Pay What You Want

Goals are powerful

It’s exciting, empowering, and sometimes a bit scary, to realize that you can do whatever you want (with the caveat that you have to deal with the consequences of doing it). That you can choose to take on a creative project just because you want it to exist, or learn a new skill because you want to master it. That you can work hard for your own aims, not just others’. Having clarity about what you’re doing (and what you’re not doing) is part of how big things happen.
Scientific literature broadly agrees that goals have (at least) four important effects^[1]:

1. Goals direct attention toward goal-relevant activities and vice versa
2. Goals energize you to work harder
3. Goals challenge you to persist longer
4. Goals cause you to become more strategic

Some people (notably Dilbert creator Scott Adams) have claimed that instead of goals, you should have “systems”. Nonsense. Have both.
And in fact everyone already does have both goals and systems. Any rough sense you have of what you’d like to happen, on any timescale, is a goal. And whatever you do to keep track of your intentions and organize your time and money and energy, is a system. But you may not have a good view of what yours look like, and it makes a huge difference to have some clarity, design, and iterating.

Goals aren’t enough

There’s more to life than checking off boxes—even if the boxes are really big and they’re ones you chose yourself. You’re not a robot to program. Being fixated on achieving things, at the expense of your health, or your values, or even just the quiet ecstatic pleasure of being present each moment while you’re doing whatever you’re doing… is a limited way of living.

We’ve been running these life-orienting workshops for 7 years, and we’ve watched hundreds of people get profoundly empowered by goal-setting and also run up against limitations with it. We’ve realized that a lot of the places that people get stuck on the way to what matters to them aren’t about planning or executing, but about emotions or their relationship to themselves and others.

It can still be powerful to organize, not around “how can I fix my motivation?” or even “how can I heal my trauma?” but “what do I want?” The fire of that passion inspires deeper change in life, but it’s not healing or fixing for its own sake (or in order to finally feel worthy or whole or able to start your life).
Thus, we still start with the questions of “what matters to you?” and “where do you want to go?” and then we follow that up with everything we’ve learned about since, from parts work & coherence coaching to deep spiritual questions, somatic practices & relational conflict-resolution.