Well-Formed Outcomes Let You Tap into Flow and Get What You Want

There are at least seven different ways of achieving anything

If you’re a human being, you’ve set a goal only to later find that nothing came of it.

In pursuit of your goal, you’ll conjure will power only to chew down your pencils, stare into space, refresh your junk email, and question your life trajectory.

Many people confuse goals with outcomes then wonder why they lack motivation. The truth is that you don’t want to achieve a goal — what you’re after is the result of that goal.

A well-formed outcome is an organizing pattern within neuro-linguistic programming (NLP). Unlike goal setting, it’s an effective framework for getting what you want. It brings you into touch with the values driving your interest in an outcome.

Well-formed outcomes invite you to tap into flow states and leave behind scarcity-based thinking. With them, you stop asking if you’ll get what you want. Instead, you focus on what you’ll do to get it.

Don’t mistake the ship for the destination

Goals lack motivational power. This is what discipline or will power apologists forget. When you’re unsatisfied and set your sights on a goal, the gap between where you stand in that moment and where you’d like to be looms large. Sometimes it’s all you see.

In the personal development space, people frequently talk about resistance. With all the traction this concept gets, many learn to accept resistance as simply part of the creative process. It’s not.

If you’re relying on goal setting alone, it isn’t surprising that you’d need to enlist heroic measures of will to get what you want. Goals don’t tell you what to do. They’re simply a measure of how far you are from where you’d like to be.

The disturbing truth is that emphasis on a goal and not an outcome often puts you at an even greater distance from what you want. Goal setting on its own doesn’t account for the underlying values driving your interests.

Most people mistake the vehicle (the goal) for the desire (the outcome). As a result, they get hyper-focused on what their ability to successfully achieve a goal says about their character. This drives tension. They become bogged down with wounds about being incompetent or incapable. In their hesitancy, they become busy rather than productive. Over time, they grow resentful, rebellious, and frustrated.

Motivation is automatic when you’re already fulfilled

When you set a goal and later struggle to follow through, you’re cut off from your values. Unconsciously, you’re resisting the goal because you don’t understand why it matters.

The key to consistent motivation is this: you need to intertwine your values with your processes. In other words, your process must bring you as much fulfillment as your desired outcome.

Here’s an example. If you want to open a bakery, your love for new kinds of pastries or cookies might drive you. Beneath this, exploration is the underlying value motivating your actions. In an inherently fulfilling process, you’d allow yourself to taste the batter and regularly experiment with new and exciting combinations of ingredients. Robbed of the ability to consistently explore, you might get bogged down in paper work or overwhelmed by picky customers and quit early on.

In every case, without inherently fulfilling processes, people flounder. You might open your bakery, but without that openness to new tastes and recipes, your passion will stiffen under the weight of long and arduous cooking sessions with confining kitchen dimensions and finicky smoke alarms. You’ll grow uninspired. You’ll get what you initially wanted, and it won’t satisfy you enough to justify continuing.

From goals to well-formed outcomes

A well-formed outcome is process-driven, measurable, sensory-based, and the product of self-directed efforts. You identify what you want and reverse engineer a process by breaking what you need to do into a series of small, manageable steps.

A goal says, “By next year, I want to make more money,” while a well-formed outcome says, “By next year, I want to make $8,000 per month, and these are the steps and processes I’ll iterate upon to get there.” In this example, you’d start by figuring out what you’d need to do each month to reach your desired income level. Then you’d get more granular, isolating each month, each week, each day. Focus on tiny, bite-sized chunks of action.

This is also a well-formed outcome because it’s sensory based —every day you’ll be able to measure whether the steps you’re taking are getting you closer to that larger bank account. Also note that by getting granular with the steps needed to get what you want, you’re identifying the actions you need to take to get results. While you might enlist other people for help, you decide whether you’re successful. Well-formed outcomes are all about resting in your own power to make things happen, not waiting around for them.

Well-formed outcomes also unhook you from the scarcity mentality. When you establish that goal of making more money, for instance, you transform it into a well-formed outcome by tying it with an explanation about what makes it desirable. In other words, you identify the values that make the outcome worthwhile. For instance, you might say, “I want to make $8,000 per month because it will allow me to live with more freedom and ease.”

After identifying that freedom and ease are valuable to you, you’ll recognize how what you’re looking for is already within you. Sure, these feelings may not appear in their strongest forms, but if you’re able to recognize and identify them as desirable, they already exist as resources within you. All you need to do is take steps to turn up their volume, intensity, and presence in your life.

So, when you’re taking steps toward your outcome, permit yourself, if only for a moment, to feel into the ways in which those desirable values and dispositions already live within you. By doing so, you’re going to feel much more pleasure in the process. That resourcefulness is going to bleed into the quality of the steps you’ll take — you’ll be acting from the perspective of someone who is already graced by the desired results, not from the desperate, striving person dying to be somewhere else.

The path is the goal

“Early on in the journey, you wonder how long it will take and whether you will make it in this lifetime. Later you will see that where you are going is here and you will arrive now…so you stop asking.” Ram Dass

Goals are often blunt and clumsy instruments. They lead you to believe that getting what you want involves chasing what’s outside you. Really, your desires materialize when you put the resources you already have in the optimal sequence.

A goal is the very tip of a larger configuration of values, beliefs, and processes. Goals aren’t inherently motivating because they exist in isolation from values. No one really wants to achieve their goals — they want the outcomes their goals generate.

Well-formed outcomes help you identify the values that inspire your goal setting in the first place. When you’re aware of the values encouraging your striving in a given direction, it becomes easy to use those values as fuel. Rather than being available only in far-off destinations, your values are the very resources you need to employ to get where you want to go.