This is the Ef Zin insight on Real Goals that you practice and experience in the program “How to Create Real Goals“. 

The question we ask ourselves is “How do you create a real and meaningful life?”

We’re all looking for “something” out of life, like an itch that needs to be scratched or a flavor we crave. And although many of us can’t articulate what “something” is, we still seek it out in our everyday lives; in our careers, our hobbies, our friends, and our relationships. We formulate hypotheses – expectations – of how to gain this “something” and pursue them expecting an improvement in our quality of life. We organize a series of goals to carry out our hypotheses: “a raise will give me a sense of achievement”, “a house will symbolize my progress”, “a partner will reflect my personal value”. However, more often than not, the goals we’ve accomplished do not fulfill us the way we expected. Instead, we’re left tired and unmotivated with a unsatisfied itch.

These urges we feel are our personal needs calling out to be fulfilled. Our needs are very real; real in the way we hurt when they are unaddressed and real in they way we grow when we tend to them. As such, they need to be treated with realness. This means the expectations we form on how to fulfill our needs must be real. Real in the way they address our true needs. We need to evaluate our way of thinking. How does getting a raise, buying a house, forming a relationship address our personal needs? A way of evaluating and predicting the effectiveness of our goals is by understanding the very nature of our needs. Is it a need to be creative? A need to feel secure? A need to connect? More specifically, what type of creativity, security or connectivity is representative of the real you? This realness will determine the degree to which you genuinely fulfill your needs or simply create more. Is the source of our actions and choices internally or externally influenced? Are we adopting unrealistic expectations set by others or chasing goals that are untrue to us?