There’s a famous metaphor suggesting how prioritising our goals, objectives and targets is about filling a glass jar with big rocks first, and then adding smaller rocks, that is, your smaller goals in the spaces that remain. Although a valuable lesson in prioritising, as an article by Harvard Business Review points out, it now calls for an upgrade.
Let us imagine a little scenario.
Vinita has her goals and objectives sorted and divided into big rocks and small rocks. Big rocks for her are: learning and developing her skill-set, gain some experience, work up her income and resume, and immigrate to a bigger city later for better opportunities. Her smaller rocks are: finding time to meditate at least a few minutes a day, finding a hobby that helps with her fitness and learning new strategies to keep her house tidier.
The metaphor of rocks gives us associations of robustness and stability. But they can also make us rigid and fixated on a goal in an unhealthy decontextualised manner. Let us take Vinita’s scenario again.
Vinita has made enough progress and she is ready to emigrate to a bigger city for better opportunities. But she gets a promotion at her current company. The pay is likely to rise exponentially, and what’s more, she might even be offered a house. What happens now to her big rock goal to immigrate to a bigger city?
If Vinita sees her goals as rocks, she is likely to go into a dilemma. An inner tug-of-war between these two opportunities is likely to cause much stress to her.
How about we upgrade the metaphor now?
Why don’t we see goals as moulds of clay instead of rocks? Little pieces which we can connect and bind together by adding water if needed, and shaping and re-shaping them as the situation changes?
The moulds of clay would be the goals. Changes in situation, and realising our core values would be the water we add and the reshaping we do.
Let us go back to Vinita with our clay metaphor. Her goals are now mouldable, re-shapable. The core remains the same – she wants a better opportunity, a better lifestyle. She would get all of this with the promotion. There’s no inner tug-of-war here because she was open to her goal(s) getting remoulded. Vinita also realises now, thanks to her flexible mentality, that what she actually valued as a big rock goal was the result of that goal, and not the goal in itself.
What’s more, rather than goals as single stones, through the re-shaping and moulding, Vinita may end up creating a beautiful sculpture out of the clay of that goal itself!
What we can understand from thinking about goals as mouldable clay is that they are a working ongoing reality. Our vision of how we want our life, and what we prioritise might change. What we thought was important to us might not remain so, or we may realise that what we valued was actually the result(s) that the goal was supposed to give us, and not the goal itself. Keeping a ‘rock solid’ rigid mindset with our goals is likely to blind us to possibilities and opportunities. Keeping our goals open to remoulding and reshaping depending on the changes in the situation and priorities is likely to free us up from the burden to hold onto an outdated vision of our life, and perhaps even surprise ourselves in a good way.