Without understanding how to live a kARm-yog
mode of lifestyle even doing the
currently popular lifestyle fashion of MEDITATION
practices to calm down in life or to remove stresses of life or to
enhance focus in life or to find the so called miracles of attaining what you
desire in life are basically not achievable....why?....because
MEDITATION without the knowledge of
kARm-yog would be like a doctor trying
to cure an illness without knowing the cause of the illness in the first place
and further knowing how the illness operates in the second place.....
The above kARm-yog mode of
lifestyle in current mode of popular un-veDik
lifestyles is attempted to be achieved by what is called setting up
GOALS in life and then achieving the
GOALS in a structured manner with knowledge of
various current teachings of life and social sciences....but without factoring
in that we are presently living in the veDik
time era we live in called kli-yug.......
In kli-yug
GOAL is defined as follows:
- Goal is a desired state of affairs of a system.
- Goal is the end toward which effort or ambition
is directed with AIM, PURPOSE.
- Goal is a condition or state to be brought
about through a course of action.
And because we are live in kli-yug
the methodology of kARm-yog lifestyle
described at the start of this article is found to be hard to follow and really
hard to accomplish....why?.....to know the answer one really need to study
veD starting with the environmental
and operating characteristics of kli-yug
which makes it hard to live a life based on the rules and regulations of
kARm-yog....
There is a lot of information already compiled and published from the
original texts of veD = SCIENCES OF LIFE AND
CREATION on this web site....PVAF
invites all of YOU to share with each other the answer to the why? asked in the
preceding paragraph....to share your thoughts please click on the
POST A COMMENT button in the header of this news
item and write away....
Now in the current times of kli-yug
the GOALS of life are set up very
differently...to get a sampling of a perspective on the art and science of life
goal setting please continue to read an article form
Barbara Moses in Canadian
Globe & Mail...Barbara Moses, PhD, is an
organizational career management consultant, speaker and author of
What Next: The Complete Guide to Taking Control of Your
Working Life....Her art and sciences is quite a bit easier than
understanding and following kARm-yog........
PREAMBLE SHORT LIST PRIMER
FROM BARBARA MOSES:
.......Make your goals work for you....
Canadian
Globe & Mail: By BARBARA MOSES
Friday, October 15, 2004 - Page C1
If you do set goals, instead of measuring them exclusively
against the traditional markers -- specific, time-framed, measurable, realistic
and achievable -- consider weighing them against the following:
- Is your goal dynamic, as opposed to being set in stone? Is it flexible? Is
it open to changing life circumstances?
- Does your goal reflect your most important needs and desires now (as
opposed to reflecting external definitions of success or earlier career
desires)?
- Will you experience pride and personal satisfaction when you have achieved
your goals?
- How will you feel if you don't pursue this goal? Will you be disappointed
in yourself or regretful of opportunities missed?
- Goal or vision? Many people find the idea of a goal somehow diminishing
when they think of their life's purpose. If so, try the word "vision" instead.
- Big or small? Career or personal? Many people experience significant
rejuvenation and satisfaction from making small changes in their life, such as
jogging twice a week or learning a new language. Your goal doesn't have to
involve doing something cataclysmic to produce a significant outcome.
- A state or a specific target? Consider the difference between "I will be
living and working abroad some time over the next few years and will now focus
my energies on ensuring I have the necessary skills and contacts" as opposed
to "by September, 2005, I will be working in Paris as a . . ."
- Can your goal withstand failure? If you don't achieve it, will you beat
yourself up or look at opportunities it liberated?
- Have you thought about how and why your goal will contribute to your
overall life satisfaction?
- Will pursuing this goal conflict with other important goals? For example,
you may want to do an executive MBA but also spend more time with your family.
Which is most important and will contribute to your
greatest sense of well-being? How will you feel about giving up one
goal in favour of another?
And now read about some of the details of the above from Barbara Moses:
Make sure goals really do
serve you
Over the course of my career, I have designed hundreds of goal-setting and
action-planning exercises.
You know the type: By October, 2005, I will be (insert aspiration here). The
steps I will take to achieve this goal are: (insert list here).
Yet recently, when faced with the need to write yet one more such exercise, I
realized how profoundly ambivalent I am about the very idea of goals.
Although I have designed these exercises, I have never actually asked
participants in my career-planning workshops to complete a goal-setting
exercise, nor in counselling people have I ever said "What are your goals?"
