A jigsaw puzzle is probably a lot more difficult to complete if you didn’t have that picture on the box, right? Maybe some of you like that, but I like my puzzles done in a week instead of a month. (J/k, I can’t stand puzzles.) What I mean is if you know what the puzzle is supposed to look like, you can start to create the border, you can group like colors, you can organize a strategy around building that Golden Gate Bridge.

Inversion is at the heart of goal-setting: visualizing the goal so you can strategize the steps to get there. This shouldn’t be new news. You use this process often.

I use inversion on the micro level – putting together projects, a Powerpoint deck, even writing this newsletter – but in my previous career, I was rarely thinking about the big goals. I’d just do what it took to get through the day or week, trusting in the reprieve of the weekend to heal me. This cycle stitched together whole years until I wondered how I got here again. I got too weighed down by the immediate to give proper attention to how I wanted the full puzzle to look.

What I’m interested in as a coach is expanding the scope of the puzzle picture and using inversion to help guide daily and weekly actions. Whole sessions can be spent peeling layers to get to the core of you, your real wants and goals unfiltered by culture, family, social media, and – most prominently – your patterned, conditioned thinking.

What would the core look like for you? Have you given thought to it recently? What would you do with that info?

Goal-setting for the long-term can be a painful and cumbersome process. It forces you to think critically about your life and what you really care about. Few people have that clearly defined, or – like I was – they have been focused solely on getting to the weekend. Sometimes just setting the goal can be a goal.

This is uncomfortable stuff. If it were easy and obvious, we’d all be doing it. And there’s no good reason I can think of to do it alone. If you think you’re ready for this (and by which I mean, clarifying and defining the life you want to live, and organizing a strategy to achieve it), let’s have a chat. Schedule a free consultation here or keep learning about coaching on my site.