Are Your Goals Worth Pursuing?
Purpose, Pleasure and the Habits That Shape a Good Life - Insights from Australia’s leading Life and Leadership coach. Connect on LinkedIn
Another real life coaching story for you! This time I was talking with a coaching client recently about goals.
Not how to set them, or whether they should be SMART, written down or broken into ninety-day plans. We were having a much more interesting conversation about how you know whether a goal is actually worth pursuing in the first place.
We spend a lot of time talking about how to set goals, build better habits and develop enough discipline to achieve them. We spend considerably less time asking whether they are meaningful goals, or whether they are simply another version of wanting more.
More money. More recognition. A bigger business. Another promotion. Another house. A better car. Another achievement to place beside everything we have already achieved.
There is nothing inherently wrong with any of those things. Ambition is not a character defect, and wanting to enjoy your life is certainly not something to feel guilty about. But the conversation with my client brought us back to a question that sits underneath much of my work in life coaching, behaviour change and performance.
What is all this effort actually for?
Eudaimonia vs Hedonism: Two Different Ideas of a Good Life
My client introduced two philosophical ideas into our conversation: hedonism and eudaimonia. I loved them! Kind of disappointed I’d never heard of “eudaimonia”
Hedonic wellbeing is generally concerned with pleasure, enjoyment, satisfaction and reducing discomfort. Eudaimonic wellbeing is more closely connected to meaning, growth, purpose and becoming more fully the person you are capable of being.
The idea of eudaimonia stretches back to Aristotle. While the word is often translated simply as happiness, flourishing is probably closer to what he was getting at. It was not simply about feeling good. It was about living well: developing character, using your abilities, making choices that reflected what mattered to you and becoming someone through the way you lived.
That distinction matters because what feels good and what contributes to a good life are not always the same thing.
Modern psychology does not necessarily force us to choose between the two. Pleasure and meaning can coexist. A good meal with friends matters. Holidays matter. Rest matters. Laughing, celebrating and enjoying what you have worked hard for all belong in a good life.
The question is what happens when pleasure, status or achievement becomes the primary measure of whether your life is going well.
Meaningful Goals Often Require Discomfort
I understand this through running.
Getting out of bed before sunrise to train for an ultramarathon is not particularly pleasurable some (most) mornings. Neither is running for hours when you are tired, sore or questioning why you entered the bloody thing in the first place.
If comfort were the objective, I would stay in bed.
But the value is not simply found in feeling good. It is found in testing myself, becoming more disciplined, experiencing what I am capable of and keeping commitments I have made to myself, even when the easier option is available.
I have written before about healthy obsession and intentionally focusing your behaviour on what really matters. The same principle applies here. Some goals deserve a disproportionate amount of effort because of what they represent to us.
The same is true outside sport. Having a difficult conversation with someone you care about may not feel good in the moment. Building a business involves uncertainty. Learning to lead people properly can force you to confront behaviours in yourself that you would rather ignore. Saving money instead of spending it is rarely exciting, and being present with your children may sometimes mean putting your phone down when part of your brain is asking for another hit of stimulation via a funny dog video.
Meaningful goals regularly ask us to tolerate short-term discomfort in service of something we believe matters more.
Wanting More Isn't Necessarily the Problem
This is where I think goals require greater scrutiny.
Most people begin with the question, “What do I want?”
A more useful question might be, “Why do I want it, and who will I become while pursuing it?”
Imagine someone whose goal is to earn another $100,000 a year. There is nothing wrong with that goal. Perhaps the additional income gives their family greater security, allows their partner to work less, creates more freedom or gives them the capacity to contribute generously to people and causes they care about.
In that case, the money is connected to something deeper.
Another person could chase exactly the same number because earning more than their peers makes them feel important. They achieve it, adjust quickly to the new level and almost immediately need the next number to recreate the same feeling.
Same goal. Completely different relationship with it.
This is where achievement can become a treadmill. You tell yourself that when you get the promotion you will feel successful, when the business reaches a certain number you will finally relax, or when you buy the house you will feel secure.
Then you arrive.
For a while, it feels good. There is satisfaction, relief, maybe even pride. But before long, the horizon shifts again and another target takes its place.
The answer is not to stop striving. It is to understand what your striving is serving.
Your Habits Reveal What You're Really Building
This is also why goals alone are not particularly interesting to me as a coach.
Goals tell me what someone says they desire. Habits tell me what they are actually building.
You can say family is your priority while checking emails throughout dinner. You can say health matters while continually sacrificing sleep for work. You can say you want financial freedom while using spending to regulate every difficult emotion. You can say you want to become a better leader while avoiding every conversation that makes you uncomfortable.
That gap matters, because purpose is easy to describe and much harder to live.
This idea sits at the heart of my coaching philosophy: change your behaviour and you begin to shape a different future.
Most people do not have a knowledge problem. They know movement matters. They know their relationships require attention. They know sleep matters. They know they should have the difficult conversation. They usually know which habits are helping and which ones are slowly pulling them away from the life they say they want.
The hard part is not knowing. The hard part is repeatedly behaving in a way that supports the life you say matters to you.
That is also why understanding how to build habits that actually stick matters. A meaningful goal still needs to be translated into behaviours that can survive a busy Tuesday, a stressful week and the inevitable days when motivation disappears.
Three Questions to Ask Before Pursuing Your Next Goal
So before setting another goal, adding another project or deciding what the next twelve months should look like, I think it is worth slowing the process down slightly.
The first question is why you actually want it. Not the polished answer you would give somebody else, but the real one. Is the goal connected to something meaningful, or are you chasing validation, comparison or a feeling you hope the achievement will somehow create?
The second question is what the pursuit will require from you. Every goal has a cost in time, attention, energy and opportunity. Sometimes the goal is absolutely worth that cost, but pretending there is no trade-off is how people become successful in one area of life while quietly neglecting another.
The third question is perhaps the hardest: will pursuing this goal help you build a life you respect, or will it simply give you something else to possess?
That is a different standard from simply asking whether you can achieve it.
What Does “More” Actually Mean?
I think this is where the conversation with my client became most useful.
Neither of us came away believing that ambition is bad, or that pleasure should somehow be removed from life. That would be a miserable interpretation of both ideas.
The more interesting question was what we mean when we say we want “more”.
Sometimes more should mean more money, more opportunity or more experiences. There are seasons of life where those things are important and worth pursuing.
But there are also times when more might mean greater courage, better health, stronger relationships, more time with people you love, more contribution, more autonomy or a greater alignment between the person you say you want to become and the way you actually live.
That distinction matters because a goal can look impressive from the outside and still pull you away from the life you actually want.
And the opposite is also true. A goal that looks ordinary to somebody else may be deeply meaningful to you because of what it asks you to become, what it helps you protect or what it allows you to contribute.
That is why I do not think the question is simply, “Can I achieve this?”
The better question is whether the pursuit deserves your time, your attention and your life.
Because in the end, a good goal is not just something you achieve. It is something that helps shape the person you become while you are pursuing it.
It is an important page in teh book called your legacy.
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