Questioning the utility of setting goals seems almost like questioning
motherhood. If people don't have goals, whether implicit or explicit, how will
they direct their behaviour or know what's important?
Indeed, the booming coaching industry is built around the pillars of
goal-setting and clarification. Rey Carr, a leading authority on coaching and
editor of Compass: A Magazine for Peer Assistance, Mentorship, and Coaching,
tells me that he recently received five books on the subject in the same week.
Without any goals, we drift. Take one 35-year-old man who has spent the past
decade bouncing around among different occupational pursuits. With indulgent
and wealthy parents behind him, he has never had any sense of urgency to
commit to a particular career path nor has he ever thought through what he
wanted to achieve in his occupational pursuits, other than a vague feeling of
"this might be it." When you talk to him, you get a sense of a lost soul who
has no belief in himself or his future.
But how explicit must our goals be? While some find it critical to have
detailed targets and timelines, others find that dispiriting.
After calling around to friends, I find the world seems to be divided into two
camps. Some people are like my financial-planner friend, who writes personal
and term career goals for herself every year, then checks up on them, ticking
off the steps she has achieved. "It's also a way of reinforcing myself because
every year I look back and congratulate myself for what I've achieved," she
says.
On the other side of this divide, a journalist friend comments: "I never set
goals. I have something in me which gives me a sense of what I want but it's
not specific -- it's more like a vision. For example, I know I eventually want
to do a master's degree, but it's a concept, not a directive. It allows me to
have a more relaxed feeling as I don't feel I'm being dictated to by my
goals."
Attitudes toward the importance of having goals partly reflect underlying
psychological needs and preferences. For some people, setting goals can be a
way of managing anxiety and ambiguity. As one woman said, "If I don't have a
goal, I won't have any reason to get out of bed in the morning. I need goals
to motivate me, otherwise I would achieve nothing."
She fears that, without vigorous self-policing, her "inner slacker" will take
command. Rather than trusting in herself, she surrenders control to what Freud
called the superego, an internalized agent of social control. Except that the
modern superego measures performance against targets and timelines instead of
moral standards.
For others, however, an aversion to setting goals may reflect a fear of
failure: "If I tell myself I'm going to achieve X and I don't succeed, I will
feel inadequate."
Others want to keep their options open. "If I commit to this, what if
something better comes along?" They feel their freedom is constrained by being
locked in to a particular course of action.
This fear of commitment is particularly common among younger people, who worry
that, by confirming one career choice, for example, they are negating another
forever. But there are also many older workers who share this fear of giving
up their freedom, and unfortunately many of them have suffered the
consequences in terms of lost opportunities and current career and financial
status.
So what's the matter with goals? John Lennon once observed that life is what
happens when you're making other plans. When we become driven exclusively by
our goals, we lose sight of what else is important. The goal becomes a
commodity to be chased at all costs.
While it's true that you can't get there if you don't know where you are
going, you may find that you arrive somewhere you really don't want to be.
We all know people who have chased after the brass ring, such as a senior
corporate job or academic tenure, only to wake up one morning when the goal
has been attained with a profound sense of emptiness. "Now what?," they ask.
Or "Is this all there is?"
This is often accompanied by the realization of a marriage lost, kids not
seen, sacrifices made during the race to goal attainment. (The academic
equivalent is what is known as post-degree depression. You've single-mindedly
pursued the degree but instead of feeling elated you feel, well, flat.) Our
values change as our life circumstances change. Often we fail to play catch-up
to emerging needs and desires, to changes in how we feel about ourselves and
what we want to be in the world.
The result is that many people pursue false goals --
based on parental desires or earlier career stage needs
or the belief that one more book published or one
more senior vice-president's position will finally make them feel good about
themselves.
For goals to be helpful, they must be dynamic, lively and mouldable. Otherwise
they are reified markers that dominate and interfere with our ability to
experience our experience.
Do you see yourself as being on a journey, open to new experiences and
opportunities, or are you on a fixed path to a predetermined destination?
There are many happy people who have no explicit goals. They may see
themselves
- as moving toward a state, such as being debt-free, so that
their career choices can be made independent of financial concerns, or
- of having a portfolio of skills that will always make them
employable.
Their goals are implicit, not explicit, and they feel no
need to put them into operation with specific targets and time lines.
So my goal for you? Make sure your goals serve
you, rather than the other way around.
Barbara Moses, PhD, is an organizational career management consultant,
speaker and author of What Next: The Complete Guide to Taking Control of Your
Working Life.
bmoses@globeandmail.ca
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