if you saw what creates every experience?

My experience and yours are constantly being created, inside of us rather than by our circumstances. And then that personal reality is experienced as solid and real.

Yet the solidity of this experience can easily be tested. Think of how different people can experience the same events totally differently. Think of how YOU can experience the same event differently a day later, or even a moment later.

Or one thought later.

When people see that their assumptions about life, that it is out there, that it is happening to them, that to change how you feel, you have to change your outer circumstances, are not true, then suddenly, magically almost, stress dramatically reduces or even disappears.

Because when you see that you are the one creating your experience, and feeling that creation, when you see that everything in that experience can and does change from moment to moment, you take the whole thing, what some have called the “cosmic joke,” a lot less seriously. You know that if you only wait to settle a bit, the same thing “out there” will look completely different.

You don’t have to do affirmations or think positive thoughts. If left alone, your thinking settles. Calm and clear is your default setting.

Just about everything is impacted by seeing through this fundamental misunderstanding.

And I find the longer you are willing to stay in the conversation, the deeper the impact will be.

Neil Patrick Harris, playing a psychologist, says this to Thomas Anderson at the beginning of the trailer for the new Matrix movie.

Thomas Anderson is Neo. Only now, he apparently doesn’t remember who he really is.

The Matrix has always been my favorite movie. In addition to being an action-packed martial arts joyride, it metaphorically points to what is actually true. My understanding of that truth has only deepened in the twenty-one years since the first movie came out.

In the Matrix, humans are imprisoned by a simulation of reality created by machines.

In our “real” world, each one of us is creating our own simulation, the only reality that each of us ever experiences, moment by moment.

And “like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad,” most of us never realize that we are imprisoning ourselves.

While there is almost infinite data available to us from “reality,” our senses are able to detect only a very thin slice of it. And then our brains reduce that data still, and compare it to a prediction we are making at the same time. From that we each make the virtual reality that we live in. The vast majority of what we sense as “reality” is just a prediction that our minds are making in each moment of what reality “should” be.

That’s right. Your reality is mostly made up of things that have already happened to you. (Mine, too.)

Thoughts you have already had.

Stories you have already been told.

Things you are convinced you need to do to stay safe.

This is true of ourselves, our partners, our jobs, our organizations. Story after story, made up and mostly unchallenged.

And we suffer because of it.

“Crazy,” is the word that Neil Patrick Harris was referring to.

We think the world we experience is made up of things outside of us, and we think we can solve it by changing those things.

But it’s a totally inside game. Our experience is 100 percent internal, 100 percent of the time. And we fall for the same trick, over and over and over again.

It’s crazy. To paraphrase Einstein, we do the same thing, over and over, and expect different results.

The first step is to see the thought-created nature of our reality. To wake up. To see that we are not Thomas Anderson. Each of us is Neo. Capable of so much more.

When we really see that we are only experiencing thought, something shifts. The habitual thinking about who we need to be and what we need to do to feel whole or complete begins to fall away, because we see it isn’t real, or helpful. We see, gradually or suddenly, that we are the creator of our thoughts, not the thoughts themselves. We are unlimited potential, not whatever that potential has created.

Ponder that. Deeply. Because really seeing that truth will be the first step toward everything changing.

The world that most of us see is crazy. Because it’s based on assumptions that can easily be proven false.

What do you see?